Banned Books Week – The Russians
By Karen Langley “The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him.” (Anais Nin) The banning of books is an emotive topic; so much of the…
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Shiny New Books
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
Reviewed by Annabel Having been Man Booker shortlisted in 2011 for her debut novel, Half Blood Blues, set in Berlin during WWII and fifty years later, Edugyan’s second novel, The…
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Review by Laura Tisdall Having read every novel that Sarah Moss has written (plus most of her non-fiction) I was eagerly anticipating Ghost Wall. It didn’t disappoint, although its brevity…
Mrs Gaskell & Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries Apart By Nell Stevens
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster It started with a misreading of some nineteenth-century handwriting. In 2013 Nell Stevens began a PhD at King’s College, London. Captivated by the energy and wit…
Liquid by Mark Miodownik
Reviewed by Annabel In his 2013 book Stuff Matters which I reviewed for Shiny here, materials science professor Miodownik took us on a tour around some of the most important…
On Rape by Germaine Greer
Review by Anna Hollingsworth To say that the statistics are grim is a blatant understatement. One woman in five will experience sexual violence, but very few cases end up in…
Apprenticeship by Peter Gill
Reviewed by Harriet Born in Cardiff in 1939, Peter Gill is a distinguished theatre director and playwright. But he started his career as an actor in the early 1960s, working…
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Reviewed by Alice Farrant The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker is the retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis (Brih-SAY-iss), once Queen of Lyrnessus and then…
The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places by William Atkins
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster When I saw him introduce The Immeasurable World as part of the Faber Spring Party, William Atkins characterised it as being in “the old-fashioned travel writing…
The Hazards of Good Fortune by Seth Greenland
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies The title of Seth Greenland’s book harks back to William Dean Howells’ 1889 New York novel of business and politics A Hazard of New Fortunes. The…
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Reviewed by Alice Farrant There are books you enjoy and then there are the books that consume you. Authors whose work brands you, generating literary musing that lasts well beyond…
Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale
Review by Annabel Given that I hadn’t looked at where this novel was set, it was a perfect, if somewhat ironic, fit to take on holiday to Somerset with me….
I Only Killed Him Once by Adam Christopher
Reviewed by David Harris Ray was first introduced – as detective – in Made to Kill (reviewed here), where, apart from cracking the case, he discovered his true nature as a killer. The…
Spotlight on Publishers: Myriad Editions
Annabel asked Myriad Editions’ Publishing Director Candida Lacey some questions… Annabel: Your company website has an intriguing strapline, ‘Publishers of fiction, graphic books and atlases’. Tell us a little about Myriad…
The King’s Witch by Tracy Borman
Reviewed by Julie Barham This is the debut novel written by Tracy Borman, who is a popular historian and Curator of Historic Royal Palaces. The research is therefore impeccable, the…
The Town by Shaun Prescott
Reviewed by Harriet This is how things are going to be from now on. This is how they’re going to stay. History can end, you know. It doesn’t have to…
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
Review by Annabel Becky Chambers’ third novel is set in the same galactic milieu as her first two. It can be read as a standalone and marks her out as…
Learning to Die by Thomas Maloney
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Three decades of life promise a quarter-life crisis: your 20s are on their way into your 30s, you’re forced to reflect and look back, and, too…
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 Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
Reviewed by Annabel The first thing you need to do with this sparkling debut novel is to suspend your disbelief. Just accept that time travel was invented by a quartet…
King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts by Claudia Gold
Review by Liz Dexter Henry II, father of Richard Lionheart and King John, husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine and murderer by instruction of Thomas Becket is, as Gold points out…
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth In his The Idiot – the original – Dostoyevsky set out on a mission to depict “the positively good and beautiful man.” The namesake, Prince Myshkin,…
To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine
Reviewed by Annabel When punk happened, although I was the right age – in my later teens, but I’d already diverted off into prog rock, (I know!). So, I never…
The Bright Side of Life by Emile Zola
Translated by Andrew Rothwell Reviewed by Harriet Fans of Monty Python may have a bit of trouble with this title – I’ve had their iconic song stuck in my head…