The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
Translated by Ralph Manheim, illustrated by Marie-Alice Harel Review by Lory Widmer Hess He picked up the book and examined it from all sides. It was bound in copper-colored silk,…
Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
Translated by Elena Bormaschenko Illustrated and Introduced by Dave McKean Reviewed by Annabel I have long meant to read this SF classic by the Strugatsky brothers, published in 1972, and…
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Reviewed by Rob Spence A new novel from Tan Twan Eng is a major literary event. His many admirers have been waiting over ten years since the publication of his…
The Home by Penelope Mortimer
Reviewed by Harriet I’ve just finished reading this very good and very upsetting novel. It’s good because Mortimer was an excellent writer, vivid, perceptive, witty. But it’s upsetting because it’s…
Shy by Max Porter
Reviewed by Annabel Now that he’s four novels into his career with Shy, it would be fair to say that Max Porter is one of the UK’s most inventive novelists….
Greek Lessons by Han Kang
Translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite It has been eight years now since Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian was published (reviewed here), and…
Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns
Review by Max Dunbar If you value your life, don’t fuck with Damani, gig economy driver extraordinaire. In her cab she has ‘a switchblade in the glove compartment (which I…
The Precinct with the Golden Arm by Dennis Broe
Reviewed by Michael Eaude This noir novel is the third of a trilogy set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and featuring private eye Harry Palmer. The golden age…
My Turn to Make the Tea by Monica Dickens
Reviewed by Julie Barham Monica Dickens wrote many novels, but her first three books were actually fictionalised memoirs of her first three “Jobs”, a varied collection. This book is the…
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
Reviewed by Harriet As I was reading this book, with great enjoyment and amazement, I was saying to myself – how am I ever going to review this? The story…
Constance Maud’s No Surrender: A Graphic Novel by Scarlett & Sophie Rickard
Review by Julie Barham Colourful, powerful and amazingly enjoyable – this new version of Constance Maud’s suffragette classic as a graphic novel is a revelation. I have not read many…
Bird of Paradise by Ada Leverson
Reviewed by Harriet Bertha – Mrs Percy Kellynch – was known as a beauty. She was indeed improbably pretty, small, plump and very fair, with soft golden hair that was…
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Review by Lory Widmer Hess “The people who offer us the best insights into reality are often novelists,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said, [The Guardian, 14 Jan 2020] and reading…
Furies: Stories of the wicked, wild and untamed
Introduced by Sandi Toksvig Review by Karen Langley Fifty years ago, in the heat of the second wave of women’s liberation, a revolutionary feminist publishing house was formed by Carmen…
Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor
Review by Max Dunbar In his lecture at King’s College London in 1944 C S Lewis defined the Inner Ring as ‘one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action….
The Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson
Reviewed by Harriet You never know what you’re going to get with a Peter Swanson novel, though you can be sure of intelligent, challenging mysteries, interesting and almost invariably warped…
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie
Reviewed by Harriet Back in 2015 I reviewed Anthony Bale’s translation of The Book of Margery Kempe. Said to be the first autobiography written in the English language (though it…
Bournville by Jonathan Coe
Review by Annabel Having read nearly everything that Coe has published and reviewing four of them for Shiny (see here), the arrival of a new title from Coe is always…
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
Review by Lory Widmer Hess The Farthest Shore, third book in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea sequence, was originally published in 1972. Picking it up for a reread today, in…
The Other Half by Charlotte Vassell
Reviewed by Harriet Charlotte Vassell’s brilliant debut thriller begins with a dying girl on Hampstead Heath. This, as we discover later, is Clemmie, and she is, or was, an influencer….
Devils and Saints by Jean-Baptiste Andrea
Translated by Sam Taylor Reviewed by Harriet You know me. Just think, and you’ll remember. The old man who plays those public pianos that you see in various transport hubs….
The Elvis Mysteries: Kill Me Tender & Blue Suede Clues by Daniel Klein
Review by Annabel Daniel Klein has featured at Shiny New Books once before, back in our early days when Victoria reviewed his 2014 non-fiction book Travels With Epicurus, a gentle…
Jungle Nama: A story of the Sundarban & The Living Mountain: A fable for our times, by Amitav Ghosh
Reviews by Peter Reason On Christmas day my elder son gave me a copy of The Living Mountain, while my younger son a copy of Jungle Nama. They both know…
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Review by Lory Widmer Hess I wouldn’t normally expect much of a book created as the novelization of a TV series, but in this case, you know—Neil Gaiman. His first…