Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries, edited by Sarah Gristwood
Reviewed by Harriet I have set myself many tasks for the year – I wonder how many will be accomplished? A Novel called Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and…
Reviewed by Harriet I have set myself many tasks for the year – I wonder how many will be accomplished? A Novel called Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and…
Reviewed by Harriet In the back of my mind I was always sure that wonderful things were waiting for me, but I’d got to get through a lot of horrors…
Reviewed by Harriet The village was beautiful. It was enfolded in a hollow of the Downs, and wrapped up snugly – first, in a floral shawl of gardens, and then,…
Reviewed by Harriet If you gave me a choice between a collection of short stories and a novel, I’d choose the novel every time. I suppose it’s something to do…
Reviewed by Harriet This is the eleventh novel in Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey historical crime series; we’ve reviewed four of them on here as well as her standalone fictional biography…
Reviewed by Harriet The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand. I was a small child then, soft at the belly. On that night my mother took me…
Reviewed by Harriet ‘I’m sick of those two.’ The words arrived in my mouth like hard, round pebbles, threatened to take up all the space. I stopped for a moment,…
Introduction by Simon Thomas Reviewed by Harriet Devine When I saw the title and the snowflakey cover of this winter offering from the British Library Women Writers series, I thought…
Reviewed by Harriet Like me, many people will have been waiting impatiently for the next installment of the ongoing saga of private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. Some (not…
Reviewed by Harriet He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn’t move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles…
Translated by Hilda Rosner Reviewed by Harriet Siddhartha had one single goal – to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow – to let the…
Reviewed by Harriet Rose Tremain’s novels – of which we’ve reviewed many on Shiny (see here) – have taken readers to the distant and not so distant past, and to…
Reviewed by Harriet If you studied poetry at school or university, or just read it for pleasure, you may well recognise this book’s title as a quotation from one of…
Reviewed by Harriet ‘You’re really imprisoned, then’, said Carruthers, staring at her. ‘Imprisoned in your beauty’. Salvatia Pinner, always known as Sally despite her parents’ objections, is sixteen years old….
Reviewed by Harriet A man has a hierarchy of crime, what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches….
Reviewed by Harriet First published in 1946, Suddenly at his Residence is a wartime novel. You wouldn’t necessarily think so at first – the novel is very much a country…
Translated by Damion Searls Reviewed by Harriet This extraordinary, powerful novel begins in Norway, in 1876, and it begins as it means to go on: Brynhild’s head was wrapped in…
Reviewed by Harriet Amber typed her next query into Google: Amber Glass, Joe Simpson, Prom Mom, Cad Dad. Ah, here they were, the headlines and images she had fought so…
Reviewed by Harriet Stef Penney is not a prolific author – there were five years between each of her first three novels, and it’s been seven years since the publication…
Reviewed by Harriet First published in 1927, nearly a hundred years ago, in the satirical British magazine Punch, the letters of fictional girl-about-town Topsy to her best friend Trix actually…
Reviewed by Harriet There’s probably a name for a sub-genre of books that echo or allude to earlier works of literature, something that has to be well done to make…
Reviewed by Harriet It’s been a while since we reviewed a British Library Crime Classic on here, so it’s a pleasure to write about this recent one, the only novel…
Reviewed by Harriet One of the problems with bounding spontaneously through life, I’ve discovered, is that people do tend to react to me quite strongly. I’d like to say that…
Reviewed by Harriet I’ve just finished reading this very good and very upsetting novel. It’s good because Mortimer was an excellent writer, vivid, perceptive, witty. But it’s upsetting because it’s…