The Tryst by Monique Roffey
Reviewed by Harriet This is a remarkable book by any standard. It’s marketed by the publisher, Dodo Ink, as a literary erotic novella, which sounds about right, as long as…
The Ready Made Thief by Augustus Rose
Reviewed by Harriet ‘A kickass debut from start to finish’ screams the cover of this highly readable, somewhat bizarre, debut novel. It’s a book that defies categorisation – perhaps best…
The End of the Web by George Sims
Reviewed by Harriet No, the title doesn’t refer to a predicted end of the internet. This is a 1976 novel, written before such things were even invented. It’s taken from…
Separation by Sally Emerson
Reviewed by Harriet I have to admit I’d never heard of Sally Emerson before the publishers offered me a couple of their recent reprints. Though she’s till around and still…
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books by Martin Edwards
Reviewed by Harriet Here at Shiny we love our classic crime, and we have been delighted to review a number of excellent novels that have recently made available through the…
The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting
Translated by Paul Russell Garrett Reviewed by Harriet For me my mother was a scent, she was a warmth. A leg I clung to. A breath of something blue; a…
A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
Reviewed by Harriet The subtitle of this book is ‘The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf’, which sounds very promising. I’ll start by saying that I found some…
The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin
Review by Harriet Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by, I found myself quite distracted by…
Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley
Reviewed by Harriet If you’re a watcher of historical TV documentaries, you won’t need introducing to Lucy Worsley, who presents history programmes for the BBC, in which she often dresses…
Introducing Jane Austen Week
By Harriet Jane Austen died two hundred years ago, on 18 July 1817, at the age of just 41. She had anonymously published four novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811),…
Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy
Reviewed by Harriet It’s every parent’s nightmare – one minute your child is there, next minute they’re gone. My own three-year-old daughter once wandered off in a busy market in…
Maigret Goes to School by Georges Simenon
Translated by Linda Coverdale Reviewed by Harriet What was he doing there? A hundred times, in the middle of an investigation, he’d had the same feeling of helplessness or, rather,…
Deaths of the Poets by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
Review by Harriet The deaths of poets matter to us because they become a lens through which to look at the poems. So say the authors, both poets themselves, in…
Aphra Behn: A Secret Life by Janet Todd
Review by Harriet ‘Aphra Behn was a woman who wore masks’. So says Janet Todd at the beginning of this monumental, newly revised biography of Behn, who was a prolific…
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
Reviewed by Harriet And if such a gift could come to him at such a time… — he opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything…
Hamlet: Globe to Globe by Dominic Dromgoole
Reviewed by Harriet Dominic Dromgoole was the Artistic Director of London’s Globe Theatre from 2005 to 2016. During this successful period he initiated many memorable achievements, including a 2012 festival…
The Devil and Webster by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Reviewed by Harriet I’d never heard of Jean Hanff Korelitz when her 2014 novel, You Should Have Known, landed unsolicited in my mailbox. I read it with huge admiration and…
Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore
Reviewed by Harriet I wanted to write about people whose voices have not echoed through time and whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history So writes Helen Dunmore…
Gone: A Girl, a Violin, and a Life Unstrung by Min Kym
Reviewed by Harriet For some reason I’ve always been fascinated by child prodigies – people who seem to have been born with an innate talent for something, which very often…
The Lark by Edith Nesbit
Reviewed by Harriet Last year there was a bit of a flutter in the blogging world when Edith Nesbit’s complete works popped up on Amazon for a very low price….
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
Reviewed by Harriet You will have only one story… You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You will have only one. This advice, given to…
Heartthrobs by Carol Dyhouse
Reviewed by Harriet Subtitled ‘A History of Women and Desire’, this book explores the fields of literature, film and popular romance. Ranging from the early nineteenth century to the present…
The Olive Oil Diet by Dr Simon Poole and Judy Ridgway
Reviewed by Harriet When I was a small child my mother, who spent a lot of time in France and loved French cooking, used to have to go to the…
The Girl Before by J.P. Delaney
Reviewed by Harriet Who is JP Delaney? All that is known at the time of writing this review is that the pseudonym conceals the identity of ‘a writer who has…