Things We Nearly Knew by Jim Powell
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Jim Powell’s Things We Nearly Knew is a slice of American smalltown life seen through the eyes of an unnamed bartender. I enjoyed Powell’s second novel,…
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Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
Reviewed by Harriet Written in just two months while its author was a patient in a psychiatric clinic, Zelda Fitzgerald’s first and only novel found a publisher in 1932. Three…
Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry
Reviewed by Anne Goodwin Twenty-one-year-old Hiram Carver, assistant surgeon on the USS Orbis in 1833, senses something special about William Borden when he first sees him on board. The sailor…
Middle England by Jonathan Coe
Reviewed by Annabel By the time I’d finished reading Coe’s latest novel, it was about a fortnight after publication and by this time he (and his publisher Penguin Viking) could…
The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space by Owen Hatherley
Review by Karen Langley Author Owen Hatherley has carved out a niche for himself as one of the UK’s foremost commentators on matters architectural and political; his work exists at…
Berta Isla by Javier Marías
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa Review by Anna Hollingsworth I’m not one for classic spy stories: I don’t care if the martinis come shaken or stirred, and as much as…
Dramatic Exchanges, selected & edited by Daniel Rosenthal
Reviewed by Harriet When we think of London’s National Theatre, most of us will envisage the great concrete complex on the South Bank of the Thames, designed by Denis Lasdun…
Where Shall We Run To? by Alan Garner
Reviewed by Annabel I’ve been a fan of Alan Garner’s novels ever since my childhood when I first encountered The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath in the 1960s. I…
The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies At times crime fiction seems a genre so powerful that it sucks in and revitalises other forms. At others, literary fiction appears to piggyback expediently on…
Little by Edward Carey
Reviewed by Simon The name Madame Tussaud is familiar to most of us – particularly to anybody who has been a tourist in London, and visited the waxwork museum that…
Childhood by Gerard Reve
Translated by Sam Garrett Reviewed by Harriet Gerard Reve (1923-2006) was a Dutch writer – according to Wikipedia, one of the ‘Great Three’ of Dutch postwar literature. I have to…
The Women’s Atlas by Joni Seager
Review by Liz Dexter On the front of the book there’s a quote from Catherine Mayer, Co-Founder of the Women’s Equality Party: “The most important book that will be published…
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: the Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce by Colm Tóibín
Review by Rob Spence Tóibín’s title, of course, comes from Lady Caroline Lamb’s snap judgement of Byron; it’s not clear whether the author here intends the epithets to be applied…
The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons, edited by Bob Mankoff
Foreword by David Remnick Review by Hayley Anderton I’m old enough to remember encyclopedias, and lucky to have grown up in a house that had a Victorian collection of books….
Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt by Chris Naunton
Reviewed by Harriet The civilisation of Ancient Egypt exerts a seemingly eternal fascination. All those pharaohs and their dynasties, stretching back to three thousand years before the birth of Christ,…
Only To Sleep by Lawrence Osborne
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies A short walk from my ergonomic study chair is my Chandler bookshelf. It includes some Philip Marlowe fiction not by Chandler: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, A…
Love is Blind by William Boyd
Reviewed by Harriet Sebastian Faulks has called William Boyd ‘the finest storyteller of his generation’, and it’s hard to argue with that. The stories he tells are mostly those of…
Nine Pints: A Journey through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood by Rose George
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Rose George is the author of three previous wide-ranging nonfiction books, about refugees, human waste and foreign shipping. In Nine Pints, she dives deep into the…
The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin
Reviewed by Harriet How Ivor would have loved being dead! It was a shame he was missing it all. First published in 1975, this very welcome reprint shows Celia Fremlin…
If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura
Translated by Eric Selland Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Who doesn’t deal with the devil every now and again? Or perhaps a god from your chosen religion, for the more saintly…
Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place by Benjamin Myers
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Benjamin Myers has been having a bit of a moment. In 2017 Bluemoose Books published his fifth novel, The Gallows Pole, which went on to win…
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
Reviewed by David Harris This was the first time I’d read a book by Novik. Her Temeraire series and Uprooted (reviewed for Shiny by Sakura here) have received lots of praise so I was pleased…
The Race to Save the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport
Review by Karen Langley The fate of the last of the Romanov Tsars and his family has exerted a fascination over the public during the century since their violent death…
Eye of the Shoal by Helen Scales
Reviewed by Annabel In her third book, Helen Scales tuns her attention to another branch of the marine tree of life with each book. She began with the small genus…