Review of The Akeing Heart by Peter Haring Judd
Review by Simon How you approach The Akeing Heart will depend largely on how familiar you are with the names Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, and Elizabeth Wade White. These…
Rosie by Rose Tremain
Reviewed by Harriet I’m a huge admirer of Rose Tremain’s brilliant novels, and very fond of childhood memoirs as a genre, so this one was a must for me. It’s…
A Chill in the Air by Iris Origo
Review by Terence Jagger This is a fascinating book, written during the year or so preceding Italy’s entry in to the 1939-45 war, when whether she would join – and…
How Shostakovich Changed My Mind by Stephen Johnson
Review by Karen Langley Readers of Shiny New Books will know of my love for Notting Hill Editions books; I’ve reviewed their “Beautiful and Impossible Things” and “The Russian Soul”…
What She Ate by Laura Shapiro
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton What She Ate looks at ‘six remarkable women and the food that tells their stories’. It comes at a time when food centred biographies, or food…
Diary of a Bipolar Explorer by Lucy Newlyn
Reviewed by Jean Morris This is both useful and beautiful. Lucy Newlyn, recently retired Oxford professor of English literature, author of a lovely book, among others, about Dorothy and William…
Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan
Review by Liz Dexter This is a truly delightful book which is a MUST if you’re a 35-55 year old British person and a great read for everyone else, too….
Elisabeth’s Lists: A Family Story by Lulah Ellender
Reviewed by Gill Davies Lulah Ellender’s book – subtitled “A Family Story” – is part biography, part family history, and it includes reflections on her own family which gradually emerge from the…
The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein
Reviewed by Harriet This enthralling multiple biography is subtitled ‘Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the year that changed literature’. The year is 1922, and the claim…
Unaccompanied Minor by Alexander Newley
Review by Annabel The children of celebrity couples inevitably have a hard time growing up, especially when their parents split. You need only think of the late Carrie Fisher, daughter…
A Chelsea Concerto by Frances Faviell
Reviewed by Kate Macdonald This is the first of the new reprint series from the Dean Street Press to be curated by the Furrowed Middlebrow blog, a truly admirable enterprise. They…
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Daniel Mendelsohn chairs the Humanities department at Bard College, where he was previously a Classics professor. He is the author of seven earlier books, ranging from…
Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Nightshade Upon Magic The online OED defines starstruck as ‘Fascinated or greatly impressed by famous people, especially those connected with the cinema or the theatre.’ There…
A Forger’s Tale by Shaun Greenhalgh
Reviewed by Harriet The subtitle of this fascinating book is ‘Confessions of the Bolton Forger’. Does that ring any bells? If you were keeping half an eye on the news…
This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
Review by Annabel I love reading medical memoirs, we’ve featured neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s two volumes here at Shiny (see my review of Do No Harm here), and heart surgeon Stephen…
I Am I Am I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
Reviewed by Harriet I’ve always admired Maggie O’Farrell’s fiction, and greatly loved her most recent novel, This Must Be the Place, which I reviewed on Shiny last year. I didn’t…
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
Reviewed by Simon Thomas Many book lovers have fantasies about what it would be like to work in a bookshop – perhaps particularly a secondhand bookshop. There is an aura…
Admissions by Henry Marsh
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Brain surgeon Henry Marsh’s first book, Do No Harm, was one of my favorite reads of 2015 [reviewed by Annabel here]. In short, enthrallingly detailed chapters named after conditions…
A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
Reviewed by Harriet The subtitle of this book is ‘The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf’, which sounds very promising. I’ll start by saying that I found some…
These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath by Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg
Review by Karen Langley You could be forgiven for thinking that the last thing the world needs is yet another book about the poet, writer and artist Sylvia Plath. She’s…
Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley
Reviewed by Harriet If you’re a watcher of historical TV documentaries, you won’t need introducing to Lucy Worsley, who presents history programmes for the BBC, in which she often dresses…
No Cunning Plan: My Story by Tony Robinson
Review by Laura Marriott Like many people I first came to know Tony Robinson through his role as Baldrick on Blackadder, before following him as he helmed Time Team. This…
Deaths of the Poets by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
Review by Harriet The deaths of poets matter to us because they become a lens through which to look at the poems. So say the authors, both poets themselves, in…
Aphra Behn: A Secret Life by Janet Todd
Review by Harriet ‘Aphra Behn was a woman who wore masks’. So says Janet Todd at the beginning of this monumental, newly revised biography of Behn, who was a prolific…