Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore
Reviewed by Harriet I wanted to write about people whose voices have not echoed through time and whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history So writes Helen Dunmore…
Reviewed by Harriet I wanted to write about people whose voices have not echoed through time and whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history So writes Helen Dunmore…
Reviewed by Alice Farrant At 35, Mary is single and living in the house she once shared with her partner. She goes to work only to be berated by her…
Review by Karen Langley In this centenary year of the Russian Revolution, much attention is being focused on Soviet Russia and its culture. One author who exerts an eternal fascination…
Reviewed by Marina Sofia It is easier to tell you what A Separation is not, rather than what it is. It is not a mystery, although a disappearance features quite…
Paperback review by Alice Farrant My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal is a powerful story that discusses race, mental illness, and family, through the abandonment of a child. It’s…
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies David Gaffney has earned himself a distinctive reputation as a writer of ‘flash fictions’ – micro-stories, variable in tone and topic but springing from a…
Paperback review by Susan Osborne Ron Rash hails from the Appalachians and it’s there that he sets his award-winning novels with their smalltown mountain backdrop similar to Kent Haruf’s Holt,…
Reviewed by Lucy Unwin No book could be simultaneously more timely and more timeless than this future classic. The Nix is fun, joyous, exciting and tender; full of both the…
Review by Annabel I reviewed Claire Fuller’s debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, for Shiny upon its publication – I loved it and was delighted when she won the 2015…
Translated by Laura Watkinson Reviewed by Gill Davies Otto de Kat is the pseudonym of a Dutch writer (journalist, poet, translator and editor) whose novels are set in Holland and…
Translated by John Brownjohn Reviewed by Annabel I’m very glad to have met the irrepressible Auntie Poldi! Our narrator, her beloved nephew, tells us what she is like: a glamorous…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster From the title and the Montego Bay, Jamaica setting, you might be expecting a story line light enough to match the Beatles’ pop song. But Nicole…
Paperback review by Gill Davies She Died Young was published in hardback last year and is now available in paperback. It is the fourth novel by Elizabeth Wilson, better known (to…
Translated by Susan Bernofsky Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a rather engaging book, which on the surface is not entirely innocent of the grave crime of being cute, but…
Reviewed by Annabel In the interest of full disclosure, Martine and I have never met, but we are Facebook friends after I reviewed her first two novels. Narcissism for Beginners…
Reviewed by Annabel Old Soho ain’t what it used to be. The former centre of London’s seedier side has been largely poshed up, gentrified and made chic for new money…
Review by Annabel There are two types of historical fiction. Those which are set during a particular period with imagined protagonists which may feature real people of the time in…
Review by Alice Farrant The number of women my brother Matthew killed as far as I can reckon it, is one hundred and six. When her husband dies Alice is…
Reviewed by Alice Farrant Akin’s father has died and Yejide is coming home. Set against a backdrop of political turmoil, Stay With Me is a powerful commentary on motherhood, love,…
Reviewed by Harriet You will have only one story… You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You will have only one. This advice, given to…
Review by Annabel Jeff Arnott’s novels are moving back in time – He started in the 1960s and 1970s with his Long Firm trilogy, then he moved back to WWII…
Reviewed by Eleanor Franzén The New York Times Book Review runs a regular feature called ‘By the Book’, a kind of questionnaire for celebrated authors about their reading habits. Recently,…
Reviewed by Terence Jagger Lagos is not the capital of Nigeria – that is planned, concrete, unexciting Abuja, in the middle of the country but without a past or much…
Review by Annabel Joe Thomas lived and taught in São Paulo, the most populous city in the Americas and Southern Hemisphere, for ten years. His observations and experience of living…