The Future of Bananas by James Dale
Review by Annabel I’m becoming addicted to the Melville House ‘Futures’ series – see my reviews of Fraud, Gardens, Energy and Trust. The series comprises short non-fiction, extended essays to…
The Future of Fraud by Becky Holmes
Review by Annabel I’ve reviewed three of Melville House’s ‘Futures’ series previously for Shiny, (Gardens, Energy and Trust). They are punchy little flapped paperbacks of under 200 pages, each written…
The Future of Gardens by Mark Lane
Review by Annabel Melville House’s ‘Futures’ series are short pocket-sized paperbacks that explore their subjects in essay format. I’ve previously reviewed two others for Shiny – The Future of Trust…
The Future of Energy by Richard Black
Review by Annabel Back in March, Shiny took part in the blogtour for Melville House’s initial books in its ‘Futures’ series. The first books in the series of small format…
The Future of Trust by Ros Taylor – blogtour
The Futures Series from indie publisher Melville House UK recently launched with four titles that couldn’t be more different from each other: going from Songwriting, to Trust, to War Crimes…
Violencia – A New History of Spain: Past, Present and the Future of the West, by Jason Webster
Review by Michael Eaude. Jason Webster takes a long, long view of Spanish history. Most history books concentrate on small chunks of time: this or that war; or a defined…
Future Rural: Imaging Tomorrow’s Countryside, edited by Adrian Cooper
Reviewed by Liz Dexter The countryside belongs to everyone. (Michael Morpurgo, Foreword) This interesting volume by the renowned and doughty nature and countryside publisher Little Toller Books brings together essays,…
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Review by Terence Jagger This is a lively and compelling biography of one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, who has somehow escaped the notice of the general…
Notes From Deep Time: A journey through our past and future worlds by Helen Gordon
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Deep time has been a persistent theme in British nonfiction over the last couple of years, showing up in books like Time Song by Julia Blackburn,…
Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures by Merlin Sheldrake
Review by Peter Reason Entangled Lives by Merlin Sheldrake has been greeted with much enthusiasm, not least by Robert Macfarlane in the New Yorker. I am sure I am not…
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier
Review by Peter Reason In 2013, a spring storm uncovered, on the shores of Norfolk, the oldest traces of humanity discovered outside Africa: fossil footprints made by early humans 850,000…
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley
Review by Annabel Natasha Pulley’s 2015 debut novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which I reviewed for Shiny here, is still one of the best first novels I’ve read. Set…
Futurekind: Design by and for the People by Robert Phillips
Review by Liz Dexter Robert Phillips is a senior tutor on the Design Products course at the Royal College of Art, as well as being an award-winning product designer in…
Tragedy, Farce and the Future: the Red Circle Minis
Review by Karen Langley As I’ve explained in my Bookbuzz feature, the Red Circle Minis are three slim volumes of original writing published by Red Circle Authors. Each book is…
Progress – Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future Johan Norberg
Reviewed by Terence Jagger As Carly Simon sang in 1971, ‘These are the good old days’. This is a fascinating book, and one you shouldn’t really read in one go…
Suburbs: A Very Short Introduction by Carl Abbott
Review by Liz Dexter There are by now over 700 Very Short Introductions, on the Book of Common Prayer, the Brain, Modern Latin American Literature, Volcanoes, inter alia, and now…
Courtiers by Valentine Low
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long What is a courtier? According to dictionaries I have checked it seems there are two definitions: A person who is often in attendance at the court of…
Out of the Dark by David Gaffney
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies The title echoes that of Out of the Past, a canonical film noir that ends uncompromisingly in a double catastrophe and leaves the future of a…
‘Not’ the Wellcome Prize Blog Tour 2020 #2 – Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff
The Wellcome Book Prize is on hiatus this year – we really hope it’ll return in 2021 as this unique prize, which celebrates literature with health, illness and medicine themes,…
Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth There’s a point in Miss Austen where I felt that my sins had been found out. Cassandra, Jane Austen’s now elderly sister, tells a younger relation…
Galileo’s Error: A New Science of Consciousness by Philip Goff
Review by Peter Reason This is a book about the philosophical perspective of panpsychism, written by a leading academic advocate. Panpsychism is an awkward word, not part of everyday vocabulary….
Doggerland by Ben Smith
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster There’s no sign of a decline in the popularity of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. If anything, it’s becoming even more prevalent – a symptom of our…
City of Light by Rupert Christiansen
Reviewed by Karen Langley The city of Paris exerts an eternal fascination; chic and glamorous, the haunt of revolutionaries and intellectuals, and stuffed with romance, it can be many things…
The Russian Soul: Selections from A Writer’s Diary by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Introduced by Rosamund Bartlett Translated by Kenneth Lantz / Olga Shartse Reviewed by Karen Langley Notting Hill Editions will probably need no introduction to readers of Shiny New Books. The…