Frontline by Dr Hilary Jones
Review by Julie Barham Medical knowledge and techniques were vastly increased during and immediately after the First World War, as the loss of so many fighting men was dwarfed by…
Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki
Translated by Karen Van Dyck Review by Karen Langley Coming of age stories are a perennial favourite in both classic and modern literature; and although much past writing has focused…
No Touching by Ketty Rouf
Translated by Tina Kover Review by Annabel Italian-born novelist Ketty Rouf won France’s Prix du Premier Roman 2020 (First Novel award) for her debut No Touching, written in French and…
The Promise by Damon Galgut
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Damon Galgut has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice. The Good Doctor delved into a young doctor’s angry melancholy in a remote rural hospital in…
An Evening with Claire by Gaito Gazdanov
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk Review by Karen Langley Recent years have seen an upturn of interest in Russian émigré authors from the 20th century; there were, of course, famous names…
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth In The Bastard of Istanbul, a mysterious curse kills one family’s men before their time; 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World tells the story…
Daughters of the Labyrinth by Ruth Padel
Reviewed by Lory Widmer-Hess When we went to Crete last October (during a brief window when travel was possible), I knew little of the island’s history beyond the myth of…
Line by Niall Bourke
Reviewed by Annabel If I searched, I could probably fill a small shelf full of novels that have a sub-niche of their own that is the ‘queue’. Within that we…
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Reviewed by Harriet Jean Hanff Korelitz has appeared twice on Shiny before, both times reviewed by me. The first novel was You Should Have Known (reviewed here); you may not…
Three Rooms by Jo Hamya
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms, the narrator discovers the communal kitchen in her Oxford house in a desperately filthy state, with surfaces covered…
Heaven by Meiko Kawakami
Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth My first encounter with Mieko Kawakami — as for most of us relying on English translations — was her…
The Snow Line by Tessa McWatt
Reviewed by Harriet A disparate group of four total strangers meet at a wedding in the Punjab, India. Three of them are young and of Indian heritage; the fourth is…
The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura
Translated by Lucy North Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth There’s a particular skill to pulling off a character who is objectively reprehensible but nevertheless wins over the sympathies of the reader….
Everyone Is Still Alive by Cathy Rentzenbrink
Reviewed by Annabel You may know Cathy Rentzenbrink through her heart-breaking memoir published a few years ago. In The Last Act of Love, she tells the story of her family…
Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
Reviewed by Harriet Here on Shiny we’ve reviewed three of Laura Lippman’s novels, here, here and here. Two were standalones, and the third was part of a series featuring Baltimore…
Narcisse on a Tightrope by Olivier Targowla
Translated by Paul Curtis Daw There’s a scene late in the story where Narcisse is out on day release, wandering the streets of Paris. He’s due to visit his family…
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
Review by Max Dunbar A nineteenth-century psychiatrist defines paramnesia as The blurring of something imaginary and something real. Most commonly, déjà vu; the sense you’ve seen something new before. And its opposite,…
Eustace and Hilda by L P Hartley
Reviewed by Harriet Leslie Poles Hartley was forty-nine when he published his first novel, The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944). It was followed by The Sixth Heaven (1946) and Eustace…
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Paperback review by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in The Vanishing Half, Kennedy, an overprivileged struggling actress, remembers a childhood shopping trip with her mother: ”I love shopping,” she’d said,…
The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper
Review by Lory Widmer-Hess Ancient Greece and Rome, which formed the foundation of so much in our Western civilization, have been getting a revisionist look lately. A number of novels…
The Feast by Margaret Kennedy
Reviewed by Harriet Margaret Kennedy has appeared a few times before on Shiny: two of her novels in 2014 [here] and [here] and more recently my own review of her…
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
Paperback review by Rebecca Foster Curtis Sittenfeld’s sixth novel, a work of alternative history narrated entirely by Hillary Rodham and covering the years between 1970 and the recent past, is…
Barcelona Dreaming, by Rupert Thomson
Review by Basil Ramsome-Davies Rupert Thomson has been around for quite a while, a prolific and much respected author; this is the first book of his I have read. So…
Miss Browne’s Friend by F M Mayor
Reviewed by Harriet Born in 1872, Flora Macdonald Mayor was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman and classics professor. Perhaps surprisingly, given her background, she became an actress, but abandoned…