The Home by Penelope Mortimer
Reviewed by Harriet I’ve just finished reading this very good and very upsetting novel. It’s good because Mortimer was an excellent writer, vivid, perceptive, witty. But it’s upsetting because it’s…
Sea Bean by Sally Huband
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton This is a book I’ve been anticipating for a couple of years. I think I first heard about it via Stephen Rutt, a nature writer I…
Shy by Max Porter
Reviewed by Annabel Now that he’s four novels into his career with Shy, it would be fair to say that Max Porter is one of the UK’s most inventive novelists….
Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London by Charlie Taverner
Reviewed by Harriet Nowadays, when most people hear the term street food, they will be thinking about the emergence in the past ten or so years of a wonderful range…
Shiny Archive Reading List #4 – The Kings & Queens of England
Compiled by Annabel It’s time for another one of our themed lists, and what better subject for the Coronation of King Charles III tomorrow than a look back through the…
Greek Lessons by Han Kang
Translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite It has been eight years now since Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian was published (reviewed here), and…
T H White: A Biography, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Reviewed by Helen Parry Not every writer lives a particularly interesting life (it is, after all, for their sitting down and imagining things that we value them) and not every…
Cary Grant’s Suit: Nine Movies that Made Me the Wreck I Am Today, by Todd McEwen
Review by Annabel North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit…
Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns
Review by Max Dunbar If you value your life, don’t fuck with Damani, gig economy driver extraordinaire. In her cab she has ‘a switchblade in the glove compartment (which I…
The Precinct with the Golden Arm by Dennis Broe
Reviewed by Michael Eaude This noir novel is the third of a trilogy set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and featuring private eye Harry Palmer. The golden age…
Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life, by Emily A. Austin
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies In my first, diagnostic year at Sussex there was a required course in Philosophy. Turned out to be Brit logical positivism. Allegedly to help recent…
My Turn to Make the Tea by Monica Dickens
Reviewed by Julie Barham Monica Dickens wrote many novels, but her first three books were actually fictionalised memoirs of her first three “Jobs”, a varied collection. This book is the…
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
Reviewed by Harriet As I was reading this book, with great enjoyment and amazement, I was saying to myself – how am I ever going to review this? The story…
The Man With Miraculous Hands by Joseph Kessel
Translated by Helen Weaver and Leo Raditsa Reviewed by Rob Spence If you were asked to suggest which real-life character was to be played by Woody Harrelson in his next…
A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland & A Fortunate Man by John Berger
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster When I first heard about journalist Polly Morland’s A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story, which was later shortlisted for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize, I…
Constance Maud’s No Surrender: A Graphic Novel by Scarlett & Sophie Rickard
Review by Julie Barham Colourful, powerful and amazingly enjoyable – this new version of Constance Maud’s suffragette classic as a graphic novel is a revelation. I have not read many…
After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport
Reviewed by Rob Spence If you were tired of aimless flânerie in the Paris of the twenties, and fancied seeing Josephine Baker dancing at the Folies Bergère, you might be…
Bird of Paradise by Ada Leverson
Reviewed by Harriet Bertha – Mrs Percy Kellynch – was known as a beauty. She was indeed improbably pretty, small, plump and very fair, with soft golden hair that was…
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Review by Lory Widmer Hess “The people who offer us the best insights into reality are often novelists,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said, [The Guardian, 14 Jan 2020] and reading…
Furies: Stories of the wicked, wild and untamed
Introduced by Sandi Toksvig Review by Karen Langley Fifty years ago, in the heat of the second wave of women’s liberation, a revolutionary feminist publishing house was formed by Carmen…
Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor
Review by Max Dunbar In his lecture at King’s College London in 1944 C S Lewis defined the Inner Ring as ‘one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action….
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Non Fiction
Lifestyle Revolution: How taste changed class in late 20th-century Britain by Ben Highmore
Review by Annabel Some years ago, our Shiny editor-at-large, Simon, reviewed a book by Ben Highmore called The Great Indoors. That book explored typical homes over the last century or so…
Suburbs: A Very Short Introduction by Carl Abbott
Review by Liz Dexter There are by now over 700 Very Short Introductions, on the Book of Common Prayer, the Brain, Modern Latin American Literature, Volcanoes, inter alia, and now…
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
Review by Terence Jagger We all know John Donne, poet and preacher, though many don’t realise that; indeed, some apparently don’t realise that they are the same man! But yes,…