Back in 2017, Shiny editor Harriet reviewed a reprint of one of Sally Emerson’s novels, Separation, first published in 1992 – describing it as ‘a novel of immense subtlety and…
Today we are delighted to be taking part in a short blog tour for the novel ‘Pomeranski’ by Gerald Jacobs, just published by Quartet Books. Gerald Jacobs is the literary…
Kit de Waal is the author of My Name is Leon which was published last year to great acclaim – see our review of the novel here. We are taking part in the blog…
São Paulo is the capital of South America. What a city: rich in culture, dripping with cash, undermined by political corruption, marked by a rich / poor disparity which fuels…
Written by Ann Kennedy Smith A Quiet Life by Natasha Walter (Borough Press, 2016), Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea (Scribe, 2016) I spend a lot of my time reading other people’s private letters…
My Aunt Sybil (sadly not the figure in black bombazine and lorgnette her name might suggest – think Gore Tex® and stout hiking shoes) on a recent visit to my…
The person who gave me the very first idea for this book was Sally Prue, a good writer and a good friend of mine. It was, I think, while my…
I recently met up with a bunch of friends from university for the afternoon. ‘You’re very successful now, aren’t you?’ one guy boomed at me before even saying ‘hello’. I…
As he stops off at Shiny New Books on his book tour, we asked J Paul Henderson, author of The Last of the Bowmans (reviewed here), to explore where the black humour comes from…
By Mark Thornton (This is an adaptation of a talk I gave to sixth formers at Abingdon School last year.) This is my tenth year of being an independent bookseller –…
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…
From ‘A Eulogy for Nigger’ by David Bradley DETROIT. Hundreds of onlookers cheered . . . as the National Association for the Advancement of … People put to rest a…
As a teenager, I’d spend hours on my own wandering the stacks of Sydney’s State Library. Its vast, airy reading room mimics those of libraries I later used in London…
Non is the author of two YA novels, the latest of which, Remix, is reviewed in our fiction section here. She recently took part in a panel discussion at the Young Adult Literature…
“Don’t write about what you know, write about what you don’t want others to know.” I don’t know who originally said it, but it is one of the best bits…
Article by Anne Goodwin 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
By Andy Miller About ten years ago, I had a bright idea. It involved reading a baker’s dozen of books I had always meant to read but had never got…
By Laura Kalpakian I often think of the novel, any novel, really, as a small boat, initially moored to a certain well known shore, an incident, say, the writer’s own…
I first came across Rex Whistler some years ago at Plas Newydd on Anglesey. There he had painted his largest and most famous mural, begun in 1936. The dining room…
My novel Fog Island Mountains is about a mixed-culture family living in southern Japan. The novel centers on the father’s unexpected diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and his wife’s flight from and denial…
