Mike Shuttleworth
Mike Shuttleworth is a former Readings Hawthorn bookseller
Review — 3 Apr 2022
Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes
It’s clear that Julian Barnes’ latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, is informed by the author’s friendship with the late novelist and art historian Anita Brookner. Ever since Flaubert’s Parrot (shortlisted…
Review — 1 Aug 2021
The Swallows’ Flight by Hilary McKay
The Swallows’ Flight picks up the threads of The Skylarks’ War, Hilary McKay’s Costa Award-winning novel of World War I. In this new novel, which can happily be read…
Blog post — 11 May 2021
Reflecting on the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner
The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is the richest award for children’s literature. It’s worth around $800,000 – courtesy of the Swedish government – and late last month was awarded to…
Review — 25 Apr 2021
The Happy Lion by Louise Fatio & Roger Duvoisin
A happy lion is comfortable in his zoo, far from his home, in ‘a lovely French town with brown-tile roofs and grey shutters’.
He is an insouciant fellow with a…
Review — 6 Sep 2020
The Wolves of Greycoat Hall by Lucinda Gifford
When the Scottish Conservation Society announces plans to reintroduce wolves into the wild, the Greycoat family of Morovia is soon boarding the Trans-Bohemia Express for the land of shortbread and…
Review — 24 Jun 2019
Impossible Music by Sean Williams
Simon Rain is eighteen, a guitarist, songwriter and passionate metalhead. When, a month before Christmas, Simon suffers a minor stroke, his life will never be the same. He cannot hear…
Review — 22 Apr 2019
Promise Me Happy by Robert Newton
Melbourne writer Robert Newton is well known to teenage readers. His colourful novel Runner, about a boy caught up in Squizzy Taylor’s 1920s underworld, is a staple of early…
Blog post — 18 Feb 2019
Bibliomemoirs: Four recommended memoirs about books and reading
Defined by Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times in 2014 as ‘a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate tone of an autobiography’, the bibliomemoir…
Blog post — 12 Dec 2018
Meet the bookseller with Mike Shuttleworth
Mike Shuttleworth has worked as a bookseller at our Hawthorn shop for close to four years but he’s been an advocate for youth literature for far longer – organising events…
Review — 24 Jun 2018
A Fortunate Life: Edition for Young Readers by A. B. Facey
They say the past is another country, and that was never more true than for this new young reader’s edition of the Australian classic A Fortunate Life. Albert Facey’s…
