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…
Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian MacDonald Review by Anna Hollingsworth In the short story The Last Obon, Satsuki is mistaken for the ghost of her aunt’s daughter by…
Rabbits by Terry Miles
Review by Annabel As I sat down to start reading this book, a tweet pinged on my phone and I glanced over – someone had commented on a post of…
Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga
Translated by Melanie Mauthner Review by Dorian Stuber The title of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile refers to both a statue of a Black Virgin Mary poised precariously…
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
Translated by Anna Moschovakis Review by Tony Malone David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black takes the reader back to the battlefields of the First World War, but anyone…
Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal
Translated by Jessica Moore Reviewed by Annabel Maylis de Kerangal is a novelist whose primary focus is not the characters that people her books, but the subject they’re involved with….
Civilisations by Laurent Binet
Translated by Sam Taylor Review by Max Dunbar Reviewers of fiction, trying to make sense of Laurent Binet’s Civilisations, have reached for video game metaphors. In the Literary Review, James Womack…
The Octopus Man by Jasper Gibson
Review by Anne Goodwin Tom doesn’t expect life to be easy; it’s more important to follow a true path. Single, jobless and reliant on benefits, he prioritises abstinence, spreading kindness,…
Summertime, All the Cats are Bored by Philippe Georget
Translated by Steven Rendall Review by Terence Jagger He moved cautiously forward through the tall grass, following a trail of broken stems. And it was there, in a miniscule clearing…
Mamma by Diana Tutton
Reviewed by Harriet Published in 1956, Mamma was the first novel Tutton wrote, though her second and now better known Guard Your Daughters was published first, in 1953. I don’t…