The Long Room by Francesca Kay
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…
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Shiny New Books
Gratitude by Oliver Sacks
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….
The Social Brain: How Diversity Made the Modern Mind by Richard Crisp
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…
The Lives of Women by Christine Dwyer Hickey
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…
The Great Swindle by Pierre Lemaitre
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…
Death on the Riviera by John Bude
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…
Charlotte Brontë: A Life, by Claire Harman
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…
Spotlight on Young Adult Fiction – early 2016
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…
A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy Gavron
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…
Death is a Welcome Guest by Louise Welsh
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…
Asking For It by Louise O’Neill
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…
The Shiny Poetry Competition – Runners Up
After our announcement yesterday of the winning poem in our competition, we are delighted to share the runners-up with you today. We’re sorry we can’t offer any prizes for our…
Performing King Lear by Jonathan Croall
Reviewed by Harriet The role of King Lear is seen today as the ultimate challenge for the classical actor, the one that provides the supreme test of his abilities in…
The Shiny Poetry Competition – Our Winner!
Introduced by Chair of the Judges, Rob Spence The inaugural Shiny Poetry Competition, on the theme, naturally enough, of ‘Reading’, attracted a small, but high-quality group of poems. The range…
Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries, ed. Martin Edwards
Reviewed by Harriet Christmas is a mysterious, as well as magical, time of year. Strange things can happen, and this helps to explain the hallowed tradition of telling ghost stories…
What Independent Theatre Taught me About Fiction Writing by Alexander Yates, author of The Winter Place.
There is a famous (and sometimes overused) piece of advice that writers like to give each other. It comes from Chekhov, in the form of a quote: “If in the…
The Winter Place by Alexander Yates (YA)
Reviewed by Annabel Tess’s mother died giving birth to her brother Axel. They live with their father in a cabin at the edge of a town in the middle of…
The Just City by Jo Walton
Reviewed by Stefanie Hollmichel Aside from The Death of Socrates and a few other pieces forced on me in school, I can’t say I have ever been interested in reading Plato. That Jo…
The House of Elrig by Gavin Maxwell
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton I discovered Gavin Maxwell’s books when newly exiled from a rural Scottish childhood. The first of his books that I found was Harpoon at a Venture. Drawn…
Beautiful and Impossible Things by Oscar Wilde
Reviewed by Karen Langley There’s always the danger that when an author becomes more famous than his works, those works will become so eclipsed that we’ll end up with an…
The Z Murders by J Jefferson Farjeon
Reviewed by Harriet Golden Age crime has always been popular, and each of the so-called queens – Sayers, Christie, Allingham, March, Tey – has her loyal followers. But in the…
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
Translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson Reviewed by Alice Farrant The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende is a tender love story, traversing from the 1930s through to the present day,…
Pushkin Vertigo – titles by Piero Chiara & Leo Perutz
Reviewed by Victoria Pushkin Vertigo, the new crime imprint from Pushkin Press has got off to a flying start with its first batch of releases. Not surprisingly, perhaps, when you…
The Maiden Dinosaur by Janet McNeill
Reviewed by Julie B “Barbara Pym…Elizabeth Taylor…” exalted company for any author’s novel, and when I noticed these names on the front of this book I must admit I was…