Living and Dying With Proust, by Christopher Prendergast
Review by Rob Spence Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is seen as a kind of literary Everest, to be attempted only by the brave or…
Jane’s Country Year by Malcolm Saville
Reviewed by Harriet Jane woke slowly. For a long minute she lay drowsing with her eyes shut, wondering why the bed felt so different. She loved her own little bed…
Everything is True: A Junior Doctor’s Story of Life, Death and Grief in a Time of Pandemic, by Roopa Farooki
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of Covid-19 chronicles. My favourites of the twenty-some I’ve read thus far have come from the…
1942: Britain at the Brink, by Taylor Downing
Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies As E. H Carr’s masterly introduction to the study of history, What Is History?, explains, the idea of a fully objective, neutral and truthful history is…
White Debt by Thomas Harding
Review by Liz Dexter As a child, I was taught that Britain had been the first nation to abolish slavery, that the effort had been led by the politician William…
Longing and Other Stories by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
Translated by Anthony H Chambers and Paul McCarthy Review by Anna Hollingsworth In the UK, readers know their Murakamis and convenience store women. Jun’ichiro Tanizaki is much less known to…
This Sacred Life: Humanity’s place in a wounded world by Norman Wirzba
Review by Peter Reason What does it mean to see the world, and life on Earth, as sacred? How might this change our approach to life? These are questions that…
My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Review by Max Dunbar The House of Tradition The grand houses of American history attract plenty of visitors wanting to learn about the Civil War, slavery and the founding fathers….
The Second Cut by Louise Welsh
Review by Gill Davies Louise Welsh has published eight novels. The only one I had read prior to this was The Cutting Room (2002), to which her latest novel is…
The Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk Reviewed by Harriet Seishi Yozomizo (1902-1991), whose works are hugely celebrated in Japan, has been described as ‘the Japanese Agatha Christie’, or alternatively ‘the Japanese John…
A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle
Review by Terence Jagger This is a modern murder mystery, but is set in 1924 and is explicitly in the grand manner of the “golden age”, with all that implies…
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
Review by Annabel Over recent years, I have been much enjoying the current vogue for the retelling of ancient myths and ancient history, especially those told from different perspectives, primarily…
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth We like to see history as going forward, progressing towards something better; it’s comforting to think that humankind is improving itself and societies grow fairer. It…
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh
Review by Peter Reason When I was a small child at primary school, we celebrated Empire Day. Children were invited—expected—to take a Union Flag to school and wave it around….
A Will to Kill by R.V. Raman
Review by Max Dunbar Slayer Rules: R V Raman’s A Will to Kill Mysteries are hard to write, and hard to review. Because of the taboo on ‘spoilers’ you can’t…
The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow & Bruce Manning
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long When this book arrived and I saw the names of the two authors, Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, my first thought was “that’s a familiar name”….
A Shiny Merry Christmas
From Annabel and Harriet After a tumultuous 2020, what with lockdown, accidentally deleting Shiny New Books and having to rebuild it totally from scratch (read more about that disaster here!), Shiny…
Skylark by Alice O’Keefe
Review by Max Dunbar The Arrow of Hope Dorothy Parker’s ‘Unfortunate Coincidence’ goes like this: By the time you swear you’re his,Shivering and sighing,And he vows his passion isInfinite, undying…
Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs
Reviewed by Harriet This delightful novel is part of the latest batch of the British Library Women Writers series. I’ve reviewed a few of these on here, most recently the…
Hey Hi Hello: Five decades of Pop Culture from Britain’s Broadcasting DJ Pioneer by Annie Nightingale
Review by Liz Dexter Nightingale was the first female DJ on Radio One, having been a journalist and live TV presenter before then and ready for the tough time she…
The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, A Crime and Its Punishment by Kevin Birmingham
Review by Karen Langley The bicentenary of the birth of Fyodor Dostoevsky has seen a flurry of books about the man and his work. I covered Alex Christofi’s Dostoevsky in…
Everybody: A Book About Freedom by olivia laing
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Olivia Laing has established herself as a group biographer par excellence, taking as her subjects alcoholic writers for the superb The Trip to Echo Spring (2013,…
Her Diaries and Notebooks, by Patricia Highsmith, edited by Anna von Planta
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies What a prodigious event this book is. Highsmith was an assiduous note-keeper and diarist. The calendar spread is 1941-1995. The editor has condensed ‘an estimated eight…
Lily: A Tale of Revenge by Rose Tremain
Reviewed by Harriet From the first moment that we meet Lily Mortimer, we know her secret. We know it because she dreams of her own death – not a peaceful…