The new edition of Shiny New Books is now available online, containing reviews of many exciting and intriguing books. A few of my reviews are in there, including the entertaining and scholarly account of the British in Malaya, Out in the Midday Sun, by Margaret Shennan; Laura Feigel’s fascinating follow-up to The Love-Charm of Bombs, this time investigating artistic life in Germany after the war in The Bitter Taste of Victory; and Howard Jacobson’s latest novel, a volume in Hogarth’s reinterpretations of Shakespeare series, in which the Mancunian author tackles The Merchant of Venice in Shylock is my Name.
There’s lots more, including a new literary guide to Venice that is definitely accompanying me next time I go; Volker Weidemann’s book about Zweig and Roth; the latest Julian Barnes biofiction, this time on Shostakovich; a new-to-me detective in Elly Griffiths’s The Woman in Blue; and a book to feed my recently-acquired taste for espionage fiction, Helen Dunmore’s Exposure.
As always with SNB, lots to read, lots to explore. Once again, a pleasing mix of the familiar and the new. Have a browse, why don’t you?
Shiny New Books 9 by Dr Rob Spence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.