The Telegraph has reviewed This is How.
The full review is available online here.
An extract:
MJ Hyland is an expert anatomist of the bruises left on a fragile mind by a hard world.
[...]
Hyland mentions Albert Camus as one of her literary inspirations, and Oxtoby shares with Camus’s Meursault – and with a rogue’s gallery of literary anti-heroes, from Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov to Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby – a deformation of the personality that isolates him from the banal warmth of ordinary human discourse. But he lacks the existential hero’s grandiose sense of glee at his separateness. Every word of Hyland’s narrative – observed with the bright, deranged precision of a Richard Dadd painting – resonates with Patrick’s tragic awareness of what he lacks.
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