American Housewife by Helen Ellis
Reviewed by Linda Boa This slim collection of a dozen stories by American novelist and short story writer Helen Ellis is something of a wee gem. With stories ranging from…
Reviewed by Linda Boa This slim collection of a dozen stories by American novelist and short story writer Helen Ellis is something of a wee gem. With stories ranging from…
By Mark Thornton (This is an adaptation of a talk I gave to sixth formers at Abingdon School last year.) This is my tenth year of being an independent bookseller –…
Reviewed by Harriet I suspect that neither of these two great classics has ever been out of print since their respective first appearances in 1719 and 1897, and a quick…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This book, which won the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, goes into the history of autism, research on autism and related syndromes over the years…
By Diana Cheng When Alex Garland was writing the screenplay for Never Let Me Go, the book author Kazuo Ishiguro told him: ‘Your only duty is to write a really good…
Paperback review by Judith Wilson I read Brooklyn when it was originally published by Viking in 2009; it was the first novel I’d encountered by Irish-born Colm Tóibín, and I’ve since devoured The…
Paperback review by Gill Davies This is Sarah Ward’s first novel. She is a very experienced reader of the genre – she blogs at Crimepieces and reviews and judges Scandinavian crime writing. It…
Reviewed by Eleanor Franzén Forgiveness is a word like tiger–there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton I do love the British Library Crime Classics series. It feels like it goes from strength to strength, or maybe it’s that this past year’s offerings…
Reviewed by Harriet I can’t tell you how excited I was when I heard there was finally going to be a proper biography of the great crime writer Josephine Tey,…
Reviewed by Laura Marriott On a small crossroads near the bottom of Manor Street, one of the main through ways in Dublin 7, there is a rundown, abandoned pub called…
Reviewed by Linda Boa If you had killed someone you would remember. Wouldn’t you? In his latest novel, which it goes without saying will be absolutely huge, his legion of fans…
Translated by Richard Dixon Reviewed by Paul Fishman For a short novel, Numero Zero is amazingly leisurely and discursive. It’s like an Arabian Nights for conspiracy theorists, historians of the late 20th century and…
Reviewed by Harriet A gripping story of obsession and spies set in eighties London. So says the blurb on the back of this truly excellent novel. But this is no…
Reviewed by Simon I’ve had the privilege of reviewing three different books by Oliver Sacks for Shiny New Books now, but this is the first since his sad death last year….
Reviewed by Anne Goodwin In the decades following the end of the Second World War, social psychology was preoccupied with an attempt to explain how ordinary people could commit such…
Paperback review by Susan Osborne Christine Dwyer Hickey is the kind of author for whom there’s no fanfare of Twitter trumpets heralding her next novel, no drip feed of showy…
Translated by Frank Wynne Reviewed by Annabel French author Lemaitre is best known for his gory yet gripping trilogy of serial killer novels featuring the detective Camille Verhoeven. They aren’t…
Reviewed by Simon I’ve got all the John Bude reprints that have appeared in the British Library Crime Classics series, and have given several to other people, but Death on the…
Reviewed by Barbara Howard Quoted in this book is Charlotte Brontë’s great aim and ambition in life ‘to be forever known’ as a poet, which she confided in a letter…
By Memory and Jenny From music to murder, from a hospital ward to Haworth Parsonage, Jenny and Memory highlight the most exciting young adult novels of the season in the…
Reviewed by Victoria In 1965, shortly before Christmas, a young, ambitious mother of two children on the brink of publishing her first book of sociology let herself into a friend’s…
Paperback review by Annabel Most trilogies are strictly sequential, one volume carrying on from another. Louise Welsh’s ‘Plague Times’ trilogy is slightly different (so far) in that the first two…
Reviewed by Annabel O’Neill’s first novel, Only Ever Yours, published in 2014, won a host of prizes in her native Ireland. Aimed at older teenagers upwards, it was a futuristic…