roma★
cherry valley forever
NASA
we're not kids anymore.
titsay
hello vonnie
Claire Keane
shark vs the universe
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Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Mike Driver
sheepfilms
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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Jules of Nature
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Kaledo Art
dirt enthusiast
h
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@shinynewbooks2
Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster, 16 April 2020
Back in early March, just before literary events started being cancelled due to coronavirus, I had the good fortune to see Lucy Jones at Hungerford Town Hall, in conversation with local nature writer and Guardian Country Diary contributor Nicola Chester. Introducing her new book, Losing Eden, Jones explained that, while nature’s positive effect on…
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A Long Way Off by Pascal Garnier
Translated by Emily Boyce
Reviewed by Annabel, 16 April 2020
For the past eight years, Gallic Books have been translating and publishing the gloriously black-humored noir novellas of Pascal Garnier. Garnier, who died in 2010, turned to writing in his thirties writing over sixty books in a wide variety of genres; he turned to noir in the 1990s. A Long Way Offwas his twelfth and final one of…
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The Birds They Sang: Birds and People in Life and Art by Stanisław Łubieński
Translated by Bill Johnston
Review by Peter Reason, 14 April 2020
Stanisław Łubieński first began observing birds in childhood through Soviet binoculars. Later, he took his hobby to a more serious level with trips to Hungary, Scandinavia and the Danube Delta. He is a serious birdwatcher, and his writing has been acclaimed in his native Poland. The Birds They Sang won the Nike award’s…
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Review by Peter Reason, 9 April 2020
There has been a lot of interest recently in the idea of ‘rewilding’, expressed for example in Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The return of nature to a British Farm, and George Monbiot’s Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. The acclaimed scientist Edward O Wilson has called for setting aside 50% of the earth’s surface for other species…
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A Bite of the Apple by Lennie Goodings
Reviewed by Simon, 9 April 2020
There’s a certain variety of person who can always spot a bottle-green spine at a hundred paces, and has faced the agonising decision about whether to shelve their Virago Modern Classics together or in with the rest of their books. I, reader, am one such person (and they’re shelved together, for what it’s worth) – Virago Modern Classics has introduced me to any…
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She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentlewomen by Katie Hickman
Reviewed by Harriet, 7 April 2020
What an enticing title! Made even more so by the sub-title, ‘British Women in India’. Katie Hickman, who herself led a peripatetic life as the daughter of a diplomat, has dug behind the stereotypical view of the British memsahib to reveal an endlessly fascinating collection of adventurous women from the seventeenth century to the late 1900s.
Starting her…
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A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen by David Hockney and Martin Gayford
Reviewed by Liz Dexter, 7 April 2020
This is a new ‘compact’ edition of this book, with a revised final chapter bringing it all up to date, and reproductions of three new David Hockney works. Of course we know what a great, influential and innovative artist Hockney is; Martin Gayford is a well-respected art critic and expert, whose book of essays, The Pursuit of Art, I reviewed hereback in the…
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The Language of Birds by Jill Dawson
Review by Susan Osborne, 31 March 2020
I’m a fan of Jill Dawson’s writing. Her last novel, The Crime Writer, was a wonderful piece of literary fan fiction, a perverse love letter to Patricia Highsmith. However, when I read that The Language of Birds was based on the notorious Lord Lucanaffair I wasn’t at all sure that I’d read it. I’m old enough to have seen far too much in the way of tawdry…
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Drinking French – David Lebovitz
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton, 2 April 2020
Before everything started to close down, the books I had been particularly anticipating, ordering, and reading, were mostly food and drink titles. Looking at them stacked up on the table in front of me I’m grateful that they are, not so much for the inspiration they offer (although I am grateful for that) but the escapism they represent.
Drinking…
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A Little History of Poetry by John Carey
Reviewed by Rob Spence, 31 March 2020
In 1935, the doyen of art critics, Ernst Gombrich, was a young, unemployed former student with a PhD in art history. He was commissioned by an Austrian publisher to write a short history of the world, primarily for younger readers. He managed the task in six weeks, and the book was an immediate success. Only towards the end of his life did Gombrich revise…
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Rules for Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson
Reviewed by Harriet, 31 March 2020
I’ve reviewed two of Peter Swanson’s excellent psychological thrillers on Shiny – here and here. There have been a couple of others since then, reviewed on my blog rather than on here, and the standard has always been high. So I was delighted to get my hands on a review copy of this one, out in the UK in early March, especially as it came with a…
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Grown Ups by Marian Keyes
Review by Laura Marriott, 26 March 2020
We start at a dinner party. If you groan inwardly at the very thought of a family dinner party then you are on the same page as Johnny Casey. The oldest of the three Casey brothers, all talented and good looking with impressive wives, he is turning 49 and powerhouse wife Jessie is throwing him a birthday party – whether he wants one or not. And frankly…
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Fandango and Other Stories by Alexander Grin
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk
Review by Karen Langley, 24 March 2020
Recent years have seen a wave of wonderful new translations of ‘lost’ Russian authors of the 19th and 20th century. Some have never been rendered into English before; some have simply not received the widespread readership they deserve; but all of those I’ve come across have been marvellous. One of the publishers at the…
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The Ruins by Mat Osman
Review by Annabel, 19 March 2020
I am an absolute sucker for any novel with a bit of rock’n’roll in it, and two of my favourite reads from 2019 fitted that bill. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six was one of them (reviewed here), but the novel that went on to be top of my ‘best of’ pile last year was the first crime novel by cult author Jeff Noon. Slow Motion Ghosts (reviewed here) is…
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James Joyce by Edna O’Brien
Review by Rob Spence, 17 March 2020
Edna O’Brien’s position as one of the most significant modern Irish writers is undisputed, and here, in this reissue of her 1999 short biography, she tackles the life of the writer who, in the eyes of many, stands as the greatest Irish writer of them all. Her enthusiasm shines from every page, as she takes the reader on a breathless journey from the Dublin…
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Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin
Translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Review by David Hebblethwaite, 12 March 2020
Winter in Sokchois a first in several senses: the debut novel by French-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, and the first title published in Daunt Books’ new Originals list. Dusapin’s narrator is a young woman working in a guest house in Sokcho, a South Korean tourist town near the border. There…
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The Author’s Effects by Nicola J. Watson
The Author’s Effects by Nicola J. Watson
Reviewed by Harriet, 10 March 2020
This splendid and fascinating book – subtitled ‘On Writer’s House Museums’ – has been a long time in the making, and is certainly none the worse for that. To get an idea of the amount of research both at home and abroad that has gone into it, you need only look at the almost four pages of acknowledgments at the beginning, the 53 pages of notes and the 36…
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