While living in England she developed a friendship with writer and publisher John La Rose, who introduced her to many people that would have an influence of her career.
The major concern of her novels is to capture the colonial and postcolonial experience of the country of her birth, Guyana, so as to understand its problems and difficulties.
In her first four books, Shinebourne has written about the place where she was born and spent her childhood – Rose Hall sugar estate in Berbice, Guyana.
The estate was run along strict colonial lines whereby people were assigned their social status in terms of a pyramid structure of race and class.
At the top were the minority white expatriates who ran the estate, they lived in exclusive quarters with all the facilities of running water, electricity, and modern conveniences in their luxurious homes, while at the bottom of the pyramid were the majority, i.e., the other races, including Africans and Indians who lived in squalid conditions, in inadequate housing without running water, electricity, and the amenities of modern life enjoyed by the expats.
Shinebourne's own family were not estate workers, her father ran a grocery but growing up on the estate, she witnessed first-hand the injustices and suffering of the workers which led her to write about the effects of colonialism in Guyana which she describes as a central theme in her early writing, especially her first three novels, Timepiece, The Last English Plantation, and Chinese Women.
She has been mainly focused on capturing the environment that shaped her from her early years in colonial British Guiana through to the postcolonial period of Independence when the country was renamed Guyana.
She worked in a bank and at month end would return to Rose Hall to give her parents a financial contribution to help pay for the school fees of her younger siblings, something she was proud of doing, that made her feel good about herself, that she was becoming a responsible adult, but she found Georgetown a difficult place because there, you were judged by your class status which was tied up with race.
This time, she chooses a much younger female protagonist, a 12-year-old, June Lehall, as she prepares to venture out of her rural community to go to an urban secondary school.
Like Sandra Yansen in Timepiece, she also experiences the culture shock of confronting the intense race and class conflicts that colonialism bred in the country.
He falls in love with her and long after they leave school and he has emigrated to Canada, he continues to carry a torch for her and at the age of 60, he tracks her down to England to propose to her, but she rejects him.
Shineboune's fourth novel, The Last Ship, portrays life on a rural colonial sugar estate, this time, in the context of the arrival of Chinese indentured workers.
Her female descendants find it difficult to follow her example about which they are ambivalent, especially her granddaughter, Joan Wong, who fights against her legacy and tries to escape from it by fleeing to England where she settles down.