The Future of Gardens by Mark Lane
Review by Annabel Melville House’s ‘Futures’ series are short pocket-sized paperbacks that explore their subjects in essay format. I’ve previously reviewed two others for Shiny – The Future of Trust…
Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair, by Hilary Giovale
Review by Liz Dexter I was immersed in a white settler myth that had always allowed me to perceive them [her ancestors] as innocent bystanders rather than oppressors. I’ve been…
Tracker by Alexis Wright
Review by Liz Dexter, 25 March 2025 In his life, he had made space for himself in the world of those who enjoyed the highest influence in Australia, as he…
Lonely Planet: Hidden Libraries by D.C. Helmuth
Review by Liz Dexter This attractive and heavily illustrated book covers fifty unusual libraries from around the world. Informative and rich, it celebrates libraries of all kinds, from mobile ones…
This Volcanic Isle: The Violent Processes that Forged the British Landscape, by Robert Muir-Wood
Review by Liz Dexter We now realize that throughout the past 66 million years, this land has been far from quiescent. It has been split by magma-filled cracks, wracked by…
Birds, Beasts and Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Ben Gow
Review by Liz Dexter If you wish to bludgeon badgers or beavers or remove peregrine falcons and hen harrier chicks from their nests, a way can be found. If you…
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
Travel & the World
Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler
In expanding and resourcing public understandings of the countryside’s colonial past, we can tell our islands’ stories and address colonial legacies from a position of knowledge rather than fear. Corinne…
Airplane Mode: Travels in the Ruins of Tourism by Shahnaz Habib
Review by Liz Dexter How intrepid you are as a traveler depends, at least partly, on how entitled you feel to travel. On whether there’s an army base nearby with…
A Ride Across America by Simon Parker
Review by Liz Dexter Fascinatingly, many of the small towns I found along the way seemed to be stuck in a time warp. I cycled past rusted 1940s Studebakers and…
You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here by Benji Waterhouse
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This book is also about me and about why anyone in the right mind would choose to be a psychiatrist. I hope that it serves as…
An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Civilisation to Independence by Zeinab Badawi
Reviewed by Liz Dexter I would like to say to the non-African reader of this book that I hope I have demonstrated that Africa has a history, that it is…
Human Origins: A Short History, by Sarah Wild
Review by Liz Dexter I have […] tried to highlight how much our understanding of human origins has changed – and continues to change – and how, in some ways,…
Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wilderness by Alastair Humphreys
We have just this one tiny planet to live on, now and for the foreseeable future. We must care for it, and use its resources wisely, sustainability, and fairly. If…
Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides, by Paul Clements
Review by Liz Dexter My hope is that this biography will send readers back to Jan Morris’s books, to either reread them of, for those who have yet to discover…
You’re All Talk: Why We Are What We Speak by Rob Drummond
Review by Lix Dexter This is a book about the relationship between how we speak and who we are. More precisely, it’s a book about the role of spoken language,…
The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small, by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Even if the ‘Rewilding your Garden’ chapter seems the only one of practical use to you – or, indeed, if you only have a window box…
Portable Magic by Emma Smith
Reviewed by Liz Dexter If classic status is registered in material book form, the stages leading up to this are also readable across different editions of the same work. Rachel…
Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science by Athene Donald
Review by Liz Dexter This book is written for anyone who is wondering why, in spite of decades of effort to promote change, the numbers of women pursuing careers in…
Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book by Emma Smith
Review by Liz Dexter In stressing users of the First Folio, then, this book is not concerned with the discussions of how the Folio came to be published, the provenance…
Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Jenni Nuttall
Review by Liz Dexter The history of women’s words, it turns out, is full of surprises, of things which aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. Even our basics have unfamiliar beginnings….
Broken: Mending and Repair in a Throwaway World by Katie Treggiden
Review by Liz Dexter These are all menders and remakers working in collaboration with nature. They understand that as humans we are part of the natural world and that we…
Suburbs: A Very Short Introduction by Carl Abbott
Review by Liz Dexter There are by now over 700 Very Short Introductions, on the Book of Common Prayer, the Brain, Modern Latin American Literature, Volcanoes, inter alia, and now…
Good for a Girl: My Life Running in a Man’s World, by Lauren Fleshman
Review by Liz Dexter Millions of women carry an abundance of positive memories of their time in sport, but they also carry the invisible wounds of their sports experiences. As…
Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement by James Vincent
Review by Liz Dexter James Vincent, a journalist for The Verge magazine, among other writing, got interested in metrology when he was sent to cover the changeover in Paris from…