Jonathan Smith on his book Wilfred and Eileen
Written by Jonathan Smith Wilfred and Eileen was well received in the literary pages in 1976. The novel was dramatized on Radio 4 in 1983 and then serialized on BBC TV…
Written by Jonathan Smith Wilfred and Eileen was well received in the literary pages in 1976. The novel was dramatized on Radio 4 in 1983 and then serialized on BBC TV…
Reviewed by Rachel Fenn Wilfred and Eileen, one of Persephone’s new books for the Spring, is also one of their most modern, having been first published in the 1970s. It…
Written by Ben Fergusson Berlin is full of holes. Literally. The moment you notice them, you begin to see them everywhere. Deep starbursts in stonework, plaster and brick. They are…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Harry Christmas strode out of Caracas airport with little more than a wallet full of stolen money and the dried-up brain of a long-haul drinker. Beyond…
Back when Shiny New Books was a quarterly, in early editions we had a competition to win ‘The Editors’ Picks’ – four books that caught the four editors’ attention that…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne. If you spend any time at all perusing reviews, on the internet or otherwise, you can’t have failed to notice the plethora of novels about the…
Reviewed by Victoria Best When this memoir begins, Joanna Rakoff is 23 and has just dropped out of her graduate literary program in London and returned to New York, declaring…
Reviewed by Victoria Best Several years ago, I read a short story collection by an author whose name was buzzing around the blogosphere as a talent to watch. The book…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Mavis Doriel Hay (1894-1979) wrote only three crime novels, all published in the 1930s. They slipped completely under the radar until the British Library decided to…
Reviewed by Sakura Gooneratne The Quick by Lauren Owen burst into the literary scene earlier this year with fantastic reviews in major broadsheets and literary blogs, no mean feat for a…
By Victoria Best My Salinger Year was unquestionably one of the best books I’ve read this year – poignant, funny, real, warm – you can read my review here. The author, Joanna…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Kate Clanchy’s first novel is a perfect summer read: it’s laugh-out-loud funny, has pathos in all the right places, a sweet young hero and an inbuilt…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell When this novel was published, I couldn’t resist the allure of the cover in an oversized paperback format with French flaps. Luckily the novel inside is…
Reviewed by Lizzy Siddal Let me start this article with a confession. In my pre-blog years, I once read a Maigret novel. I didn’t like it much. I found it…
Written by Harriet Devine. She will love deeply – suffer terribly – she will have glorious moments to compensate. Emily Byrd Starr, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s most autobiographical heroine, remembered these…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Dictatorship of the Average This place’ll be a paradise tomorrow. And in every department there’ll be a supervisor with a sub-machine gun. – from ‘Mao Tse…
Reviewed by Jodie Robson “It was a glorious day in June – for that matter it was the Glorious First of June – and the sun was resounding on the…
Reviewed by Bookgazing E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars is a small book crammed to the brim with narrative experiment and investigation. Its story begins with sharp lines arranged in a whip crack…
Reviewed by Karen Heenan-Davies Expectations ran high in the run-up to the publication of Khaled Hosseini’s latest novel And the Mountains Echoed. Could he emulate the success of The Kite Runner and A Thousand…
By Max Dunbar A decade or so into his career as a bestselling novelist, horror writer Stephen King ran into problems. He was drinking constantly and taking cocaine, banging out…
Reviewed by Denise Kong In 2007 Lilian Pizzichini “had it all”. She’d worked at The Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review, won the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger for non-fiction with her first…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell In tackling on one of Shakespeare’s most popular pairings in her latest novel, Marina Fiorato is taking a big risk. The sparring partners who…
Reviewed by Danielle Simpson Quite often the best reading experiences I have, or at least the most memorable ones, are stories that are in some way challenging or difficult. This…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine No author of the present day has been at once so much read, so much admired and so much abused. So wrote the New Monthly Review…