As always, I've read and reviewed some great books in Shiny 5, but if you asked me which was my favourite, it would probably be Cecilia Ekbäck's brilliant debut novel Wolf Winter -- you can read my review here.
As you can well imagine, us eds spend a lot of time choosing titles for review -- as soon as one edition is out, we're already planning the next one. Our wonderful contributors are a great help, and we all trawl through the catalogues and keep our eyes on the news, and of course the publishers offer us, or send us, lots of books too. But Wolf Winter came to me in a slightly unusual way. I'm a great fan of audiobooks and recently a kind publicist has been sending me credits for books to listen to and review on Audible. I picked Wolf Winter from there almost at random, attracted I suppose by snow and wolves and the word Nordic in the blurb. And what a great listen it was. It was crying out for a review in Shiny 5, and it got one -- plus Cecilia was kind enough to answer my questions for our BookBuzz section. Serendipity or what?