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 one of the most influential guitarists…
Posts by
Shiny New Books
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 last six months. For poetry, however,…
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 desert around Quartzsite, Arizona. Her plan…
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 of literature from other languages available…
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 a workshop, you will most likely…
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 Mackay Brown. I made a passing…
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 by providence impoverishedIn squalor, grow up…
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 of interpretation remains, the problem of…
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 and tragic ends. A pair of…
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 The Sixth Heaven (1946) and Eustace…
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 get the necessary ingredients to start…
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 mother: ”I love shopping,” she’d said,…
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 – who had agreed to let…
The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper
Review by Lory Widmer-Hess Ancient Greece and Rome, which formed the foundation of so much in our Western civilization, have been getting a revisionist look lately. A number of novels…
Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, by Mark Solms
Review by Terence Jagger This is a fascinating book, one I bought after hearing the author give an inspiring presentation to the Royal Institution. He starts by recounting how his…
Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson
Reviewed by Harriet I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me….I often think of my dear Saint Lawrence on his…
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
Paperback review by Rebecca Foster Curtis Sittenfeld’s sixth novel, a work of alternative history narrated entirely by Hillary Rodham and covering the years between 1970 and the recent past, is…
The Feast by Margaret Kennedy
Reviewed by Harriet Margaret Kennedy has appeared a few times before on Shiny: two of her novels in 2014 [here] and [here] and more recently my own review of her…
Barcelona Dreaming, by Rupert Thomson
Review by Basil Ramsome-Davies Rupert Thomson has been around for quite a while, a prolific and much respected author; this is the first book of his I have read. So…
Miss Browne’s Friend by F M Mayor
Reviewed by Harriet Born in 1872, Flora Macdonald Mayor was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman and classics professor. Perhaps surprisingly, given her background, she became an actress, but abandoned…
Five Fascinating Facts About… Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Compiled by Annabel The Royal Society of Literature is celebrating ‘Dalloway Day‘ today – a Wednesday in the middle of June – when Virginia Woolf’s novel in a day is…
Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian MacDonald Review by Anna Hollingsworth In the short story The Last Obon, Satsuki is mistaken for the ghost of her aunt’s daughter by…
Rabbits by Terry Miles
Review by Annabel As I sat down to start reading this book, a tweet pinged on my phone and I glanced over – someone had commented on a post of…
Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga
Translated by Melanie Mauthner Review by Dorian Stuber The title of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile refers to both a statue of a Black Virgin Mary poised precariously…