Michelle Shine

I was looking forward to reading The Improbability of Love. It came highly recommended by a friend who couldn’t put it down and described it

I was asked to review the this novel by the publisher because I wrote a very favourable review here for Apple Tree Yard. My Husband’s Son be

We get to know Evie as a young girl growing up in the 70s. The granddaughter of a TV star. Sharpened by cynicism and suffering from a perceived lack of love and attention, she is needy for someone charismatic to endorse her existence. As a middle aged woman Evie observes the unhealthy relationship of a girl and her boyfriend, the son of a friend who’s house she is staying in at the time. It is the catalyst that makes Evie reflect on her own youth, and how as a young teenager,

I did enjoy Maggie O Farrell’s This Must Be The Place, but I’m not sure I agree with the reviewers who have said it is her best book yet. I will probably always compare everything she writes to her masterpiece (in my view) After You’d Gone. In this, her latest, the story trips and slides in and out of time frames, first and third person, with many narrators and tenses which shows a deftness of writing and takes a huge skill to pull off. But unlike in The Glorious Heresies by

Most years I love the winner of the Bailey’s. Not the drinking competition, I mean the novel that wins the literary prize. And not the author; I’ve never met any of the authors. Sometimes, I fantasize that something I’ve written wins the Baileys. For me, it’s just a fantasy, but for Lisa McInerney, the fantasy came true, this year, with her book The Glorious Heresies . I finished reading it a week ago and its presence has stayed with me ever since. The story centres on the t

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon is a lovely quirky novel, told predominantly through the eyes of a 10 year old girl, but also gives an insight into the adults that live in her street and play a part in her world. It is set in the UK during the very hot summer of 1976, and is charmingly reminiscent of that era. The plot centres around the disappearance of a Mrs Creasy. There are also other happenings: a fire that took place some time ago, a baby that was kidn

Whilst in Goa, editing the novel I am currently working on, I read Golda, a biography of the late, great, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir by Elinor Burkett. I have been fascinated by Golda Meir for some time, for not only was she a pioneer and subsequent leader of the only Jewish homeland, a hero and legend, but her wit is comparable to that of Oscar Wilde. I knew that a book about the woman behind the oscillating image would captivate me but what I wasn’t prepared for, was

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty Recommended by Danny at WEL Books I haven’t read many books this year that I haven’t wanted to put down, and none that I read in one sitting, apart from this one. Apple Tree Yard is the story of a middle-aged female scientist who has an affair with a mysterious man; a crime thriller which begins towards the end of the tale with the protagonist in the dock during a murder case. Written in the first person, the reader is with the narrator all t