April 5, 2022 Truly Madly by Stephen Galloway Reviewed by Harriet ‘Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the Century’ is the subtitle of this joint biography by Stephen Galloway. The…
March 31, 2022 Brittle With Relics: A History of Wales 1962-1997 by Richard King Review by Liz Dexter In this extraordinary book, Richard King takes the voices of a hundred Welsh people who were active in various forms…
March 31, 2022 French Braid by Anne Tyler Reviewed by Harriet ‘That’s how families work. You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever’….
March 29, 2022 Whatever Gets You Through the Night by Charlie Higson Review by Annabel Back in the 1990s, Higson wrote four thrillers for adults, they were dark, nasty and funny. But after them he got…
March 24, 2022 Latchkey Ladies by Marjorie Grant Reviewed by Harriet These girls, buffeting with the world as they did war-work, or any work that would support them, were apt to have…
March 22, 2022 Mother Mother by Annie Macmanus Review by Annabel You may know Annie Macmanus as ‘Annie Mac’, the fomer Radio 1 DJ. She left the station last year to pursue…
March 17, 2022 The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya Review by Terence Jagger This is a lively and compelling biography of one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, who has somehow…
March 17, 2022 Nine Lives by Peter Swanson Reviewed by Harriet Peter Swanson is a prolific author, averaging one book a year since his debut, The Girl with a Clock for a…
March 15, 2022 The Former Boy Wonder by Robert Graham Review by Rob Spence Pete Duffy is having a mid-life crisis. His fiftieth birthday is on the horizon, and his career as a freelance…
March 10, 2022 The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett Review by Terence Hallett This is an intriguing but also frustrating book. I did wonder if the Shiny editors would allow me to write…
March 10, 2022 After Agatha: Women Write Crime by Sally Cline Review by Karen Langley We readers have never been able to get enough of crime fiction, it seems, and in the 21st century the…
March 3, 2022 The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein by Sharon Ruston Review by Annabel Gaskell Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, her novel conceived during that momentous trip to Geneva in 1816 during ‘the year without a summer’,…
March 3, 2022 Two short, watery novels: Tides by Sara Freeman & The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka By Rebecca Foster Short novels can convey much truth in a low page count, ramping up the psychological intensity through pared-back scenes and a…
March 1, 2022 No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader by Mark Hodkinson 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…
March 1, 2022 Into Egypt by Rosalind Brackenbury Review by Rob Spence This novel, first published nearly half a century ago, deals with matters which still, sadly, resonate today. Our protagonist is…
February 24, 2022 Two debut novels: Brown Girls, & Black Cake 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…
February 24, 2022 Great Literary Friendships by Janet Phillips Reviewed by Harriet When you see the title of this book, you may think, as I did initially, that it was going to be…
February 22, 2022 Stalin’s Library, by Geoffrey Roberts Review by Basil Ransome-Davies One review of this book has come on quite strong against Roberts’ view of Stalin – prominent among the twentieth…
February 22, 2022 little scratch by Rebecca Watson Review by Anna Hollingsworth When a novel comes with praise like ”daringly experimental” and “dazzlingly original”, my eyebrow tends to go up. Really? “Original”…
February 17, 2022 Out of the Dark by David Gaffney 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…
February 17, 2022 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…
February 10, 2022 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….
February 8, 2022 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…
February 8, 2022 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…
February 3, 2022 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…
