View this email in your browser

Newsletter #34

Hello lovely people! Having sufficiently battened down the hatches, tied down the new releases tables and, um, given everyone the day off last Friday, we're happy to say we survived Storm Eunice. Here's hoping all of you managed to stay safe, and didn't come a cropper of any rogue wheely bins. Now that the weather (at time of writing) appears to have calmed down again, we're receiving word that it's not only safe, but actually advised, to return to your local bookshop to see what new delights they have on offer. Not our words, just reporting what the Met office say. Trust us. Don't look it up.

New this week

Having covered the big topics of how a person should be and motherhood, Sheila Heti turns to the end of life in her latest work of autofiction, Pure Colour. Within two hundred pages she covers the beginning and end of our universe, encapsulated within the life of protagonist Mira. It's a wild, thoughtful ride through reincarnation and everyday living, a gentle exploration of the human life cycle.

From the macro to the micro: Pola Oloxiarao's Mona is a pitch-perfect satire of a certain literary type: its protagonist, an author, spends her days creating fake accounts to respond to bad reviews of her novel online. It escalates from there, in a very funny, very acid-tongued way. A Million Aunties, meanwhile, is a cat's cradle of a book. In tracing the various disparate strings of a Jamaican family spread across the diaspora, Alecia McKenzie loops back and forth, up and over, into a complete portrait of a community which spans continents and lifetimes.

Best known for his (at times painfully) honest autobiographical Patrick Melrose quintet, Edward St Aubyn strays off the beaten path — clutching a fistful of scientific papers — for Double Blind. His new novel follows a naive young botanist, in the middle of a rewilding program on a country estate and while expanding his interior world with magic mushrooms. His life will soon intersect with the very un-chill world of 21st century capital, as St Aubyn expands his scope to take in the pharmaceutical industry and the cutting edge of scientific research. Much more sweeping, and much more sincere, than anything he's done before!

The urgent displacement of a family is the ever-relevant topic of Kololo Hill, the debut novel from Neema Shah. In this instance, it's the exile of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin that sees newlywed couple Asha and Pran navigating the hostile environment of the UK. A complex, artful exploration of a fraught historical moment. The latest edition of eclectic literary journal Granta, issue 158, also takes "In The Family" as its theme, with fiction from Nathan Harris and the aforementioned Heti, an essay by Fatima Bhutto on familial grief, and poetry by Akwaeke Emezi.

Leading off our non-fiction picks this time around is Christina Patterson's Outside, the Sky is Blue. Framed around Patterson's sorting through the detritus of her family home, this memoir charts the author's loss of her once-fanatic religious faith in the face of her sibling's mental health troubles, her own ill health, and the realisation that the perfect childhood created by her parents may have been markedly less so. What sounds unrelentingly grim in theory is surprisingly life-affirming in practice, a mature inquiry into what makes lives worth living and how to carry on with the burden of loss.

Something different from the realm of nature writing, Peter Riley's Strandings would appeal to fans of Phillip Hoare. Riley vividly reports from the forefront of Britain's whale scavengers, an underground community filled with opportunists, conspiracy nuts, deviants and magicians — and which the author counts himself a part of. Two-time Booker shortlistee Esi Edugyan provides an intelligent, critical guide through the intersections of art and race in Out of the Sun, seeking out the perspectives unrepresented by the mainstream canon. A Ways of Seeing for the 21st century.

There's travel writing, and then there's travel writing: Tété-Michel Kpomassie's Michel the Giant chronicles the author and explorer's decade-long expedition from his village in Togo, West Africa to the Arctic Circle. Newly translated, the book is both a stunning testament to Kpomassie's determination and will, a reflection on exoticising the foreign and unfamiliar, and a snapshot — having begun his cross-continent trek in the fifties — of a long-vanished world.

Laura Galloway felt a similar pull to farthest north, having discovered ancestral roots tying her to the indigenous Sámi people of the Arctic. Dálvi follows her journey from directionless divorcee in New York to solitary and single in the Norwegian town of Kautokeino. A humorous, honest memoir of travelling to discover oneself. Jessie Ware, meanwhile, finds more than enough meaning (and family history) in the kitchen. The musician-turned-podcaster-turned-cookbook author brings together stories of love, loss, and childbirth in essay collection Omelette, as hilarious as it is heartwarming.

Significantly more reliable than actual locomotives, the latest instalment in the shop-favourite Adventures on Trains series just rolled into the station! In Sabotage on the Solar Express, M. G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman (ably supported by illustrator Elisa Paganelli) add a touch of the sci-fi to the mystery. Our heroes Harrison Beck and Uncle Nat have been invited onto the maiden journey of a super-fast, sun-powered train. Except there's a saboteur on board, and they need to find them before they go careening off the tracks, far from help in the Australian Outback! Excellently plotted, tense, with a cast of colourful characters.

Elle McNicoll's Like A Charm has all of the author's trademark warmth, imagination and empathy, wrapped up in the magical story of a girl whose move to Edinburgh reveals her family's hitherto-unknown place in a hidden underground world of unseen mystical creatures. Tazmin Merchant and Paola Escober return to their own magical world in The Mapmakers, the sequel to The Hatmakers. Another spellbinding tale, as Cordelia continues to seek out her missing father, with both help and hindrance offered by the secret societies of enchanted milliners, cobblers, and cartographers of London.

One Camel Called Doug gets the starring role in our picture book recommendations. Lou Fraser and Sarah Warburton's latest is a funny, gently rhyming bedtime story, following one young camel's excitement — and subsequent exhaustion — at hosting an increasing number of single-humped friends. A welcome fable about the importance of winding down before getting a good night's sleep.

On the non-fiction front, we have a new chapter in Rob Biddulph's Draw With Rob series of activity books, this time focussing on Amazing Animals. This one comes with an accompanying YouTube channel of tutorials to help children draw along at home, something we hear Ian McEwan is thinking of including in his next bestseller. Finally, if the solar express wasn't excitement enough for the train-loving sprog in your life, Sams Sedgman and Brewster provide a whistle-stop tour of the globe in Epic Adventures, an illustrated trip through twelve round-the-world rail journeys.

Just when you got used to the new lighting and the rearranged bookshelves, we're springing another bookshop innovation on you: we're now stocking a selection of adult boardgames! Top of the pile amongst our current selection has to be Pandemic, an all-too-familiar collaborative game about working together and sharing resources (toilet paper, biscuits etc) to survive in an apocalyptic scenario. It's a classic for a reason! We also have Azul, a competitive tile-building with shades of Sudoku in its strategy and puzzle-solving.

What we're reading

Louise had her heartbroken by, but nonetheless, highly recommends Lost Cat by Mary Gaitskill — a very powerful portrait of loss and everyday tragedy.
Tom endorses Alison Bechdel's The Secret to Superhuman Strength, a graphic novel chronicling the author's lifetime of exercise and evolving relationship with her body (with a sideline in covering the thought and writings of transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson Margaret Fuller!)
Paul just finished We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, a brilliant discussion of the role of art and activism in the age of patriarchal capitalism and climate catastrophe.

A fantastic selection once more, we hope you'll agree! As is always the case, information about opening hours, ordering, and our contact details follow. Remember also that to avoid your umbrella turning inside out, you need to make sure its facing the direction of the wind. We're afraid we cannot be held resp0nsible for any Mary Poppins-esque altitudes reached through improper brolly use. Take care of yourselves and we'll see you soon!

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!)