August 3, 2021 Three Rooms by Jo Hamya Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms, the narrator discovers the communal kitchen in her Oxford house in a…
August 3, 2021 Broken Greek by Pete Paphides Reviewed by Liz Dexter Stuck with a bunch of friends who seemed to think I was something other than what I was; guilty about…
July 29, 2021 Heaven by Meiko Kawakami Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth My first encounter with Mieko Kawakami — as for most of us relying…
July 27, 2021 The Snow Line by Tessa McWatt Reviewed by Harriet A disparate group of four total strangers meet at a wedding in the Punjab, India. Three of them are young and…
July 22, 2021 The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura Translated by Lucy North Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth There’s a particular skill to pulling off a character who is objectively reprehensible but nevertheless wins…
July 22, 2021 Everyone Is Still Alive by Cathy Rentzenbrink Reviewed by Annabel You may know Cathy Rentzenbrink through her heart-breaking memoir published a few years ago. In The Last Act of Love, she…
July 20, 2021 Dream Girl by Laura Lippman Reviewed by Harriet Here on Shiny we’ve reviewed three of Laura Lippman’s novels, here, here and here. Two were standalones, and the third was…
July 20, 2021 Narcisse on a Tightrope by Olivier Targowla Translated by Paul Curtis Daw There’s a scene late in the story where Narcisse is out on day release, wandering the streets of Paris….
July 16, 2021 The House of Fragile Things by James McAuley Reviewed by Harriet ‘Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France’: it was this subtitle that pulled me in, and I requested the book…
July 16, 2021 On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt by Ann Heberlein Translated by Alice Menzies Review by Karen Langley The concept of “the banality of evil”, coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt, has become famous (some…
July 15, 2021 The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley Review by Max Dunbar A nineteenth-century psychiatrist defines paramnesia as The blurring of something imaginary and something real. Most commonly, déjà vu; the sense you’ve seen…
July 15, 2021 Martha Lloyd’s Household Book Introduced with annotated transcription by Julienne Gehrer. Review by Hayley Anderton Martha Lloyd, to the previously uninitiated (such as myself) was a friend and…
July 13, 2021 Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice 1967-75 by Richard Thompson Review by Annabel There are still people who doubtless haven’t heard of Richard Thompson. To those of us in the know though, he is…
July 13, 2021 A Vertical Art – Oxford Lectures by Simon Armitage Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, 90 per cent of people said that they’d read a novel in the…
July 9, 2021 Nomadland: From Book to Screen By Diana Cheng It first started with journalist Jessica Bruder camping in a tent then later in a van for three winters in the…
July 9, 2021 Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History by Anna Aslanyan Review by Karen Langley As bookish people, when we think about translation we’re probably thinking about it in literary terms. There’s a rich seam…
July 8, 2021 Smoke Hole: Looking to the wild in the time of the Spyglass by Martin Shaw Review by Peter Reason Martin Shaw is a mythologist, storyteller, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide, a teacher of mythic imagination. Should you encounter him at…
July 8, 2021 Broken Lights, by Basil Ramsay Anderson Reviewed by Rob Spence Years ago, I was teaching an undergraduate class on the topic of the poetry of the bard of Orkney, George…
July 6, 2021 Hamilton and Me: An Actor’s Journal by Giles Terera Reviewed by Harriet How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spotIn the Caribbean…
July 6, 2021 Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, by Sarah LeFanu Review by Helen Parry Reconstructing anyone’s life poses enormous difficulties, for however copious the evidence of letters, diaries, journals, and eye-witness accounts, the problem…
July 2, 2021 Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton by Gail Crowther Review by Karen Langley Despite their groundbreaking achievements as poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are still too often remembered for their dramatic lives…
July 2, 2021 Eustace and Hilda by L P Hartley Reviewed by Harriet Leslie Poles Hartley was forty-nine when he published his first novel, The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944). It was followed by…
July 1, 2021 Gelupo Gelato by Jacob Kenedy Review by Hayley Anderton When Gelupo Gelato arrived, it was so hot I couldn’t muster the energy to make the big supermarket trip to…
July 1, 2021 The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett Paperback review by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in The Vanishing Half, Kennedy, an overprivileged struggling actress, remembers a childhood shopping trip with her…
June 29, 2021 A Stinging Delight by David Storey Reviewed by Harriet Back in 2004 I had the great pleasure of meeting David Storey – rugby player, painter, novelist, poet, playwright and filmmaker…
