Enjoy!" Hermione Eyre in the Evening Standard argued that it is an "uneven" work – in which "glacial anti-heroines abound their hunting grounds are modern institutions such as cruise ships and care homes" – but one that contains "wonderfully tight modern fables, and Atwood twists the knife with devastatingly casual skill".
The tales run to a general pattern: people who knew one another intimately in their 20s are brought back together in their 70s to live out the variously absurd, fantastic or dreadful aftermaths of youthful sex, illusion and crime … Look at these tales, then, as eight icily refreshing arsenic Popsicles followed by a baked Alaska laced with anthrax, all served with impeccable style and aplomb. Her scenes and caricatures, as accurate and vivid as those of Hogarth, are almost entirely of old age. She's out for the shocked laugh, and gets it, but with elegance. In Stone Mattress, her ninth volume of short stories, Margaret Atwood is, according to Ursula K Le Guin in the FT, "having a high old time dancing over the dark swamps of Horror on the wings of satirical wit. There is a 'Parliament of Devils', a 'Bloody Meadow', a 'Red Gutter' and even a "Love Day" … Jones's material is thrilling … it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling." I think," echoed Sean McGlynn in the Spectator: "Apparently it is inspired by the Wars of the Roses, drawing inspiration from the bloody, ruthless machinations of England's power-brokers at the waning of the middle ages … Jones specialises in popular, straightforward narrative history, largely eschewing analysis and anything that gets in the way of his telling a rattling good story." Jessie Childs in the Daily Telegraph gave the book five stars out of five: "There are battles fought in snowstorms, beheadings, jousts, clandestine marriages, spurious genealogies, flashes of chivalry and streaks of pure malevolence.
"T he Wars of the Roses are significant for three good reasons: they destroyed the Plantagenet dynasty, they ushered in the Tudors, and they inspired Game of Thrones." Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times enjoyed The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors, by Dan Jones – a "racy and vigorous new narrative history".
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