Reviewed by Harriet No, the title doesn’t refer to a predicted end of the internet. This is a 1976 novel, written before such things were even invented. It’s taken from a quotation about death, which is apt because death does crop up a bit in this excellent novel, a British …
Reviewed by Annabel Natalie Haynes may be most familiar to you as a journalist and broadcaster, popping up on various shows and with her own series Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics on BBC Radio 4, which takes an irreverent look at ancient Greek and Roman life. Her first …
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies Christopher Wilson’s new novel takes us back in time while signalling contemporary concerns. It recalls the Cold War epoch, focusing on the ‘court’ of Josef Stalin, iron man of the Soviet Union and bogeyman of the capitalist powers, at a time in the early 1950s …
Reviewed by Harriet The subtitle of this book is ‘The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf’, which sounds very promising. I’ll start by saying that I found some of the sections worked better than others, but that might have been a matter of how well-informed I was to …
Reviewed by Harriet Here at Shiny we love our classic crime, and we have been delighted to review a number of excellent novels that have recently made available through the British Library’s Crime Classics series. The editor of the series is of course the indefatigable Martin Edwards, who also manages …
Translated by Alex Valente Reviewed by Annabel Can you hear me? is no ordinary psychological thriller – to pigeonhole it into that sub-genre would be to ignore large parts of this atmospheric and intense novel. Alongside the central mystery is a coming of age story and the two themes mesh …
Reviewed by Harriet I have to admit I’d never heard of Sally Emerson before the publishers offered me a couple of their recent reprints. Though she’s till around and still writing, her six novels were published between 1980 and 2001; since then she has concentrated on travel writing, journalism and …
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This entertaining and thought-provoking book is both a state-of-the-nation essay and an exercise in historical research and re-enactment and Maconie, being a seasoned writer and man of the people, gets it just right. While others of his books have looked at particular regions, with a sort …
Questions by Annabel Annabel: When you began writing these books, had you already planned a trilogy? Had you ever thought that A Lovely Way to Burn could be a standalone novel, ending on a possible hopeful note for its heroine, Stevie? Louise: I knew from the first strike of the …
Reviewed by Annabel No Dominion is the concluding part of Louise Welsh’s Plague Times Trilogy – a dystopian tale of a pandemic and its aftermath. Although Welsh asserts in the Q&A we did (see here) that you can read the novels in any order, I think you’d probably want to …
Review by Laura Marriott Listening In is a collection of 24 short stories from comedian and writer Jenny Eclair. Her last literary outing was the well-received novel Moving, reviewed on Shiny New Books here. Running at around 10 pages per story it is perfect bed time reading. Black and white …
Translated by Thomas J. Kitson Reviewed by Karen Langley The early 20th century was a time of great change and upheaval; it produced wars and revolutions, but also a great flowering of experimentation in the creative arts. The whole of Europe was affected, but a particularly distinctive strand was seen …
Written by Rob Spence Anthony Burgess, whose centenary is celebrated this year, remarked ruefully on more than one occasion that he produced as many novels in a year as E.M. Forster managed in a long lifetime. Yet if Burgess is known at all by the general public, it is as …
Compiled by Annabel Researching Burgess for this article, I found so many nuggets, I could easily have compiled a list of fifty facts – or even more! It was difficult to restrict it to just five, but I have managed that by picking those that particularly appealed to me! For …
Reviewed by Lucy Unwin Great dancers make the most complicated moves look effortless, and great writers have you swinging through their work like a dance. Zadie Smith skips easily from London, to New York, to West Africa in her latest novel, without missing a beat. She tells the stories of …
