A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
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…
Rupert Wallis – My First Year as a Published Author
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…
All Sorts of Possible by Rupert Wallis (YA)
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…
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
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…
Remix by Non Pratt (YA)
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 –…
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
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…
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald
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…
The Honours by Tim Clare
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…
10:04 by Ben Lerner
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…
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
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…
The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle (YA)
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…
The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge (YA)
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?…
The Infidel Stain by M J Carter
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…
The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera
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…
The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys
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…
Seacrow Island, and Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren
Reviewed by Lory Widmer Hess If you’ve been lucky enough to spend summers as a child in a special place, you know that they carry a most particular magic. The…
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Believe the hype from America, where Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel was released in March: this is sure to be one of the books of the year,…
The Dying Season by Martin Walker
Reviewed by Linda Boa Ahh! Just look at that cover of a beautiful French country town in the sunset; small enough so everyone knows everyone else who matters. That’s where…
Jellyfish by Janice Galloway
Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite Janice Galloway’s new short story collection takes as its starting point an observation by David Lodge: “Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about…
The Crooked House by Christobel Kent
Reviewed by Victoria Hands up who remembers Jeremy Bamber, the White House Farm murderer? This was back in 1985, when I was 16 and the case made a notable impact…
Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz by Maxim Biller
Translated by Anthea Bell Reviewed by Karen Langley Polish-Jewish author and artist Bruno Schulz lived a short and strange life, culminating in a tragic and pointless death at the hands…
Peking Picnic by Ann Bridge
Reviewed by Claire Hayes From its opening sentence, Peking Picnic evokes an exquisite sense of time and place – or rather of two places. For Laura Leroy, wife of a British attaché…
The Artificial Anatomy of Parks by Kat Gordon
Reviewed by Victoria It’s been ages since I read a good, old-fashioned family story, and although Kat Gordon’s debut novel wears the veneer of contemporary culture, set partly in a…
Death of Anton by Alan Melville
Having really loved Alan Melville’s Quick Curtain, it didn’t take much to convince me that I wanted to try another of his detective novels, also published in the British Library Crime…