Martin Edwards Q&A
Questions by Harriet Harriet: Martin, although you have been a solicitor all your working life, it’s probably true to say that until recently you have been best known for your crime…
Sugar and Snails by Anne Goodwin
Reviewed by Victoria Diana Dodsworth is an enigma to the reader, a complicated, prickly person in her 40s who seems imperfectly stitched together over a festering mass of secrets and…
The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
Reviewed by Lyn Baines The Golden Age of crime fiction spanned the period between the World Wars. There are many stereotypes about the books written during this period, most of them…
Interview with Jon Day, Author of Cyclogeography
Interview with Ingrid Wassenaar (Wednesday 3 June 2015) The other day, my son donned a backpack and wobbled off down our garden path on his small two-wheeler, all by himself,…
Cyclogeography by Jon Day
Reviewed by Victoria The term ‘psychogeography’ may sound unwieldy but it’s actually rather an intriguing and lovely notion. It ties together the ideas that inform the concept of genius loci, or…
Writing about Secrets, the False Self and Insecure Identities in my Novel, Sugar and Snails by Anne Goodwin
We all have secrets, things we’ve done or aspects of ourselves that we can reveal only to our nearest and dearest, and sometimes not even to them. We all have…
Bloomsbury’s Outsider: A Life of David Garnett by Sarah Knights
Reviewed by Simon Sarah Knights claims that she wrote her biography of David Garnett partly to restore his reputation – not as a writer, but as a person. His wife’s…
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Reviewed by Shoshi Ish Horowicz Outline is about a woman teaching on a creative writing course in Greece. That sentence doesn’t do any justice to the novel, but I feel a…
In My House by Alex Hourston
Reviewed by Linda Boa Margaret Benson is 57 years old. She lives alone, bar her dog Buster, in her own house in a comfortable, middle class area of London. She…
Early Warning by Jane Smiley
Reviewed by Victoria There’s a strong tradition of episodic narrative in the books that clamour for the title of Great American Novel – Faulkner, Kerouac, Salinger, Twain, Henry Miller and…
Waverley by Walter Scott
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Waverley has been on my ‘ought to read’ list for longer than I care to remember, so when Shiny New Books asked me to read a new…
Sylvia by Leonard Michaels
Reviewed by Karen Langley The blurring of the lines between fiction and fact is an artistic trope which is very much in vogue in current writing. Novels abound featuring real…
William Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction by Stanley Wells
Reviewed by Harriet How much can be said about the life and work of Shakespeare in just 135 pages? A surprising amount, in fact. Clearly these OUP Very Short Introductions…
I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers
Reviewed by Annabel To many, Sheers is primarily known as a Welsh poet. His 2005 collection Skirrid Hill was acclaimed, and he has presented some poetry programmes on the television, and wrote…
The Inspiration Behind ‘Hush’
Written by Sara Marshall-Ball Photography has always been a strong presence in my life. I put this mainly down to my mother, who has meticulously catalogued my entire existence from…
Hush by Sara Marshall-Ball
Reviewed by Victoria Illness and the various challenges it poses have become hot topics in contemporary fiction. Cancer narratives abound in fiction and non-fiction, as do stories of mental and…
Gorsky by Vesna Goldsworthy
Reviewed by Paul Fishman Gorsky is an enigmatic, much-gossiped-about billionaire who is rarely seen at his own famously gorgeous parties; there is a suggestion of some enormous unresolved romance in…
Quick Curtain by Alan Melville
Reviewed by Simon Shiny New Books has been a consistent and delighted fan of the British Library Crime Classics series, which has been rather a phenomenon in the publishing industry…
Flight by Isabel Ashdown
Reviewed by Victoria I’m not the biggest fan of prologues but I have to hand it to Isabel Ashdown for making pretty good use of hers. It’s November 1994 and…
Ruth Rendell (1930-2015)
By Harriet Devine Ruth Rendell’s death on 2 May this year has brought to an end a career spanning an astonishing fifty years. By the time you are reading this,…
The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall
Reviewed by Victoria Sarah Hall’s reputation preceeded her into this, my first excursion into her writing (though it’s her fifth novel). Usually this is not a good thing; I have…
Song of the Sea Maid, Science and Setting by Rebecca Mascull
Song of the Sea Maid, my second novel for Hodder and Stoughton, comes out on June 18th this year. Yet as with many novels, the work started a long, long…
Death in the Rainy Season by Anna Jacquiery
Reviewed by Linda Boa I didn’t know much about Cambodia before I read Anna Jacquiery’s second Inspector Morel novel, Death In The Rainy Season. In this book, though, we don’t see a great deal…
Introducing the Shiny Book Club
We hope that some of you have managed to read our first Shiny Book Club choice – Laline Paull’s The Bees. We left you with some questions below to think about…