We all have secrets, things we’ve done or aspects of ourselves that we can reveal only to our nearest and dearest, and sometimes not even to them. We all have…
Reviewed by Simon Sarah Knights claims that she wrote her biography of David Garnett partly to restore his reputation – not as a writer, but as a person. His wife’s…
Reviewed by Shoshi Ish Horowicz Outline is about a woman teaching on a creative writing course in Greece. That sentence doesn’t do any justice to the novel, but I feel a…
Reviewed by Linda Boa Margaret Benson is 57 years old. She lives alone, bar her dog Buster, in her own house in a comfortable, middle class area of London. She…
Reviewed by Victoria There’s a strong tradition of episodic narrative in the books that clamour for the title of Great American Novel – Faulkner, Kerouac, Salinger, Twain, Henry Miller and…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Waverley has been on my ‘ought to read’ list for longer than I care to remember, so when Shiny New Books asked me to read a new…
Reviewed by Karen Langley The blurring of the lines between fiction and fact is an artistic trope which is very much in vogue in current writing. Novels abound featuring real…
Reviewed by Harriet How much can be said about the life and work of Shakespeare in just 135 pages? A surprising amount, in fact. Clearly these OUP Very Short Introductions…
Reviewed by Annabel To many, Sheers is primarily known as a Welsh poet. His 2005 collection Skirrid Hill was acclaimed, and he has presented some poetry programmes on the television, and wrote…
Written by Sara Marshall-Ball Photography has always been a strong presence in my life. I put this mainly down to my mother, who has meticulously catalogued my entire existence from…
Reviewed by Victoria Illness and the various challenges it poses have become hot topics in contemporary fiction. Cancer narratives abound in fiction and non-fiction, as do stories of mental and…
Reviewed by Paul Fishman Gorsky is an enigmatic, much-gossiped-about billionaire who is rarely seen at his own famously gorgeous parties; there is a suggestion of some enormous unresolved romance in…
Reviewed by Simon Shiny New Books has been a consistent and delighted fan of the British Library Crime Classics series, which has been rather a phenomenon in the publishing industry…
Reviewed by Victoria I’m not the biggest fan of prologues but I have to hand it to Isabel Ashdown for making pretty good use of hers. It’s November 1994 and…
By Harriet Devine Ruth Rendell’s death on 2 May this year has brought to an end a career spanning an astonishing fifty years. By the time you are reading this,…
Reviewed by Victoria Sarah Hall’s reputation preceeded her into this, my first excursion into her writing (though it’s her fifth novel). Usually this is not a good thing; I have…
Song of the Sea Maid, my second novel for Hodder and Stoughton, comes out on June 18th this year. Yet as with many novels, the work started a long, long…
Reviewed by Linda Boa I didn’t know much about Cambodia before I read Anna Jacquiery’s second Inspector Morel novel, Death In The Rainy Season. In this book, though, we don’t see a great deal…
We hope that some of you have managed to read our first Shiny Book Club choice – Laline Paull’s The Bees. We left you with some questions below to think about…
Reviewed by Jane Carter I have a very clear memory of visiting a bookshop, a good few years ago. I had a birthday book token, and I wasn’t too sure…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Altar of Pity: Martin Millar’s Athens ‘I’ve tried setting a novel in ancient Athens before,’ writes Martin Millar, in the afterword to his new book,…
Reviewed by Helen Parry The sun was now set, and the darkness coming on, but the child thought of no danger but the bears behind her. If she had looked…
By Claire Fuller In 2011 a teenage boy turned up in Berlin claiming that he had been living in the German forests with his father for the previous five years…
Reviewed by Annabel They say that every picture tells a story – or sometimes more. When seventeen year old Peggy finds an old photograph of her family and Oliver, the…
