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…
Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries, edited by Sarah Gristwood
Reviewed by Harriet I have set myself many tasks for the year – I wonder how many will be accomplished? A Novel called Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and…
Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty, by Alexander Larman
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long When Alexander Larman wrote The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication about Edward VIII, he had no idea that it would be the beginning of…
Head North by Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham
Review by Rob Spence When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced in October last year that the multi-billion pound rail infrastructure programme HS2 would not, after all, be completed, leaving Manchester…
Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, by Avril Horner
Reviewed by Harriet In the back of my mind I was always sure that wonderful things were waiting for me, but I’d got to get through a lot of horrors…
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley
Review by Karen Langley Back in the 20th century, the world was a very different place to live in if you were female and/or gay. Equal pay was a pipe…
How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins, by Helena de Bres, illustrated by Julia de Bres
Reviewed by Simon Thomas When I discovered there was a new collection of essays out about the philosophy of twins, and that it was written by an identical twin, I…
Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s hidden histories, by Amitav Ghosh
Review by Peter Reason The term ‘narco state’ usually refers to those countries whose economy has been taken over by the cultivation of the opium poppy and the criminal gangs…
What Do I Know? by Michel de Montaigne
Translated by David Coward Review by Karen Langley The essay as a form of writing has existed for centuries, and one of its pre-eminent practitioners was the French author Michel…
Shiny Prize Season – A Flat Place by Noreen Masud – Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
Reviewed by Simon Thomas The world is probably divided into two people: those who find the idea of a book about flat landscapes appealing and those who don’t. I suspect…