American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Let’s face it: anything involving human tragedies, poverty, despair, abuse and crime offers a wealth of material for a novelist of any genre. At the risk…
Happy Ever After by C. C. MacDonald
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies Adultery. It crops up everywhere. Few grown-up pastimes are as popular as disobeying the sixth Commandment. Where would novels, plays and movies be without it? It’s…
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud
Review by Peter Reason I have on my desk three pieces of rock, collected during my ecological pilgrimage on in the west coast of Scotland, that I wrote about in…
Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson
Review by Annabel This short novel told in letters took me pleasantly by surprise. Within pages I was hooked, and I read it in one extended sitting, shedding a tear…
The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai Reviewed by Harriet This delightful reprint from Pushkin Press is widely viewed as one of Japan’s greatest murder mysteries. Amazingly this is its first English…
Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History – Catherine Belsey
Review by Hayley Anderton Tales of the weird have a deep hold on our collective imagination, and of all the things we’ve given credence to over the course of human…
The Last Two Maigrets by Georges Simenon
Maigret and the Informer, translated by William HobsonMaigret and Monsieur Charles, translated by Ros Schwarz Review by Basil Ransome-Davies Simenon was a supercharged writing machine, a prodigious figure whose élan…
Sorry for the Dead by Nicola Upson
Reviewed by Harriet Here at Shiny we are great admirers of Nicola Upson’s books – her most recent novel, Stanley and Elsie, was reviewed here, and we’ve also covered two…
The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North
Review by David Harris A new book by Claire North is always a very special event in my reading calendar, and William Abbey didn’t disappoint. In something of the same vein as…
Blackberry & Wild Rose by Sonia Velton
Review by Helen Skinner It’s 1768 and Sara Kemp has just arrived in Spitalfields, the London parish which has become home to a thriving community of Huguenot silk weavers. Sara…
Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill
Review by Harriet The gates of her prison were open, but she lacked the courage to go through them to whatever new country was waiting for her on the other…
The Measure of a Man by Marco Malvaldi
Review by Terence Jagger I was intrigued to see this novel on my doormat: Malvaldi is better known (to me at least) as a writer of crime stories, and I…
Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong
Translated by Natascha Bruce Review by David Hebblethwaite Ho Sok Fong is a Malaysian writer whose short stories have won a number of awards. Lake Like a Mirror is her second collection,…
Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg
Review by Terence Jagger This, in spite of its slightly silly sounding title, is an interesting and slightly mysterious collection of six short stories. They are all very different, but…
Interview with Jane Badger about Pony Books
Interview by Liz Dexter Jane Badger started off as a dealer in horse and pony books, becoming known for her extremely extensive website on the subject: https://janebadgerbooks.co.uk/. She’s even written…
Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver
Review by Annabel I read and really enjoyed Paver’s first two adult novels, both ghost stories. The first, Dark Matter was located in the Arctic, which was followed by Thin Air set in the Himalayas,…
Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas
Review by Anna Hollingsworth My immediate reaction was a desperately deep sigh when, pre-launch, Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis was trumpeted as a must-read revelatory work on the fashion industry. Surely anyone…
Akin by Emma Donoghue
Reviewed by Harriet Back in 2010 I read Emma Donoghue’s best selling, prize winning Room. I admired it but I can’t say I enjoyed it. Not only because the story…
Galileo’s Error: A New Science of Consciousness by Philip Goff
Review by Peter Reason This is a book about the philosophical perspective of panpsychism, written by a leading academic advocate. Panpsychism is an awkward word, not part of everyday vocabulary….
The Memoir of an Anti-Hero by Kornel Filipowicz
Translated by Anna Zaranko Review by Harriet It could be argued that Anglophone readers are living in a golden age of translated literature; all manner of smaller publishers are bringing…
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Review by Liz Dexter Amma is a playwright and director who’s moved from the fringes to the mainstream (or has it moved to her?). Yazz is a millennial student, sure…
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
Reviewed by Harriet I’ve reviewed two of Elizabeth Strout’s novels on Shiny [here] and [here] and both were brilliant. But possibly my favourite up to now has been her 2009…
Find Me by André Aciman
Review by Anna Hollingsworth There are two kinds of novels to which I don’t want to see a sequel. There are, of course, the literary nightmares that I pray I…
Home Work by Julie Andrews
with Emma Walton Hamilton Review by Annabel Julie Andrews’s first volume of memoir, Home, told us of her childhood, growing up during the war, and her early career on stage in…