The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun
Translated by Kathie von Ankum Reviewed by Harriet If a young woman from money marries an old man because of money and nothing else and makes love to him for…
What Not by Rose Macaulay
Introduced by Sarah Lonsdale with notes by Kate Macdonald Review by Karen Langley The name of Rose Macaulay is not one that will necessarily be well known to the casual…
Alice by Elizabeth Eliot
Reviewed by Simon Hurrah to Dean Street Press and their continued Furrowed Middlebrow series, bringing back underrated women writers that most of us haven’t heard of before. Elizabeth Eliot certainly…
Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
Reviewed by Harriet Written in just two months while its author was a patient in a psychiatric clinic, Zelda Fitzgerald’s first and only novel found a publisher in 1932. Three…
The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin
Reviewed by Harriet How Ivor would have loved being dead! It was a shame he was missing it all. First published in 1975, this very welcome reprint shows Celia Fremlin…
Vanish in an Instant by Margaret Millar
Reviewed by Harriet Why had I never heard of Margaret Millar until I spotted this reprint by Pushkin Vertigo? Because, I suppose, she was one of those people who have…
Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Reviewed by Harriet Do you believe in fairies? Probably at a young age most people would say they did. And together with an idea implanted by popular books and paintings,…
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette Leduc
Translated by Derek Coltman Review by Karen Langley There’s been a buzz recently about Penguin’s (re?) launch of their European Writers series, with the first two books by Mercè Rodoreda…
Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar by Yuri Tynianov
Translated by Susan Causey, Translation editor Vera Tsareva-Brauner Review by Karen Langley Recent years have seen a large number of works by Russian authors newly translated into the English language;…
The Bright Side of Life by Emile Zola
Translated by Andrew Rothwell Reviewed by Harriet Fans of Monty Python may have a bit of trouble with this title – I’ve had their iconic song stuck in my head…
Vocations by Gerald O’Donovan
Reviewed by Julie Barham This Irish novel, originally published in 1921, reprinted by Handheld Press, is a tremendously engaging read. Dealing with the fates of two girls in Catholic Ireland,…
The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers
Translated by Margaret Bettauer Dembo Reviewed by Gill Davies The novel is set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and was first published in German in 1942. Seghers was a…
The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull
Reviewed by Harriet ‘From its first appearance in 1934, Richard Hull’s The Murder of my Aunt was recognised as something special in crime fiction’. So says Martin Edwards in his introduction…
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima
Translated by Geraldine Harcourt Reviewed by Annabel This latest addition to Penguin Classic’s expanding list of new translations in an upmarket paperback format is a beguiling novella following the story…
Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries, ed. Martin Edwards
Reviewed by Karen Langley Golden Age crime, which has had such a revival recently, is renowned for particular tropes and settings; the country house location or the locked room mystery…
The Golovlevs by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin
Translated by I.P. Foote Review by Karen Langley Back in SNB #13 I reviewed “The History of a Town” by Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of the great Russian satirists of the 19th…
Moonrise & Lost Mars, ed. Mike Ashley
Reviewed by Karen Langley There can’t be many readers of Shiny New Books who aren’t aware of the lovely British Library Crime Classics series: long out-of-print and forgotten novels and…
The Runagates Club by John Buchan
Reviewed by Julie Barham This is a splendid book for all those who revel in the scary, the heroic and the unusual. Anyone familiar with John Buchan’s best known novel, The…
Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Fame Is the Spur (originally published in 1940) is the second out-of-print Howard Spring novel reissued by Head of Zeus’s Apollo imprint, following last year’s release…
Demian by Hermann Hesse
Translated by W. J. Strachan Reviewed by Karen Langley Is it the destiny of mankind to be pulled constantly back and forth between the two poles of good and evil,…
Portrait of a Murderer by Anne Meredith
Reviewed by Harriet Subtitled ‘A Christmas Crime Story’, this is a remarkably accomplished and fascinating novel by a writer better known under her other pseudonym, Anthony Gilbert. It was much…
A Love Story by Émile Zola
Translated by Helen Constantine Reviewed by Harriet Here on Shiny we’ve reviewed several of the new Oxford World Classics editions of the novels of Émile Zola: Money, Earth and The…
Pan Books at 70: The SF Edit
Reviewed by Annabel Pan, founded in 1944, published its first mass market paperback in 1947 – Ten Stories by Rudyard Kipling with the famous Pan logo designed by Mervyn Peake…
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Reviewed by Julie Barham The inevitable question is, do we need a new edition of one of Austen’s books? Well, on the evidence of this super book, sent to me…