Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily van Duyne
Written by Victoria Best There’s a lot going on in Emily van Duyne’s intriguingly hybrid work on Sylvia Plath, a book that has its feet in scholarship and its head…
The King’s Loot: The Greatest Royal Jewellery Heist in History by Richard Wallace
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long It is always misleading to read the serialisation of a book in the newspapers. The paper in question will always focus on the more sensational aspects…
All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield
Reviewed by Harriet This is the second book about fraud I’ve reviewed this year, the first being Joseph Hone’s impressive The Book Forger. Obviously, as you can tell from the…
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
Travel & the World
Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler
In expanding and resourcing public understandings of the countryside’s colonial past, we can tell our islands’ stories and address colonial legacies from a position of knowledge rather than fear. Corinne…
Airplane Mode: Travels in the Ruins of Tourism by Shahnaz Habib
Review by Liz Dexter How intrepid you are as a traveler depends, at least partly, on how entitled you feel to travel. On whether there’s an army base nearby with…
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
Review by Peter Reason I am sitting under the old apple tree in our Orchard on a sunny summer afternoon, looking over the meadow grass swaying in the light breeze,…
The Blues Brothers by Daniel De Visé
An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Film Classic Review by Annabel Full disclosure: I saw The Blues Brothers on the first day of…
A Ride Across America by Simon Parker
Review by Liz Dexter Fascinatingly, many of the small towns I found along the way seemed to be stuck in a time warp. I cycled past rusted 1940s Studebakers and…
It’s a Gas by Mark Miodownik
Review by Annabel Ever since his first two books, Stuff Matters (2012) and Liquid (2018), I’ve been waiting for Miodownik to complete his states of matter trilogy with a book…
The Future of Energy by Richard Black
Review by Annabel Back in March, Shiny took part in the blogtour for Melville House’s initial books in its ‘Futures’ series. The first books in the series of small format…
All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District by Esther Rutter
Review by Simon Thomas In the past decade, a trend has developed where the lines between biography and autobiography, between non-fiction and memoir, have collapsed in on themselves. The author…
Parallel Lives by Maryam Diener
Review by Karen Langley When most people think of the high profile spies of the 20th century, names like Burgess, McLean and of course Kim Philby are probably the first…
Completely Kafka by Nicolas Mahler
Translated by Alexander Booth Review by Karen Langley 2024 is the centenary of the death of author Franz Kafka and the year has seen a flurry of interest focusing on…
Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers – a personal history, by Anne Somerset
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long Queen Elizabeth II had fifteen prime ministers during her reign. Queen Victoria had fourteen. The weekly meetings between Queen Elizabeth and her prime minister were one…
Deep Water: The World in the Ocean, by James Bradley
Review by Peter Reason James Bradley, the Australian novelist and essayist, chooses an apt epigraph from Arthur C. Clarke for his book: ‘How inappropriate to call this planet “Earth”, when…
The Book Forger by Joseph Hone
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Thomas James Wise (1859-1937) was a bibliophile and thief’, says Wikipedia. He was indeed. As Joseph Hone puts it in this fascinating exploration of ‘the most sensational…
You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here by Benji Waterhouse
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This book is also about me and about why anyone in the right mind would choose to be a psychiatrist. I hope that it serves as…
An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Civilisation to Independence by Zeinab Badawi
Reviewed by Liz Dexter I would like to say to the non-African reader of this book that I hope I have demonstrated that Africa has a history, that it is…
One Man in his Time: A Memoir, by N.M. Borodin
Review by Karen Langley Nicholas Borodin (as he is billed here) is something of a man of mystery, at least for the English speaking reader. Apart from his memoir, One…
Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death, by Laura Cumming
I am a very critical reader; there are not many books that I unreservedly admire. So it is notable that when I finished reading Thunderclap, I closed the covers, turned…
And Time Was No More: Essential Stories and Memories, by Teffi
Edited and annotated by Robert Chandler Review by Karen Langley The last decade or so has seen a resurgence of interest in Russian émigré writing with a host of forgotten…
Blue Remembered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff
Reviewed by Harriet Who remembers reading The Eagle of the Ninth? First published in 1954, when Sutcliff was 34, it is set in Roman Britain and tells the story of…
Rural Hours – The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker
Reviewed by Gill Davies In the summer of 1917 Virginia Woolf was living at Asheham, a house near Lewes in Sussex. She was 35 and hadn’t written anything for two…
Anthony Burgess, The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians 1962 – 1993, edited by Paul Phillips
Review by Rob Spence Anthony Burgess was, of course, one of the most significant novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, publishing over thirty novels, (a centenary reading…