Pulitzer prize-winner Jennifer Egan’s new book, Manhattan Beach, is “a novel that deserves to join the canon of New York stories”, according to Amor Towles in the New York Times. Set in that city between the Depression and the second world war, it depicts a woman looking for her missing father while working as a diver for the navy. Its period research “weighs it down”, thought the Evening Standard’s David Sexton, but “it has also enabled her to write here a gripping, modern version of a 19th-century novel”. For Lucy Atkins in the Sunday Times, “Egan’s descriptive writing is superlative... However, some sections, often involving technical details or descriptions of life at sea, do feel ponderous… her characters are never baddies or angels, they are complex and forgiven. It will win accolades, but whether it is a truly transporting read will depend, heavily, on your desire for narrative propulsion.”

Martin Amis examines superlative writing – and sport, porn and politics – in his collection of essays, The Rub of Time. It features “some wonderful writing about football, tennis, Philip Larkin and his own dad, Kingsley”, wrote Anthony Quinn in the Mail on Sunday. “But elsewhere there’s a distinct whiff of used stock in the air... His tirade against Donald Trump ... already it feels like yesterday’s news. His piece on Jeremy Corbyn ... is breathtakingly feeble... Amis’s perspective on British politics, taken from his Brooklyn domicile, rarely felt compelling; now it looks irrelevant. His more personal essays are the best … The Rub of Time, however, creaks in its joints.” The Times’s Roger Lewis found “Amis’s literary criticism ... richly enjoyable [and] his intellectual gifts ... formidable” but was also “less convinced by Amis’s political reporting”. Nonetheless, he is “bayonet-sharp”. According to the Sunday Times’s Claire Lowdon, “the literary essays will leave you educated, enlightened, entertained … The reportage in particular is extremely good ... On sport, Amis is at his funniest... But it’s hard to see why some of the pieces in the ‘politics’ sections have been included.” The New Statesman’s Leo Robson wrote: “In the areas that readers do care about, Amis delivers exceptional service. [It] is a riot of immaculately delivered punchlines and improbably sustained set-pieces.”

Everybody Lies, according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, whose book is subtitled What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. What it tells us is that lots of people are racist, sexist and paranoid about their own bodies, apparently. Stephens-Davidowitz is “probably not overstating it when he claims that the continuing study of these searches ‘will radically expand our understanding of mankind’”, wrote Oliver Thring in the Sunday Times, who concluded: “This undemanding book is a useful first step towards that knowledge.” John Thornhill in the Financial Times found it “an absorbing, and impassioned, examination of these new data sources”, even though “the seriousness of his message is, at times, undermined by the over-jauntiness of his prose style.” Overall, it “makes for glum reading”, according to Sam Leith in the Evening Standard. “But it’s glumly compelling ... In our neuroses and anxieties, Google’s giant dataset tells us: you are not alone ... Google searches are a window into ... the boundlessness of our species’s greatest asset, the asset that may save us: curiosity.”