Review by Liz Dexter While he’s now a publisher and editor with his own imprint, Hodkinson grew up in a terrace house in Rochdale with one book in the house…
Review by Rob Spence This novel, first published nearly half a century ago, deals with matters which still, sadly, resonate today. Our protagonist is an idealistic young English woman, Jo…
Review by Liz Dexter I’d like to introduce you to two astoundingly accomplished debut novels, so well done that you would not think they were first novels; two voices we’d…
Reviewed by Harriet When you see the title of this book, you may think, as I did initially, that it was going to be about friendships between writers (Pope and…
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies One review of this book has come on quite strong against Roberts’ view of Stalin – prominent among the twentieth century’s most publicised murderous dictators and…
Review by Anna Hollingsworth When a novel comes with praise like ”daringly experimental” and “dazzlingly original”, my eyebrow tends to go up. Really? “Original” sounds better on the blurb than…
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies The title echoes that of Out of the Past, a canonical film noir that ends uncompromisingly in a double catastrophe and leaves the future of a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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”….
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…
