April 9, 2020 A Bite of the Apple by Lennie Goodings Review by Simon There’s a certain variety of person who can always spot a bottle-green spine at a hundred paces, and has faced the…
February 6, 2020 Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin by Clive James Review by Karen Langley My love of the poetry of Philip Larkin is no secret; I’ve written about him numerous times on my own…
January 30, 2020 Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide, by Barry Forshaw Review by Basil Ransome-Davies When I started teaching popular fiction courses forty years ago, having always been more drawn to Jesse James than to…
January 23, 2020 Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor Review by Gill Davies Women read a lot more fiction than men; they also buy more books, attend writers’ events, blog, exchange ideas, and…
December 5, 2019 Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History – Catherine Belsey Review by Hayley Anderton Tales of the weird have a deep hold on our collective imagination, and of all the things we’ve given credence…
October 1, 2019 Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell Review by Simon As the cover of Confessions of a Bookseller tells us, Bythell is an international bestseller. A couple of years ago, The…
October 23, 2018 Books do furnish a Painting by Jamie Camplin & Maria Ranauro Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Thames and Hudson have got form for publishing tempting books that combine art and literature – Eric Karpeles Paintings in…
September 20, 2018 Mrs Gaskell & Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries Apart By Nell Stevens Reviewed by Rebecca Foster It started with a misreading of some nineteenth-century handwriting. In 2013 Nell Stevens began a PhD at King’s College, London….
March 15, 2018 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…
January 30, 2018 Science Fiction: A Literary History edited by Roger Luckhurst Reviewed by Annabel Once upon a time SF was a subculture haunted by small populations of nerds and geeks. Star Wars (1977) changed that,…
January 18, 2018 In Search of Lost Books: The forgotten stories of eight mythical volumes by Giorgio van Straten Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is an engaging book about other books, but it makes no judgements on them, and nor can we express,…
December 7, 2017 The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler Review by Annabel While I can’t claim to read anywhere near the volume of old and newly reprinted novels that some of my Shiny…
December 5, 2017 A History of Children’s Books in 100 Books by Roderick Cave and Sarah Ayad Reviewed by Harriet Earlier this year I reviewed Martin Edwards’ Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, and very good it was too. So…
October 6, 2017 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…
August 24, 2017 The Bestseller Code by Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jocker Reviewed by Annabel Imagine that you train a computer to read and analyse books, input a mix of hundreds and ask it to predict…
August 24, 2017 The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books by Martin Edwards Reviewed by Harriet Here at Shiny we love our classic crime, and we have been delighted to review a number of excellent novels that…
August 10, 2017 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…
February 2, 2017 The Novel of the Century – The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables by David Bellos Review by Annabel Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is 150 years old in 2017, and doubtless there will be much attention paid them including this…
October 11, 2016 The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk Translated by Nazim Dikbas Reviewed by Rob Spence Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate, is the kind of public intellectual that we need to cherish, especially…
April 28, 2016 The Prose Factory by D.J. Taylor Reviewed by Liz Dexter This ambitious book aims to provide a history of what it calls ‘literary life’ in the 20th century, encompassing an examination…
April 25, 2016 The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Reviewed by Simon There are few children’s literary characters who are as well known as Alice et al. From Alice bands to Mad Hatters,…
April 12, 2016 Venice by Marie-José Gransard Reviewed by Harriet I’ve been to Venice twice in my life, both times for regrettably short visits, but unforgettable ones. You can’t help being…
July 9, 2015 The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards Reviewed by Lyn Baines The Golden Age of crime fiction spanned the period between the World Wars. There are many stereotypes about the books written…
October 27, 2014 What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund Reviewed by Rebecca Hussey The immediate effect of reading Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read was to make me want to pick up a…
October 21, 2014 The Art of Neil Gaiman by Hayley Campbell Reviewed by Jodie Robson I think I may have have mentioned before that I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman’s writing. A pretty unabashed fan,…
