Here we showcase the very best of what Booka has to offer. Read reviews of the latest bestsellers. Find out in advance about our exciting events. Discover what our visiting authors have to say. Be inspired by our book-buying guides and helpful articles. Learn something new or revisit an old favourite. Find out more about our team and the work that goes on behind the scenes. Booka is proud to be an independent bookshop and we have never been afraid to speak out. Join us now and subscribe for all our latest updates, posts, events and news.
THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME Liam Higginson In Wales, where I grew up and still live now, we like to think of ourselves as a nation of storytellers. This is true, I think, but it’s always struck me as a little strange. It seems to me that human beings are a species of...
The Books That Made Me The Color Purple by Alice Walker The first book I became utterly obsessed with was Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. I had been struggling to muster up much enthusiasm for reading when I overheard my teacher recommend it to another, probably much...
The Books That Made Me HORRIBLE HISTORIES by Terry Deary These were probably the first books that I ever loved. I was an avid reader of old annuals that I picked up from jumble sales – Beano, Whizzer and Chips, that kind of thing – and the Horrible Histories series...
The Books That Made Me I read pretty voraciously as a child, but I can’t say that what I consumed helped me develop any early authorial skills. Perhaps this was because so much had been written a generation earlier. Was I the only one still reading The Famous Five,...
The Books That Made Me As a young child, I fell asleep every night to my grandmother reading next to me. She read ‘Journey to the West’, the Chinese classic, and though there’s a lot I don’t remember from those days, I do remember how the main character, a monkey...
The Books That Made Me In my first year of school, we were given our first book to read, and told to take it home. It was a picture-book, with only a smattering of words. Our teacher, understandably, didn’t have a great deal of faith in four year olds to keep the...
The Books That Made Me The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales By Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith Anarchy. Invention. Hens who get angry about ISBN numbers. As a child I couldn’t believe that anyone had allowed this book to happen. This...
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,...