House of Beauty by Melba Escobar
Translated by Elizabeth Bryer Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies Each time I walk into town from my house I pass at least one nail/beauty salon/spa/bar/studio (the titles variously inflect the…
Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries, ed. Martin Edwards
Reviewed by Karen Langley Golden Age crime, which has had such a revival recently, is renowned for particular tropes and settings; the country house location or the locked room mystery…
White Houses by Amy Bloom
Reviewed by Susan Osborne I’ve yet to read anything by Amy Bloom that I’ve not loved. Her writing is both deft and empathetic, pressing all my literary buttons. Spanning a…
Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey
Reviewed by Harriet Four years after Emma Healey’s best selling Elizabeth is Missing comes her second novel, Whistle in the Dark. It’s a psychological thriller of sorts, but don’t expect…
Edgar & Lucy by Victor Lodato
Reviewed by Alice Farrant For seven years Florence, Lucy and Edgar have lived in the wake of Frank’s death. No one mentions Frank’s passing and so Grandmother, Daughter-in-law and Son…
The Trick To Time by Kit de Waal
Reviewed by Alice Farrant Mona lives a quiet life as a dollmaker, at face value she appears to be an ordinary woman, however, in private she runs a side-service helping…
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Reviewed by Harriet Asymmetry is defined as ‘lack of equality or equivalence between parts’, a definition that applies both to a theme of this brilliant debut novel and to its…
Tangerine by Christine Mangan
Reviewed by Annabel They say that in Tangier, the local hustlers have clocked all the new arrivals within hours – this is what I was told when I visited Tangier…
Happiness by Aminatta Forna
Review by Lucy Unwin “You know how it is with white people. You say it’s race, they tell you you are mistaken. Then they say it’s because of your race…
A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey
Reviewed by Harriet A Long Way from Home, as the title implies, is a novel of a journey in more than one sense. An actual physical journey takes up the…
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…
The Unbeliever by Oggy Boytchev
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…
Dear Mrs Bird by A J Pearce
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…
Moonrise & Lost Mars, ed. Mike Ashley
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…
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
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…
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
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…
Almost Love by Louise O’Neill
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,…
The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton
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…
Sunburn by Laura Lippman
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…
The Extremist by Nadia Dalbuono
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,…
Daphne by Will Boast
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…
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
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…
Felix Culpa by Jeremy Gavron
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…
Savages: The Wedding by Sabri Louatah
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…