Shop Girl by Mary Portas
Review by Annabel Mary Portas is one of those TV presenter/gurus you either love or find profoundly irritating. I love her and her championing of the high street and independent…
Review by Annabel Mary Portas is one of those TV presenter/gurus you either love or find profoundly irritating. I love her and her championing of the high street and independent…
Reviewed by Laura Marriott “I always thought it would be classy to not kiss and tell … but after a while you just get sick of having other people trying…
Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg Reviewed by Karen Langley The Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War were amongst the most brutal conflicts of…
Reviewed by Annabel Francis Spufford is known for his five non-fiction books, the subjects of which are varied in the extreme, notably his delightful memoir of childhood reading The Child…
Compiled by Annabel The story goes that London cabbies won’t go ‘South of the River’ after dark – I have no proof of this, but it’s an enduring myth. Asked…
Reviewed by Simon Full disclosure from the off: I am longstanding blogging friends with the author of this book, and also an admirer of his earlier fiction (sequels to E.F….
Reviewed by Simon Katherine Mansfield is, of course, best known for her short stories – and rightly so; for my money, she is the greatest short story writer I’ve ever…
Reviewed by Harriet I’ve read and enjoyed all three of the prizewinning Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell’s full-length novels, so, though short stories are not usually my genre of choice, I…
Asked by HarrietLucy, people always like to know how a writer got started. So can you tell us about your beginnings, and when you realised you were going to be…
Reviewed by Harriet Here at Shiny we love our reprints, and are always delighted to include reviews of one or more of the British Library’s Crime Classics series. So when…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster This is the second gem I’ve read from Head of Zeus’s new imprint, Apollo. Like Josephine Johnson’s Now in November, which won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize, this…
Translated by Robert Vilain Reviewed by Karen Langley Back in 2013, I read a really lovely book called Rilke in Paris, which focused on the life of the great German poet…
Reviewed by Annabel Debut novelist P.K. Lynch trained as an actor before having a family and turning to writing plays. Her first professional acting job was playing Lizzy in Trainspotting, (in…
I recently met up with a bunch of friends from university for the afternoon. ‘You’re very successful now, aren’t you?’ one guy boomed at me before even saying ‘hello’. I…
Questions by Rebecca Foster 1. Readers learn so few facts about Tess – even her name and where she’s from are not revealed until a long way into the book,…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Twenty-two-year-old Tess arrives in New York City by car in June 2006. Feeling like a Midwestern bumpkin, she has no money for tolls and has to…
Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies Reviewed by Gill Davies What an odd novel! It is Yokoyama’s sixth, his first to be translated into English, and was an immediate best-seller in Japan….
Translated by Alison Anderson Reviewed by Annabel If like me, you read and loved Muriel Barbery’s bestselling novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which blended romance, philosophy and a teenaged genius…
Reviewed by Simon Bloomsbury Reader has done an excellent job in bringing back many neglected authors (including some of my favourites, such as E.M. Delafield and Ivy Compton-Burnett), but these…
Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a tough book, about Nigerian politics, Islam, and a young boy growing up without guidance – and his journey from nothing to nothing by…
Reviewed by Chelsea McGill Dr. Morayo Da Silva is a retired English professor living in San Francisco. As she goes about her daily life, she comes into contact with other…
Reviewed by Victoria To add to a long list of lines I wish I’d written, I read somewhere that Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was ‘Harlequin romance meets…
Reviewed by Harriet Nobody who’s a fan of Sophie Hannah’s crime fiction will be surprised to learn that The Narrow Bed features an inexplicable set of crimes, enough twists to make you…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth There was going to be a novel about Portugal much earlier. In Life of Pi, the author within the story tells the reader how he had gone…