John O’Connell reviews This is How in The New Statesman
The full review is online here.

Here’s an extract:

In his desire to force a face-off between the Two Cultures, McEwan often seems to be writing himself out of a job. M J Hyland, in her subtle and richly exploratory new novel, adopts the opposite approach, announcing her intention with an epigraph from Nietzsche: “Everything unconditional belongs in pathology.” If action is a function of pathology, all inquiry into motive is pointless, because motive has already been stablished. Yet this is what novels do so well – inquire into motive. You could even argue that it is all they do, or all they should do.

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