The Watermark by Sam Mills
Reviewed by Harriet Sam Mills is not a prolific writer, but her books are well worth waiting for. In 2012 she published The Quiddity of Will Self, which she described…
The Ghost Lake by Wendy Pratt
Review by Peter Reason Ghost Lake is a paleolithic, extinct lake that lies between the Yorkshire Wolds and Scarborough. In prehistoric times it was a real lake, the centre of…
Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily van Duyne
Written by Victoria Best There’s a lot going on in Emily van Duyne’s intriguingly hybrid work on Sylvia Plath, a book that has its feet in scholarship and its head…
Warsaw Tales, selected and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Review by Rob Spence The only time I have been in Warsaw was in 1988, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. …
Books into Film: Fall 2024
By Arti The annual film festival season kicks off in late August, and come September, there are arrays of new offerings on streaming platforms. I haven’t done actual research, but…
Table for Two by Amor Towles
Review by Annabel Until this year Towles has delighted his readers with novels of increasing thickness including A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway, both of which I adored,…
Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton
Reviewed by Harriet The spring night drew them into its deepening embrace. The ripples of the lake had gradually widened and faded into a silken smoothness, and high above the mountains the…
The King’s Loot: The Greatest Royal Jewellery Heist in History by Richard Wallace
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long It is always misleading to read the serialisation of a book in the newspapers. The paper in question will always focus on the more sensational aspects…
Kala by Colin Walsh
Review by Annabel Kala was the literary thriller to be seen reading last summer when first published. A high-profile debut from a young Irish author, I saw many favourable reviews…
All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield
Reviewed by Harriet This is the second book about fraud I’ve reviewed this year, the first being Joseph Hone’s impressive The Book Forger. Obviously, as you can tell from the…
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
Travel & the World
Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler
In expanding and resourcing public understandings of the countryside’s colonial past, we can tell our islands’ stories and address colonial legacies from a position of knowledge rather than fear. Corinne…
Airplane Mode: Travels in the Ruins of Tourism by Shahnaz Habib
Review by Liz Dexter How intrepid you are as a traveler depends, at least partly, on how entitled you feel to travel. On whether there’s an army base nearby with…
The Trap by Ava Glass
Reviewed by Harriet Ava Glass has been proclaimed as the new queen of spy fiction. I’m not in a position to judge this, as The Trap is the first of…
The Dark Side of the Sky by Francesco Dimitri
Review by Max Dunbar The question The Dark Side of the Sky asks is simple and fascinating. Can an apocalyptic cult ever be right? The Bastion of Southern Italy is not, on…
Interview with Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press
Interview by Harriet Harriet: Hi Kate – thanks for agreeing to do this. We know you’re working on a memoir of your Handheld days, so this will be a special…
The Gulls Fly Inland by Sylvia Thompson
Reviewed by Harriet October 3rd 1939 Inaction is difficult to bear. Since I am forced into inaction, here, I shall write. Not, as I have written in peace-time, brief things…
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
Review by Peter Reason I am sitting under the old apple tree in our Orchard on a sunny summer afternoon, looking over the meadow grass swaying in the light breeze,…
The Blues Brothers by Daniel De Visé
An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Film Classic Review by Annabel Full disclosure: I saw The Blues Brothers on the first day of…
A Ride Across America by Simon Parker
Review by Liz Dexter Fascinatingly, many of the small towns I found along the way seemed to be stuck in a time warp. I cycled past rusted 1940s Studebakers and…
It’s a Gas by Mark Miodownik
Review by Annabel Ever since his first two books, Stuff Matters (2012) and Liquid (2018), I’ve been waiting for Miodownik to complete his states of matter trilogy with a book…
Tatting and Mandolinata by Faith Compton Mackenzie
Reviewed by Harriet This intriguing title indicates the presence of two separate works by Faith Compton Mackenzie, of whom you’ve probably never heard. The name will ring a bell though,…
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…