Daughters of the Labyrinth by Ruth Padel
Reviewed by Lory Widmer-Hess When we went to Crete last October (during a brief window when travel was possible), I knew little of the island’s history beyond the myth of…
Line by Niall Bourke
Reviewed by Annabel If I searched, I could probably fill a small shelf full of novels that have a sub-niche of their own that is the ‘queue’. Within that we…
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Reviewed by Harriet Jean Hanff Korelitz has appeared twice on Shiny before, both times reviewed by me. The first novel was You Should Have Known (reviewed here); you may not…
Three Rooms by Jo Hamya
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth At one point in Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms, the narrator discovers the communal kitchen in her Oxford house in a desperately filthy state, with surfaces covered…
Broken Greek by Pete Paphides
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Stuck with a bunch of friends who seemed to think I was something other than what I was; guilty about growing up British in a Greek…
Heaven by Meiko Kawakami
Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth My first encounter with Mieko Kawakami — as for most of us relying on English translations — was her…
The Snow Line by Tessa McWatt
Reviewed by Harriet A disparate group of four total strangers meet at a wedding in the Punjab, India. Three of them are young and of Indian heritage; the fourth is…
The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura
Translated by Lucy North Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth There’s a particular skill to pulling off a character who is objectively reprehensible but nevertheless wins over the sympathies of the reader….
Everyone Is Still Alive by Cathy Rentzenbrink
Reviewed by Annabel You may know Cathy Rentzenbrink through her heart-breaking memoir published a few years ago. In The Last Act of Love, she tells the story of her family…
Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
Reviewed by Harriet Here on Shiny we’ve reviewed three of Laura Lippman’s novels, here, here and here. Two were standalones, and the third was part of a series featuring Baltimore…
Narcisse on a Tightrope by Olivier Targowla
Translated by Paul Curtis Daw There’s a scene late in the story where Narcisse is out on day release, wandering the streets of Paris. He’s due to visit his family…
The House of Fragile Things by James McAuley
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France’: it was this subtitle that pulled me in, and I requested the book knowing almost nothing of what it…
On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt by Ann Heberlein
Translated by Alice Menzies Review by Karen Langley The concept of “the banality of evil”, coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt, has become famous (some might say notorious) since she developed…
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
Review by Max Dunbar A nineteenth-century psychiatrist defines paramnesia as The blurring of something imaginary and something real. Most commonly, déjà vu; the sense you’ve seen something new before. And its opposite,…
Martha Lloyd’s Household Book
Introduced with annotated transcription by Julienne Gehrer. Review by Hayley Anderton Martha Lloyd, to the previously uninitiated (such as myself) was a friend and connection of Jane Austen and her…
Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice 1967-75 by Richard Thompson
Review by Annabel There are still people who doubtless haven’t heard of Richard Thompson. To those of us in the know though, he is one of the most influential guitarists…
A Vertical Art – Oxford Lectures by Simon Armitage
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, 90 per cent of people said that they’d read a novel in the last six months. For poetry, however,…
Nomadland: From Book to Screen
By Diana Cheng It first started with journalist Jessica Bruder camping in a tent then later in a van for three winters in the desert around Quartzsite, Arizona. Her plan…
Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History by Anna Aslanyan
Review by Karen Langley As bookish people, when we think about translation we’re probably thinking about it in literary terms. There’s a rich seam of literature from other languages available…
Smoke Hole: Looking to the wild in the time of the Spyglass by Martin Shaw
Review by Peter Reason Martin Shaw is a mythologist, storyteller, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide, a teacher of mythic imagination. Should you encounter him at a workshop, you will most likely…
Broken Lights, by Basil Ramsay Anderson
Reviewed by Rob Spence Years ago, I was teaching an undergraduate class on the topic of the poetry of the bard of Orkney, George Mackay Brown. I made a passing…
Hamilton and Me: An Actor’s Journal by Giles Terera
Reviewed by Harriet How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spotIn the Caribbean by providence impoverishedIn squalor, grow up…
Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, by Sarah LeFanu
Review by Helen Parry Reconstructing anyone’s life poses enormous difficulties, for however copious the evidence of letters, diaries, journals, and eye-witness accounts, the problem of interpretation remains, the problem of…
Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton by Gail Crowther
Review by Karen Langley Despite their groundbreaking achievements as poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are still too often remembered for their dramatic lives and tragic ends. A pair of…