This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
Review by Annabel I love reading medical memoirs, we’ve featured neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s two volumes here at Shiny (see my review of Do No Harm here), and heart surgeon Stephen…
The Cocktail Book
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton My day job is selling wine, spirits, and beer, something I fell into when I became interested in learning more about wine. That was 18 years…
A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies However deeply the irony may have entered his soul, John le Carré has no reputation as a jester. An element of satire typifies his work, always….
Questions for Laura Wilson on The Other Woman
Interview by Harriet Harriet: Hi Laura – thanks for agreeing to answer some questions. I really loved The Other Woman and have some questions specifically about that. But first, our…
The Other Woman by Laura Wilson
Reviewed by Harriet A couple of years ago on Shiny I reviewed Laura Wilson’s The Wrong Girl. That was a tense psychological thriller centring on family relationships, and so, in…
New People by Danzy Senna
Reviewed by Alice Farrant Maria and Khalil are the perfect couple, “King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom”. Maria is a successful scholar, writing her dissertation on the Jonestown…
I Am I Am I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
Reviewed by Harriet I’ve always admired Maggie O’Farrell’s fiction, and greatly loved her most recent novel, This Must Be the Place, which I reviewed on Shiny last year. I didn’t…
Pan Books at 70: The SF Edit
Reviewed by Annabel Pan, founded in 1944, published its first mass market paperback in 1947 – Ten Stories by Rudyard Kipling with the famous Pan logo designed by Mervyn Peake…
Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke
Reviewed by Gill Davies This is Attica Locke’s fourth novel and a stunning follow-up. Black Water Rising was set in 1981; Pleasantville in 1996 and both used the crime genre with deep political insight…
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Paperback review by Lucy Unwin There is no question, this book is stunning: in its scope, its ambition, in what it can teach us and in the skill on display….
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
Reviewed by Simon Thomas Many book lovers have fantasies about what it would be like to work in a bookshop – perhaps particularly a secondhand bookshop. There is an aura…
Sugar Money by Jane Harris
Reviewed by Harriet Jane Harris is not exactly a prolific novelist. Five years passed beween the publication of her debut novel The Observations (2006) and her second outing Gillespie and…
Giving A Voice - an Interview with Miranda Gold
Interview by Victoria Miranda Gold is a writer based in London. Her first novel, Starlings, published by Karnac in December 2016, reaches back three generations to explore how the impact of…
Return to the Dark Valley by Santiago Gamboa
Translated by Howard Curtis Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies I found a molten quality in this novel (if it is a novel). It burns off the page, as they say. It…
Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing : Encounters with the Mysteries & Meanings of Language by Daniel Tammet
Reviewed by Liz Dexter You may remember Tammet from his autism memoir, Born on a Blue Day, and his fascination with words and languages as well as numbers continues until the…
The Squeeze by Lesley Glaister
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Admitted, to say that the world has shrunk into a village has shrunk into a cliché itself. But the cliché is painfully accurate, and Lesley Glaister’s The…
Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak
Paperback Review by Eric Karl Anderson It’s deeply frightening and upsetting how politically divided society is at the moment. When different factions are so convinced about the certitude of their…
Autumn by Ali Smith
Paperback review by Clare Rowland Autumn is the first of four books in a planned series of novels by Ali Smith named after the seasons and which focus on how we experience time….
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Reviewed by Julie Barham The inevitable question is, do we need a new edition of one of Austen’s books? Well, on the evidence of this super book, sent to me…
Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, edited by Bryan Karetnyk
Reviewed by Karen Langley In the anniversary year of the 1917 Russian Revolution a number of books have been issued which look at that tumultuous event and its effect on…
The Tryst by Monique Roffey
Reviewed by Harriet This is a remarkable book by any standard. It’s marketed by the publisher, Dodo Ink, as a literary erotic novella, which sounds about right, as long as…
The Easy Way Out by Steven Amsterdam
Paperback reviewed by Susan Osborne This novel is unlikely to appeal to everyone although we should all read it. It’s about assisted suicide, one of the great moral dilemmas of…
The Brazilian by Rosie Millard
Reviewed by Laura Marriott The Brazilian opens in a London beauty salon where the middle class and nearly middle aged (although she would be furious if you suggested so!) Jane is…
Testimony by Scott Turow
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies The ‘international theme’ – Old World/New World – was a foreground concern of Henry James. It typically featured the experience in Europe of an American…