July 22, 2021 Everyone Is Still Alive by Cathy Rentzenbrink Reviewed by Annabel You may know Cathy Rentzenbrink through her heart-breaking memoir published a few years ago. In The Last Act of Love, she…
July 13, 2021 Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice 1967-75 by Richard Thompson Review by Annabel There are still people who doubtless haven’t heard of Richard Thompson. To those of us in the know though, he is…
June 16, 2021 Five Fascinating Facts About… Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Compiled by Annabel The Royal Society of Literature is celebrating ‘Dalloway Day‘ today – a Wednesday in the middle of June – when Virginia…
June 15, 2021 Rabbits by Terry Miles Review by Annabel As I sat down to start reading this book, a tweet pinged on my phone and I glanced over – someone…
June 8, 2021 Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal Translated by Jessica Moore Reviewed by Annabel Maylis de Kerangal is a novelist whose primary focus is not the characters that people her books,…
June 1, 2021 The Muse by Nell Dunn Review by Annabel There is a particular sub-genre of memoir that almost goes into biography but fundamentally remains a memoir. I’m talking about memoirs…
May 20, 2021 The Assistant by Kjell Ola Dahl Translated by Don Bartlett Reviewed by Annabel Kjell Ola Dahl is one of Norway’s foremost crime writers, especially known for his ‘Oslo detectives’ series,…
May 4, 2021 Sistersong by Lucy Holland Reviewed by Annabel Lucy Holland’s impeccably researched novel combines the story of a 19th Century murder ballad, ‘The Two Sisters’ with Dark Ages post-Arthurian…
April 27, 2021 A Rage in Harlem and The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes Reviewed by Annabel I first discovered the mad world of Chester Himes’s Harlem in an old Allison & Busby paperback of The Crazy Kill,…
April 20, 2021 Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden Reviewed by Annabel Diary of a Film follows a few days in the life of an auteur film director who is in Italy with…
March 25, 2021 The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers Reviewed by Annabel With The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers brings her Wayfarers series to a close. The quartet began in 2015…
March 11, 2021 The Disciple by Michael Mallon Reviewed by Annabel A novel about the increasingly toxic relationship between an old art historian and his young acolyte set in Florence was always…
March 5, 2021 Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz Translated by Rachel Ward Reviewed by Annabel I’ve come late to German ‘Queen of Krimi’ Simone Buchholz’s novels. Hotel Cartagena is the ninth of…
February 23, 2021 A Long Way From Douala by Max Lobe Translated by Ros Schwartz Reviewed by Annabel I have a personal goal to increase diversity in my reading and am glad to have discovered…
February 18, 2021 House With No Doors by Jeff Noon Reviewed by Annabel Having been a fan of Jeff Noon’s cult spec fiction novels set in an alternate Manchester, I was surprised and delighted…
February 11, 2021 Astral Travel by Elizabeth Baines Reviewed by Annabel …a lot of what I remember is not the same as what the others remember, which was partly what caused the…
February 9, 2021 Mr Cadmus by Peter Ackroyd Reviewed by Annabel Owning most of Ackroyd’s fiction output and a good chunk of his non-fiction (even if I haven’t quite read it all),…
February 4, 2021 The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter Reviewed by Annabel Max Porter emerged on the British literary scene in the mid-2010s as an author to be watched. His debut 2015 novella…
January 21, 2021 The Searcher by Tana French Reviewed by Annabel A new novel from Tana French, Irish author of the acclaimed Dublin Murders series is always worth waiting for. Her latest,…
December 17, 2020 Mr Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe Reviewed by Annabel Jonathan Coe’s latest novel couldn’t be further from his Costa-winning Middle England (which I reviewed for Shiny here), which examined 21st…
December 9, 2020 Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World, by Vaclac Smil Reviewed by Annabel If you, or a potential recipient of this book for Christmas, are a fan of Tim Harford on BBC Radio 4’s…
December 3, 2020 It’s the End of the World by Adam Roberts Reviewed by Annabel I learned a new word this year. ‘Eschatology’ is defined as ‘the part of theology concerned with death, judgement, and the…
November 26, 2020 What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez Review by Annabel My first exposure to Nunez was through her breakthrough novel The Friend, finally gaining her prizewinner status (the US National Book…
November 17, 2020 The Book Lover’s Quiz Book: Novel Conundrums by Gary Wigglesworth Reviewed by Annabel Gary Wigglesworth’s twitter feed was something of a godsend on Tuesday evenings during furlough earlier this summer. The former bookseller who…
October 29, 2020 The Harpy by Megan Hunter Reviewed by Annabel Megan Hunter’s beautiful and poetic debut novella, The End We Started From (reviewed here for Shiny by Lucy Unwin), the story…
