April 16, 2020 Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Back in early March, just before literary events started being cancelled due to coronavirus, I had the good fortune to…
April 14, 2020 The Birds They Sang: Birds and People in Life and Art by Stanisław Łubieński Translated from Polish by Bill Johnston Review by Peter Reason Stanisław Łubieński first began observing birds in childhood through Soviet binoculars. Later, he took…
April 14, 2020 A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry Reviewed by Harriet, 14 April 2020 In early times I was Ojinjintka, which means rose. Thomas McNulty tried very hard to say this name,…
April 9, 2020 A Bite of the Apple by Lennie Goodings Review by Simon There’s a certain variety of person who can always spot a bottle-green spine at a hundred paces, and has faced the…
April 9, 2020 Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Review by Peter Reason There has been a lot of interest recently in the idea of ‘rewilding’, expressed for example in Isabella Tree’s Wilding:…
April 7, 2020 She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman Reviewed by Harriet What an enticing title! Made even more so by the sub-title, ‘British Women in India’. Katie Hickman, who herself led a…
April 7, 2020 A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen by Martin Gayford and David Hockney Reviewed by Liz Dexter This is a new ‘compact’ edition of this book, with a revised final chapter bringing it all up to date,…
April 2, 2020 The Language of Birds by Jill Dawson Reviewed by Susan Osborne, 2 April 2020 I’m a fan of Jill Dawson’s writing. Her last novel, The Crime Writer, was a wonderful piece…
April 2, 2020 Drinking French by David Lebovitz Review by Hayley Anderton Before everything started to close down the books I had been particularly anticipating, ordering, and reading, were mostly food and…
March 31, 2020 Grown Ups by Marian Keyes Reviewed by Laura Marriott We start at a dinner party. If you groan inwardly at the very thought of a family dinner party then…
March 31, 2020 Rules for Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson Reviewed by Harriet I’ve reviewed two of Peter Swanson’s excellent psychological thrillers on Shiny before. There have been a couple of others since then,…
March 31, 2020 A Little History of Poetry by John Carey Review by Rob Spence In 1935, the doyen of art critics, Ernst Gombrich, was a young, unemployed former student with a PhD in art…
March 24, 2020 Fandango and Other Stories by Alexander Grin Translated by Bryan Karetnyk Reviewed by Karen Langley Recent years have seen a wave of wonderful new translations of ‘lost’ Russian authors of the…
March 19, 2020 The Ruins by Mat Osman Reviewed by Annabel I am an absolute sucker for any novel with a bit of rock’n’roll in it, and two of my favourite reads…
March 17, 2020 James Joyce by Edna O’Brien Review by Rob Spence Edna O’Brien’s position as one of the most significant modern Irish writers is undisputed, and here, in this reissue of…
March 12, 2020 Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins Review by David Hebblethwaite Winter in Sokcho is a first in several senses: the debut novel by French-Korean writer…
March 10, 2020 The Author’s Effects by Nicola J. Watson Reviewed by Harriet This splendid and fascinating book – subtitled ‘On Writer’s House Museums’ – has been a long time in the making, and…
March 5, 2020 Red Sixty Seven, curated by Kit Jewitt Review by Peter Reason When I was a small boy, back in the 1950s, I remember going on Sunday School trips to the seaside….
February 27, 2020 Square Haunting by Francesca Wade Review by Karen Langley “Square Haunting” was published to much fanfare and acclaim recently; a book which looks at the lives of five notable…
February 25, 2020 Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton Review by Annabel Anyone who works in a school these days will be familiar with ‘lockdown’ procedures, with code reds being the ones you…
February 25, 2020 Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford Reviewed by Ali Business as Usual is an early work from the formidably productive writing partnership of Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford (both pseudonyms) –…
February 20, 2020 Snow, Dog, Foot by Claudio Morandini Translated by J. Ockenden Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Who could resist the title of this Italian bestseller? A black comedy about a hermit in…
February 20, 2020 Kallocain by Karin Boye Translated by David McDuff Review by Karen Langley Our modern world often seems to be getting very close to a dystopian nightmare, and most…
February 18, 2020 My Caravaggio Style by Doris Langley Moore Review by Simon It’s always exciting when Dean Street Press announce the next batch of novels in their Furrowed Middlebrow series, chosen by Scott…
February 13, 2020 Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara Review by Laura Tisdall Jai is nine years old and lives with his family in the slums of New Delhi. He loves watching reality…
