On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Paperback review by Anna Hollingsworth One way for a book to land a blow is to describe dark, brutal matters but to dress them in a language that is the…
Paperback review by Anna Hollingsworth One way for a book to land a blow is to describe dark, brutal matters but to dress them in a language that is the…
Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite Kevin Barry is known for his short stories, and with good reason. It has been eight years since his last collection, Dark Lies the Island, so…
Translated by Nick Caistor Reviewed by Gill Davies This is the first novel by Olivier Norek to be translated into English. It was first published in France in 2013 and…
Review by Annabel My first exposure to Nunez was through her breakthrough novel The Friend, finally gaining her prizewinner status (the US National Book Award) and now reprints of earlier…
Reviewed by Harriet Islands of Mercy is set in 1865, and, in a split narrative, covers events in England and Sarawak, in Borneo. Throughout most of the novel, the two…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Imagine a mining town and everything covered in shades of coal, from the people to the buildings to the sky and every single surface. That’s the…
Reviewed by Harriet It’s exactly ten years since I discovered Barbara Comyns for the first time. Born in 1909, she had an unusual upbringing and a somewhat chequered career, both…
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth How do you feel about the prospect of someone having sex with their grandfather? And them justifying it by the fact…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women 1890 -1940 was a standout book from last year – it’s still genuinely one of the most unsettling anthologies I’ve…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton I spent some time looking up the definition of Weird as opposed to Horror in preparation for writing this, and now have the perfect opportunity to…
Reviewed by Annabel Megan Hunter’s beautiful and poetic debut novella, The End We Started From (reviewed here for Shiny by Lucy Unwin), the story of a woman about to give…
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long Francesca Bassington sat in the drawing room of her house in Blue Street regaling herself and her estimable brother Henry with China tea and small cress…
Translated by Anne Goldstein Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Adolescence can be brutal, and in The Lying Life of Adults Elena Ferrante brings it out in all its ugly passions, grievances…
Translated by Antonina W. Bouis Reviewed by Karen Langley Science fiction writing often gets a bad press; dismissed as lightweight genre writing, mocked for some of the horrendous cover art…
Reviewed by Harriet I’m rather ashamed to say that the only one of ‘multi-award-winning’ John Banville’s books I’ve read before is The Black-Eyed Blonde, which he published in 2014 under…
While Shiny New Books concentrates on the new, we enjoyed giving some of our reviewers room to share previously published – ie: ‘not Shiny New Books’ they were reading this…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth In one of the marketing quotes on its cover, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is described as “an elegantly cryptic, poetically plotted Murakami-esque whydunit.” Thematically…
‘They tried to hide the truth. But the camera never lies…’ Review by Basil Ransome-Davies So runs the publisher’s tagline on the front cover of S. J. Watson’s third novel. …
Translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff In the Translator’s Note at the end of Daughters, Sinéad Crowe writes of her concern about successfully translating the…
Review by Annabel Of all the books that were published a couple of weeks ago in this September’s post-lockdown publishing splurge, Susanna Clarke’s second novel, Piranesi, was the one I…
Reviewed by Harriet He was walking behind her, two steps behind. She did not look back. She said, “I’m not talking to you”. “I completely understand”. “If you did completely…
Translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff Joining the ranks of small presses dedicated to one particular region or language, Fum d’Estampa is a Barcelona–London go-between…
Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth When Breasts and Eggs appeared in bookshops alongside all the Murakamis, Convenience Store Woman and Stranger Weather in Tokyo…
Reviewed by Harriet Back in 2017 I reviewed JP Delaney’s brilliant psychological thriller The Girl Before on Shiny (here). All I know about the author is that he’s a man…