All the Beautiful Girls by Elizabeth J Church
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Elizabeth J. Church’s debut novel, The Atomic Weight of Love, was about an 87-year-old amateur ornithologist whose husband was one of the creators of the atomic…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Elizabeth J. Church’s debut novel, The Atomic Weight of Love, was about an 87-year-old amateur ornithologist whose husband was one of the creators of the atomic…
Reviewed by Annabel Oggy (Ognian) Boytchev grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Bulgaria. He developed an interest in spies and spy novels as a child, after hearing propaganda on…
Reviewed by Helen Skinner It’s 1941 and Britain is at war. Emmeline Lake has always wanted to be a journalist and is thrilled when she sees an advertisement in the…
Reviewed by Karen Langley There can’t be many readers of Shiny New Books who aren’t aware of the lovely British Library Crime Classics series: long out-of-print and forgotten novels and…
Reviewed by Harriet I forget everything between footsteps. ‘Anna!’ I finish shouting, snapping my mouth shut in surprise. My mind has gone blank. I don’t know who Anna is or…
Review by Terence Jagger This is a tricky book to read, though I enjoyed much of it. It is funny and observant, but painful too. Kitani has a strong view…
Reviewed by Annabel After the searing, taboo-breaking storyline of O’Neil’s second novel, Asking For It (reviewed here), a young adult story about consent, teenage sex-shaming and the fallout from it,…
Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies At the close of James Joyce’s moving and magisterial story ‘The Dead’ the reader learns that ‘snow was general all over Ireland… falling faintly through the…
Reviewed by Harriet We’ve reviewed two of Laura Lippman’s novels in Shiny, here and here. One was a police procedural and the other a standalone – Lippman’s output is fairly…
Review by Marina Sofia You might be forgiven for expecting this book set in Italy to be translated from Italian, given the Italian sounding name of the author. In fact,…
Reviewed by Annabel The vogue for using ancient myth to inspire contemporary novels continues unabated. Last year, Kamila Shamsie updated the story of Antigone in Home Fire, in which a…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Command the Mermaid Speak Last year a monster emerged from London’s sewers. The ‘fatberg’ – as the city’s waste disposal experts called it – was a…
Review by Rob Spence The German artist Kurt Schwitters developed a method , which he called “Merz” by which his canvases would be constructed using hundreds of fragments of material…
Translated by Gavin Bowd Reviewed by Annabel This debut novel is the first volume of Louatah’s planned Saint-Étienne quartet named after the French city in which its protagonists reside. Saint-Étienne…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho is an impressive debut, both in its writing and its treatment of a difficult subject: the murder of a young child in the…
Reviewed by Jean Morris Rainsongs will take you to remote vistas in the west of Ireland. It’s a lovely, vividly transporting novel. “Apart from the wind and waves, it’s completely…
Reviewed by Gill Davies Following on from her highly-acclaimed first novel, The Dry, Jane Harper has written a second gripping story featuring the harsh Australian outback and a detective called…
Reviewed by Harriet I have certain reservations about novels in which the central character is someone who really existed. Sometimes it works really well, as for example in the case…
Reviewed by Annabel I managed to miss Forbes’s debut, Ghost Moth, which received rave reviews – something I should remedy having read her second novel. Edith and Oliver is set in the…
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies This novel borrows its title from Fritz Lang’s canonical film noir (which is also a teasing, ironic comedy of the repressed returning) and Finn’s first-person narrator, Dr…
Translated by Sam Taylor Reviewed by Harriet Moroccan born novelist Leïla Slimani is not the first woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, though she’s only…
Translated by Jamie Bulloch Reviewed by Terence Jagger We are not in Japan, but Germany; set in the snowy Black Forest, not far from the French border, this novel starts…
Translated by Katherine Gregor Reviewed by Terence Jagger In early twelfth century Venice set we our scene, although the cod historical touch is maybe just a little unfair, there is…
Translated by Ekin Oklap Review by Rob Spence A new novel by Orhan Pamuk is always an event, and this one doesn’t disappoint. It’s an absorbing story, set in the…