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The Joy of Bookclubs I’m writing this as we prepare for Independent Bookshop Week. We hope this week will give a much needed boost to sales for all independent bookshops across the country. Bookshops are so vital in the unsettled world we find ourselves in. We are...
Happy Empathy Day! One of my favourite books on this year’s Read for Empathy collection is The Fights That Make Us by Sarah Hagger-Holt. Not only is it the perfect choice to put yourself into someone’s shoes, it’s also appropriate for Pride Month! I...
The Books That Made Me I still remember the feeling of the orange-colored hardback covered in plastic that was ragged around the edges. The aged yellow pages and the feel of it in my hands as I read it for the umpteenth time. It’s a library book and the cover reads –...
The Books That Made Me The summer I was four, my mum read E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web to me and my elder sister. Although I can no longer recall the story, I do remember that at some point, my mum was unable to go on reading through her tears. And so my aunt took...
It takes a community to write a book I grew up with the image of the lonely artist; Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce sitting in the lonely garret writing in splendid isolation. I accepted that Wordsworth really did wander lonely as a cloud and that Yeats...
THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME Growing up, most of the books in our house were bibles or Baptist tracts. My older brother had a few well-thumbed paperbacks about the strange and bizarre, so I became quite the expert on the Loch Ness monster and spontaneous combustion. I was a...
The Books That Made Me From the moment I could read, I hid inside books. They were my escape and my comfort when life became challenging or too difficult for me to cope with. The type of book didn’t really matter to me. It could be one of the Narnia series, a...
The Books That Made Me I often describe my novel Fundamentally as Evelyn Waugh meets Phoebe Waller-Bridge, so I’ve been inspired by a pretty wide range of cultural production! I’ve always loved old-school British satire, like Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious novel Scoop about...
Bookshop Manager Ruth was lucky enough to receive an early copy of Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey… Wild, ferocious, stark, and filled with wonder, Eowyn Ivey’s new novel ‘Black Woods, Blue Sky’ is truly magnificent, an incredible read. Having adored both...
The Books That Made Me I have always been drawn to stories of journeys – The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, Peter Pan. As an only child growing up on a remote Scottish island, reading was a companion, a doorway to adventure, to faraway places, to the unexpected...
The Books That Made Me I have been a lover of books for as long as I can remember. Books afforded a younger me, quiet and aloof, a world of possibilities with infinite braver versions of myself. The more I read the more I realised it was not just the books themselves...
The Books That Made Me The Heart of The Woods starts and (spoilers) ends just outside Oswestry. It begins in the woodland my father planted just over a decade ago, just a stone’s throw from Booka. I’ve watched with no small amazement as the thousand native broadleaf...
The Books That Made Me It was my father who taught me the value of books. Our home was filled with books on poetry, philosophy, history and politics. In my grown-up years, my father told me that he always thought that if our home had a plentiful bookshelf, one day,...
The Books That Made Me My earliest reading experience involves the charming picture book Not Now Bernard by David McKee. My dad used to read it to me at bedtime. It’s the story of a boy who claims there is an enormous purple monster in the house, and his parents who...
6 months ago, we were one bookshop. Now we are two. It seems incredible to us, even after being booksellers for 14 years, that we now have two bookshops. It felt as though we talked about it for years, then couldn’t find the right location, the right building....
Clare Mackintosh – I Promise it Won’t Always Hurt Like This In December 2006, my five-week-old son died. I was a police officer back then, calm in a crisis and hardened to tragedy. I had delivered bad news to more doorsteps than I could count; watched blood...
The Books That Made Me When I was a little girl, my favourite author was Robin McKinley. She wrote fairy tale retellings; the first book of hers I read was Beauty, a novel-length retelling of beauty and the beast. But she also wrote epic fantasy, two marvellous books...
Writing Crime Fiction as a Local Author Bolt From The Black is my second Oswestry-based murder mystery and my thirteenth book. It follows Each Slow Dusk, the first Inspector Probert novel, in which a body is discovered at the foot of the statue of Wilfred Owen in Cae...
Fiction: The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden Astonishing, haunting and brutal, Katherine Arden’s WW1 historical fantasy, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, is a tale of endurance, duty, family, and stupid dumb hope; of the bonds between siblings, of the ties which bind...
The Books That Made Me I was an avid reader as a child and remember the shelves at home being filled with all sorts of treasures – Helen Nicholl and Jan Pieńkowski’s Meg and Mog books, Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Shirley Hughes. My most prized possession was a copy of...