We are often asked if we have read every book in the shop. Well, not quite, but between us we are read a good spread of fiction and non-fiction. Here is a small selection of books we have thoroughly enjoyed or can highly recommend. We hope to suggest new recommendations each month.
Normal People
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person’s life – a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds …. Read More
La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One
Philip Pullman’s magnificent bestseller is now in paperback, with new additional illustrations. Malcolm Polstead’s Oxford life has been one of routine, ordinary even. He is happiest playing with his daemon, Asta, in their canoe, La Belle Sauvage. But now as the rain builds, the world around Malcolm and Asta it seems is set to become increasingly far from ordinary. Finding himself linked to a baby by the name of Lyra Belacqua, Malcolm is forced to …. Read More
Transcription
In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever. Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet …. Read More
Melmoth
After the success of her tour-de-force novel, The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry returns with Melmoth, a profound, ambitiously realised work of fiction which asks fundamental questions about guilt, forgiveness, moral reckoning and how we come to terms with our actions in a conflicted world. Twenty years ago Helen Franklin did something she cannot forgive herself for, and she has spent every day since barricading herself against its memory. But the sheltered life she has crafted for …. Read More
Sea Prayer
A deeply moving, gorgeously illustrated short story for people of all ages from the international bestselling author of The Kite Runner, brought to life by Dan Williams’s beautiful illustrations’The book may be brief, but it is beautiful, poetic – a distillation of his strengths’ Sunday Times On a moonlit beach a father cradles his sleeping son as they wait for dawn to break and a boat to arrive. He speaks to his boy of the …. Read More
The Bees
Following the recent event with Carol Ann Duffy at Swansea University we have signed copies of several of the poet laureate’s newest books ‘The Bees’, ‘The King of Christmas’ and ‘Collected Poems’. ‘The Bees’ is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of new poems as Poet Laureate, and the much-anticipated successor to the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Rapture. After the intimate focus of the earlier book, The Bees finds Duffy using her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love …. Read More
