Admirers of Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears have narrowly outnumbered sceptics. This novel centred on a mechanical swan "isn't only about life and inventiveness: it overflows with them," applauded the Sunday Times's Peter Kemp. "This tour de force of the imagination succeeds on all fronts," agreed Rebecca K Morrison in the Independent. Other pro-Carey critics included Catherine Taylor in the Sunday Telegraph ("ambitious ... sustained flair") and the Daily Telegraph's Lucy Daniel ("I loved this book for its mysteries, its hinted back stories, its reserve, and its underlying complexity"). But Prospect's Hermione Eyre felt the book "staggers to a halt" as Carey "seems to lose interest in the human characters... a pleasurable firework display, but [it] sheds little permanent light"; and in the Observer Edmund Gordon viewed it as "speaking to the intellect rather than the heart – a complex and expertly crafted piece of machinery, but not an altogether convincing representation of life". The Spectator's Richard Davenport-Hines was disappointed that, at 68, Carey had produced "a subdued, even careworn book", lacking "the elating richness" of his "mid-life exuberance".
If reviewers found fault with Anne Tyler's The Beginner's Goodbye, they did so on similar grounds. It "reprises many of the scenarios and themes of her very successful The Accidental Tourist," such as bereavement, Pamela Norris pointed out in the Literary Review. But its restricted canvas "sacrifices the [earlier novel's] comic ebullience to a quieter realism". Norris's implied disappointment was not shared by the Sunday Times's Amanda Craig, who found it "diverting, but also deeply rewarding"; and Cressida Connolly in the Daily Telegraph loyally argued that "a below-par book by Tyler is still very much more interesting, richer and more alive than the best work almost any other writer is producing". In the Daily Mail, however, Stephanie Cross reported that "this feels like a short story, not a novel, and its sentimental conclusion is hard to take" .
Ben Macintyre "has written a series of books that reveal no important new secrets, but captivate as story-telling," wrote Max Hastings, reviewing Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies in the Sunday Times. "I have seldom enjoyed a spy story more than this one, and fiction will make dreary reading hereafter." "Macintyre's research is deceptively deep," the Times's Allan Mallinson declared, before pronouncing Double Cross "utterly gripping". Craig Brown, in the Mail on Sunday, echoed him in finding it "grippingly enjoyable ... [It] reads like an Ealing comedy, full of daffy heroes pursuing madcap schemes involving invisible ink, false beards, foreign temptresses and endless double-bluffs".
Kathleen Jamie's Sightlines has been even more popular. "Her written words make readers see with a clarity bestowed by only a few most gifted writers," commented Diana Athill in the Literary Review. "It is not often that the prose of a poet is as powerful as her verse, but Jamie's is." Philip Hoare in the Sunday Telegraph concurred: "Jamie's prose is exquisite, yet never indulgent. She has the ability to make us believe we are there, with her. Sightlines is a work of intense purity and quiet genius, and we are lucky to have it." The Daily Telegraph's Adam Nicolson was no less rapturous, singling out a sighting of whales in the concluding piece: "I don't think I have ever read a passage which transcribes so exactly the deep, unsettling weirdness of the wild."