Cookbooks for Christmas
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Despite having run out of shelf space for more cookbooks some time ago, they remain one of my favourite things to give and receive at Christmas,…
The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church
Reviewed by Annabel In 1941 Meridian ‘Meri’ Wallace wins a place at university in Chicago to study ornithology. There she dates Jerry – and they have fun – but Meri…
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
Reviewed by Harriet Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in…
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Reviewed by Annabel. Although this is the second book in a series, given that its two main characters were subsidiary supporting ones in its predecessor, you could read it as…
The Promised Land: An American Reading List
Compiled by Eleanor Franzén So, the presidential election of 2016. As with the elections of 2012 and 2008, I will be telling my children exactly where I was when I…
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley
Reviewed by Harriet In the pantheon of detective fiction there is nothing quite like it. So writes Martin Edwards in his introduction to the British Library’s new edition of this…
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Reviewed by Karen Langley There can be very few people in the reading world who haven’t heard of Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated detective, Sherlock Holmes; in fact, his fame has…
Deep Water by Christine Poulson
Reviewed by Gill Davies I was very pleased to find a crime novel with no paedophiles or serial killers, or – for that matter – without a feisty female detective…
Millers Valley by Anna Quindlen
Reviewed by Adèle Geras Anna Quindlen is an American writer who ought to be much better known in this country. Her last novel, Still Life With Breadcrumbs (reviewed here), is very good indeed…
The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This book, based loosely on work Perry has done in the media and on television, looks at modern masculinity and how it can possibly be reworked…
The Gradual by Christopher Priest
Reviewed by David Harris This was the first of Christopher Priest’s books that I’d read. While I gather from other reviews that it’s particularly accessible for him and so probably…
The Captain with the Whiskers by Benedict Kiely
Reviewed by Julie Barham When the old captain died the family went strange and it wasn’t with grief, and if you want to know why, you should talk to somebody…
Loose Canon: the extraordinary songs of Clive James and Pete Atkin by Ian Shircore
Review by Rob Spence It’s now over forty years since I discovered the songs of Pete Atkin and Clive James. In a wonderful series of albums in the late sixties…
The Girl in Green by Derek D. Miller
Reviewed by Gill Davies In the past, I have hesitated to read a novel that uses dreadful contemporary events as its plot and thematic focus, in case it feels exploitative…
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Reviewed by Simon It might seem strange to include a novel in the reprints section that is only 13 years old – but Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has recently had all…
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Paperback review by Naomi Eileen might ‘look like a girl you’d expect to see on a city bus, reading some clothbound book from the library about plants or geography’ but if…
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Reviewed by Harriet Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid…
The Age of Bowie by Paul Morley
Reviewed by Annabel When the world woke up on January 10th to hear that David Bowie had died just two days after Blackstar was released, we all mourned. I still…
Spotlight on Publishers: NYRB
Q & A with Edwin Frank, Editorial Director at NYRB The Eds at Shiny are all great fans of NYRB books. Can you tell us a little about the genesis…
Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Translated by Basil Creighton / revised by Margot Bettauer Dembo Reviewed by Karen Langley Being known as the author of one successful book can be as much of a curse…
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London, by Lauren Elkin
Reviewed by Helen Parry ‘I think people are made of the places not only where they’ve been raised, but that they’ve loved; I think environments inhabit us […] By understanding…
Secret Lives: Real Women in Fiction
Written by Ann Kennedy Smith A Quiet Life by Natasha Walter (Borough Press, 2016), Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea (Scribe, 2016) I spend a lot of my time reading other people’s private letters…
About My Mother by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Translated by Ros Schwartz & Lulu Norman Reviewed by Alice Farrant About My Mother is the story of a Lalla Fatma, written down by her son Tahar as she lays…
Where Roses Never Die by Gunnar Staalesen
Translated by Don Bartlett Reviewed by Gill Davies Where Roses Never Die is my first Gunnar Staalesen novel. Staalesen is Norwegian and he has been successfully writing crime fiction since 1977,…