Newsletter #32
Hello lovely people! Thank you for tearing yourself away from today’s Wordle puzzle (the lazy man’s crossword, for those out of the loop) long enough to read this edition of the newsletter. Really, it’s to your benefit, because we’ve got plenty of good stuff to share from our shelves this time: paperback editions of some hardback heavy hitters, the start of a new series from one of our favourite children’s authors, and two — that’s right two — jigsaw picks! And at no point will we ask you to guess any five letter words. The answer will always be “books.”
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New this week
The debut novel of poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois riffs on the titular thinker’s concept of “double consciousness”, as a young Black woman in the present-day deep south of America explores her fraught family history, shoring up painful memories of slavery, a lost homeland, and the Civil Rights movement.
Louise Welsh catches up with the protagonist of her debut, blackly comic novel The Cutting Room in The Second Cut, another compelling thriller exploring the seedy underbelly of Glasgow with former pornographer Rilke as our guide. Meanwhile, Send Nudes lives up to its brilliantly provocative cover/title combo. Saba Sams’s short stories weave their way through nightclubs, music festivals and beach holidays as they chronicle women’s sexuality at different stages of life with a sharp, stylish eye.
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Lauren Oyler’s fantastic Fake Accounts is now in paperback, its story of online dating, shifting identities and social commentary no less relevant now than when it first hit the shelves. Our narrator discovers her boyfriend, who claims to shirk all social media, is in fact an incredibly popular Instagram conspiracy theorist. This revelation precipitates a discursive, dryly hilarious and utterly cynical journey through trendy Brooklyn and even-more-trendy Berlin.
Also new in paperback is Hafsa Zayyan’s arresting debut We Are All Birds of Uganda, a moving story of a young hot-shot lawyer in London, returned home due to an unexpected tragedy, encountering a family history he never knew. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams is a wonderfully inventive adventure, as the daughter of one of the original compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary comes across an example, and subsequently attempts to compile her own book, of forgotten words.
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In Firmament, atmospheric scientist Simon Clark shines a light on the thin, invisible layer of air that surrounds the Earth: forming climates, creating weather, and generally ensuring our pale blue dot is in any way inhabitable. By explaining the science and the history of its discovery, Clark provides as simple a guide to this marvel as you’re likely to get — and, in the process, our current climate crisis with renewed understanding and urgency.
Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers spins quite the yarn: a celebration of the oft-forgotten originators of those iconic bedtime stories that make Disney the big bucks. From mediaeval England to a German apothecary to war-torn Russia, it’s a tale as gripping as anything from the Brothers Grimm. More globetrotting and secret histories can be found in Sofi Thanhauser’s insightful Worn, a pocket history of clothes, the places they come from and the people who made them.
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We've two fantastic, long-unavailable reissues to recommend this time around. While widely (and correctly) regarded as the preeminent chronicler of the Jazz Age, Dorothy Parker is known more for her essays and fiction than her poetry. Enough Rope should go some ways to redressing that imbalance, being a collection of her verse which proves she is just as perceptive, unsentimental and dryly hilarious when she turns her gimlet eye to rhyming couplets.
Shirley Collins is a living legend — a folk singer who has been a fixture of the local and international circuit for nearly seventy years. She’s lived a life, and she knows how to tell a story. It’s no surprise, then, that America Over the Water, is packed with incident and insight: her memoir of a year spent travelling through 50s America with music historian Alan Lomax. If you’re looking for tips on how to get the most out of life, look no further than The Fourfold Remedy, where John Sellars draws on Greek philosopher Epicurus’s writings on seeking pleasure above all else.
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We’re going to try our best to avoid nautical puns as we introduce you to The Ship of Cloud and Stars, a brilliant new high-seas adventure from Amy Raphael and illustrator George Ermos. Nico Cloud is bored by her small-town life, but forbidden from venturing further afield by her cautious parents. Then she chases a kitten aboard the ship of a scientist setting sail for new lands — an accidental stowaway! — and finds her dream life rocked by the reality of choppy seas, pirates, and volatile scientific discoveries.
Shop favourite Alastair Chisholm kicks off a new series with not one but two thrilling instalments. Dragon Storm follows a pair of young tearaways in a fantasy world where dragons have long since been extinct (or so they think). Ross Welford’s Into the Sideways World looks to be similarly imaginative fun, as twelve-year-olds Willa and Manny stumble into an alternate reality where war and pollution have been seemingly conquered…but at what cost?
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Lucy Rowland and Ben Mantle’s A Hero Called Wolf is a cute, colourful rhyming picture book about overcoming stereotypes: Wolf loves reading, but finds that his kind are always the bad guy. That’s until a grumpy giant crashes his library, and he has a chance to save the day. Huw Lewis-Jones and Ben Sanders’s ill-tempered Bad Apple returns in Apple Grumble, a beautifully-illustrated and extremely silly story where our “hero” faces the wrath of Granny Smith and her gang of anthropomorphic fruits.
In the tradition of Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and Jane Needle’s Wild Wood, Sam Wedelich’s take on Chicken Little purports to lift the lid on the “real and totally true tale” behind the well-known story. In this version, our heroine sets about investigating the source of a mysterious bonk on the head — while the rest of her coop lose theirs with panic. A fun twist which turns this from a fable about hysteria to fact-checking, with wonderful illustrations from cartoonist Wedelich.
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Our jigsaw picks often pull from the great and the good of art history. This time, there's a twist, as these 1,000 piece puzzles depict not singular works, but a Where's Wally?-style scavenger hunt of visual references to their subjects. Dinner with Monet and Dinner with Dali are packed with colour and humour, and will keep you guessing even when you've finished piecing them together.
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What we're reading
- Sarah is really enjoying The Flowering, the autobiography of iconoclastic mixed-media artist Judy Chicago, which is as provocative, strident and clear-eyed as her work
- Tom cannot put down Hit and Run, Nancy Griffin's biography of Hollywood producers Jon Peters and Peter Gruber, two larger-than-life characters who faked it 'til they made it — then took LA for everything it had
- Ellie loved Kisses For Jet by Joris Bas Backer, an important story in graphic novel format, whose author hasn't flinched at sharing all his teenage feelings and experiences
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With that, we must beat a hasty exit, stage left, pursued by books. As per usual, our opening hours, contact details and information about ordering are below. Pop in and see us, ask for recommendations, maybe buy a tome or two. In the meantime, take care of yourselves and we'll see you back here in a fortnight for an encore!
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| We are open for browsing 10-6 Monday to Saturday, and 11-5 on Sunday. You can also email or call (020 7249 2808) to place an order, then pick up your items from the shop. If you're unable to get to the shop for any reason, you can order books to be delivered to you through our friends at Bookshop.org (and we receive a decent commission!) |
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