Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez
Translated by Christina MacSweeney Reviewed by Pete Freeth Havana Year Zero is a delightfully unusual detective story from Karla Suárez and translated into English by Christina MacSweeney. Set in the…
Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz
Translated by Rachel Ward Reviewed by Annabel I’ve come late to German ‘Queen of Krimi’ Simone Buchholz’s novels. Hotel Cartagena is the ninth of her books featuring the Hamburg-based State…
The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Every millennial woman should have this on her bookshelf’ says Pandora Sykes on the front of Nell Frizzell’s new book. New in the sense that it’s just…
She Come By It Natural by Sarah Smarsh
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies Forty years ago I spent some time on the motel strip at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to do some hiking in the magnificent Smoky Mountains. At…
The Ice by John Kåre Raake
Translated by Adam King Reviewed by Gill Davies John Kåre Rake is a successful Norwegian screen writer and this is his first novel. It’s a mysterious thriller that uses its…
Grayson’s Art Club: The Exhibition (Manchester Art Gallery, 2020)
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Back at the beginning of the first lockdown, Grayson Perry, potter and tapestry maker extraordinaire and no stranger to intimate and challenging TV shows, ran an…
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
Reviewed by Harriet Barbara Comyns seems to be enjoying a well-deserved renaissance at the moment. In addition to this one, just published by Daunt Books (with more to come later…
Biography & Memoir, Diaries
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Review by Peter Reason I have been totally absorbed in Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places since it arrived in the morning mail and I read in the Preface: ‘The right…
Chauvo-Feminism: On Sex, Power and #MeToo by Sam Mills
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Remember the 1990s? It was a decade where lads’ mags decorated magazine shelves in supermarkets and where Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus with…
A Long Way From Douala by Max Lobe
Translated by Ros Schwartz Reviewed by Annabel I have a personal goal to increase diversity in my reading and am glad to have discovered the indie publisher HopeRoad. Founded in…
House With No Doors by Jeff Noon
Reviewed by Annabel Having been a fan of Jeff Noon’s cult spec fiction novels set in an alternate Manchester, I was surprised and delighted when his book Slow Motion Ghosts,…
How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth When an author is described as having a ”fresh voice”, I usually dismiss the description with a shrug; the attribute is repeated so often that it’s…
The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp
Reviewed by Harriet At fifty-five, Isobel Brocken was still a nice-looking woman. She dated, of course, all her female friends said so – poor Isobel certainly dated; she was plump,…
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
Paperback review by Rebecca Foster I almost passed on the chance to read this because I’d gotten the impression that it was nothing more than a romantic comedy with a…
The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Robert Jones, Jr. had doubts about writing The Prophets: “Not only was the subject matter too uncharted but the psychic weight of it felt too heavy…
Astral Travel by Elizabeth Baines
Reviewed by Annabel …a lot of what I remember is not the same as what the others remember, which was partly what caused the trouble when I tried to write…
This Time Next Year We’ll be Laughing by Jacqueline Winspear
Reviewed by Harriet Jacqueline Winspear was born in 1955. Her debut novel – the first of her award-winning Maisie Dobbs mysteries – was published in 2003. Counting on my fingers…
Mr Cadmus by Peter Ackroyd
Reviewed by Annabel Owning most of Ackroyd’s fiction output and a good chunk of his non-fiction (even if I haven’t quite read it all), I thought I had a grip…
We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan
Review by Pete Freeth As the British publishing industry continues to strive for greater diversity and cultural representation, initiatives like the #Merky Books New Writer’s Prize are incredibly valuable steps…
The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter
Reviewed by Annabel Max Porter emerged on the British literary scene in the mid-2010s as an author to be watched. His debut 2015 novella Grief is the Thing With Feathers…
Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights, edited by Polly Russell and Margaretta Jolly
Reviewed by Liz Dexter It used to be that we attended exhibitions and treated ourselves to the catalogue in the shop on the way out. Now, it’s more a case…
Reviewer’s Choice: A New Sublime – Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics by Piero Boitani
While Shiny New Books concentrates on the new, occasionally, we give our reviewers room to share previously published – ie: ‘not Shiny New Books’ – they have been reading. A…
Right After the Weather by Carol Anshaw
Paperback review by Susan Osborne Set in Carol Anshaw’s home town of Chicago in the months before and after the 2016 election, Right After the Weather explores both the state…
The Fresh and the Salt: The Story of the Solway by Ann Lingard
Reviewed by Peter Reason When I was a small boy—and this memory must reach back to around 1950—I played with a wooden puzzle made up of the historic counties of…