The Chimes by Anna Smaill
Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson I’ve read a couple of fascinating dystopian novels recently: Station Eleven and Not Forgetting the Whale. Both use a dark forecast of the future to say something meaningful…
Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson I’ve read a couple of fascinating dystopian novels recently: Station Eleven and Not Forgetting the Whale. Both use a dark forecast of the future to say something meaningful…
Reviewed by Annabel Hats off to Bloomsbury on the lovely design of this wonderful novel. You can’t see here, but there is a cut-out of the watch dial, and all around…
Reviewed by David Harris This book is very different from Thomas’s last, Our Tragic Universe. We see events from several viewpoints, mostly members of the rambling Gardener family: Fleur, her lover…
Reviewed by Alice Farrant Tender by Belinda McKeon is a literary tour-de-force. A frighteningly addictive tumble down the rabbit hole of obsessive love and friendship in late-90s Ireland. Catherine is 18,…
Reviewed by Adèle Geras First, full disclosure. Susan Hill, whose Long Barn Books has published this novel, sent me a copy as a gift. She had no idea that I was…
Review by Annabel Anyone who has ever been enthralled by reading or seeing the film of The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s seminal story of the USA’s quest to break the…
Reviewed by Bookgazing For a while now, there’s been some online discussion about whether “the coming out novel” has had its day, and whether modern readers need stories where characters…
Reviewed by Harriet Rarely can the publication of a novel have been surrounded by such an uproar and so many misconceptions. Let’s put one of them straight right away —…
Reviewed by Victoria When I first heard that an author had produced a rewrite of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, I was extremely eager to read it. I love von…
Paperback review by Susan Osborne When I think of Baltimore two things come to mind: Anne Tyler and The Wire, polar opposites in terms of subject matter but both supreme exemplars…
As his second YA novel All Sorts of Possible is published (reviewed here), author Rupert Wallis stops off at Shiny New Books on his blog tour to tell us about his experience including…
Reviewed by Annabel I saw a repeat of a Horizon TV programme all about sinkholes the other month. Geology professor Ian Stewart was in Florida, which is the sinkhole capital of the…
Reviewed by Sakura Gooneratne Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. He doesn’t devour them really; it only feels that…
Reviewed by Jodie When I reviewed The Girl at Midnight I mentioned how great it was to read a story with a female friendship at its heart. Lo and behold, Remix by Non Pratt –…
Paperback review by Harriet Marie-Laure sits on her bed with the window open and travels her hands over her father’s model of the city. Her fingers pass the ship-builders’ sheds…
Translated by Alice Menzies Reviewed by Danielle Katarina Bivald’s The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a ‘long cool sip of lemonade while lying in a hammock on a sunny day’ sort…
Reviewed by Eleanor Franzén It’s rare for any book, let alone a book marketed as literary fiction for adults, to open with a thirteen-year-old girl lying flat on her stomach…
Paperback review by Susan Osborne Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was much talked about on publication – 10:04 is his second and it’s narrated by a writer whose first novel was…
Translated by Philip Gabriel Reviewed by Tony Malone Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the story of thirty-six-year-old train station designer Tsukuru Tazaki, a native of Nagoya…
Reviewed by Bookgazing Every October, Cara’s family is beset by accidents big and small. The family all refer to this month as ‘the accident season’ and try to take extra…
Reviewed by Ana Grilo “Have you read Frances Hardinge?” I’ve made several false starts with this review because I don’t know what to write. How do I describe The Lie Tree?…
Reviewed by Gill Davies The Infidel Stain is the second novel by M J Carter featuring the unusual detective duo of Jeremiah Blake and Captain William Avery. In the first novel, The…
Reviewed by Simon Kundera’s latest – and, so it seems in discussion of the novel, potentially last – novel was published last year in French, and has now been translated…
Reviewed by Danielle Helen Humphreys writes some of the most lyrical prose I have come across. I’m slowly reading my way through her work, some of it read in pre-blogging…