Review by Laura Tisdall In her debut, Boy Parts, Eliza Clark brilliantly demolished the ‘disaster woman’ trope with her portrait of Irina, a deliciously callous young woman who’s on the prowl for…
Review by Annabel For Welsh’s ninth novel, she stays in Glasgow and it is a thriller, but this is not a third outing for her reluctant crime-solving auctioneer Rilke (cf:…
Reviewed by Harriet The village was beautiful. It was enfolded in a hollow of the Downs, and wrapped up snugly – first, in a floral shawl of gardens, and then,…
Review by Gill Davies This is a first novel by a practising barrister and is billed as “a legal thriller with a psychological twist”. It comes with plaudits from –…
Review by Annabel Let me explain. This Thursday, a film called Argylle reaches our cinema screens in the UK; you may even have seen the trailer (IMDB link here). This…
Reviewed by Harriet This is the eleventh novel in Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey historical crime series; we’ve reviewed four of them on here as well as her standalone fictional biography…
Review by Simon A new novel by Michael Cunningham is cause for celebration. I’ve read and loved all his novels – give or take a not-to-my-taste venture into science fiction…
Review by Rob Spence We are in London at its Victorian zenith, a city of imperial majesty, and also a city where the most abject poverty exists side-by-side with the…
Reviewed by Harriet The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand. I was a small child then, soft at the belly. On that night my mother took me…
Reviewed by Harriet ‘I’m sick of those two.’ The words arrived in my mouth like hard, round pebbles, threatened to take up all the space. I stopped for a moment,…
The growth of social media seems to have generated a huge increase in madness. Not real madness, of course. Rather, it’s the condition affected by so many TikTokers and Instagrammers,…
Introduction by Simon Thomas Reviewed by Harriet Devine When I saw the title and the snowflakey cover of this winter offering from the British Library Women Writers series, I thought…
Reviewed by Rob Spence I was once assured by a James Joyce scholar that there was more critical material on Joyce than there was on Shakespeare – pretty good going,…
Review by Annabel Ever since I read and reviewed this novel, back in the spring of 2015 when it was first published – my review for Shiny is here –…
Reviewed by Harriet Like me, many people will have been waiting impatiently for the next installment of the ongoing saga of private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. Some (not…
Reviewed by Lory Widmer Hess Neil Gaiman and I have at least one thing in common: we both started reading Diana Wynne Jones when we picked up one of her…
Review by Lory Widmer Hess The Temple of Fortuna is the third book in a trilogy that began with The Wolf Den and continued with The House with the Golden…
Review by Annabel Imagine, it’s the mid-late 1970s, the Independence Day long weekend, and the founder members of an exclusive country/hunting club, West Heart, are gathered in the Club’s extensive…
Reviewed by Harriet He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn’t move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles…
Translated by Anthea Bell Review by Terence Jagger Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna, but lived in England, the USA and Brazil, where he apparently died in a double suicide…
Review by Helen Parry Despite her virtuous nature, Emmeline Mowbray is destined to cause trouble because she is a beautiful, illegitimate orphan growing up in an isolated and decaying Pembrokshire…
Translated by Hilda Rosner Reviewed by Harriet Siddhartha had one single goal – to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow – to let the…
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk Review by Karen Langley Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) was a Japanese author known for his erotically charged stories, and is considered one of his country’s best-known modern…
Reviewed by Harriet Rose Tremain’s novels – of which we’ve reviewed many on Shiny (see here) – have taken readers to the distant and not so distant past, and to…
