The Riverside Bookshop will remain closed until it is safe for us to reopen.
Please accept the best wishes of Team Riverside, and we’ll look forward to seeing you again when we are back.
March 21, 2020
Riverside now closed until the end of April
Dear friends,
We are now closed with immediate effect until the end of April, when we will review the situation.
We are sorry for any inconvenience, but we are sure that you will understand that we are acting to protect the health and welfare of our customers, and our staff.
Meanwhile, stay safe. Best wishes –
Team Riverside
March 17, 2020
Covid-19 update from Riverside
We are monitoring the situation daily and have no confirmed cases of coronavirus among our staff to date. We will take immediate action if needed and will notify through our Instagram and/or blog if we need to close the shop for a period of time. So it’s business as usual for now.
If you are planning to make a special trip to see us, please ring us before you travel – 020 7378 1824.
Best wishes from all at the Riverside Bookshop.
February 18, 2020
Actress by Anne Enright
Hardback, Jonathan Cape, £16.99, out 20 February 
Katherine O’Dell is an actress, and her daughter Norah tells her story. From the Irish theatre of the 1940s to London’s West End and the early days of Hollywood, famous Katherine’s life is exciting and often turbulent. But no-one could predict that she would shoot someone. Why did this happen?
Norah notes: “I was twenty-eight and the time of the assault. I struggled on for the next year or more, but there came a day when I could not make it in to work. I was writing a book, I said. And then that became true. I wrote, not one, but many books. But I never wrote the one I needed to write, the one that was shouting out to be written, the story of my mother and Boyd O’Neill’s wound”.
From the Booker winning author of The Gathering and The Green Road, all of the things Anne Enright is known for are present here. There is family drama, mothers and daughters, snappy lines and a story that seizes you and doesn’t let you go.
Norah begins to feel able to tell her mother’s story after Katherine’s death, prompted in part by irritation with how the story is being co-opted by others. But how can she get to the truth? Can she tell her own story too?
My colleague read this first, and rightly said this was a must-read for fans of fiction about theatre. The dry wit reminded me of another all-time great theatre book, Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s.
Review by Bethan
February 17, 2020
Ben Aaronovitch signed copies!
We were delighted to welcome Ben 
Aaronovitch to Riverside to sign copies of his new book, False Value. Come and get them while they’re hot…
Ben generously signed copies of his back catalogue too, so fans can upgrade their collection.
February 12, 2020
We Love You, Mr Panda by Steve Antony
Paperback, Hodder Children’s Books, £6.99, out now
The legendary Mr Panda returns.
As ever he is long on kindness and manners, and short on rudeness and entitled behaviour.
This time he is offering free hugs (after checking first with each potential recipient). He is all ready to hug a smelly skunk and a potentially bitey crocodile. But everyone would seem to prefer to hug someone else. It is a difficult moment when you realise that perhaps no-one wants to hug you. But maybe someone will offer Mr Panda a hug instead?
Engaging bright pictures and a relatable character make this a great addition to a winning series. This perfect Valentine’s gift is guaranteed to raise a smile.
Review by Bethan
February 11, 2020
The Missing – The True Story of My Family by Michael Rosen
Hardback, Walker, £8.99, out now
Great-Uncle Oscar, Great-Aunt Rachel, Great-Uncle Martin and other family members were missing from Michael Rosen’s post-war childhood. Although those who had disappeared were spoken of, there was mystery around what had happened to them. (A poem for Oscar and Rachel is available at https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2019/01/clockmender-oscar-rosen-and-his-wife.html). For Rosen, some of the mysteries were not resolved until he was doing the research which formed this book.
This outstanding short book is written for children aged about ten and up, as well as adults. It is a useful and appropriate way to start talking about the Holocaust with children. He tells his family story through accessible and moving prose interspersed with his poems. In a moving interview in the Guardian, he talks about the long impact of the silence about those who were missing (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/dec/28/michael-rosen-family-history-jewish-culture). As the article notes: “Unusually, the book is aimed at children aged 10 and over, as well as adults. Rosen decided to write it that way after visiting a school where a pupil denied the Holocaust to his face. “This young man put up his hand and said: ‘It didn’t happen, did it?’” As the teacher panicked, Rosen remembers counting to three and patiently saying: ‘Well, no, it did happen.’”
Rosen shares original family letters, postcards and photos which make the stories even more compelling, and show readers that you can do your own research about things that are important to you. You don’t need to be a specialist.
Fans of Rosen’s work will meet people they remember: his memorable childhood friend Harrybo; his beloved father; and his grandfather (who turns out to be the inspiration for this excellent poem from You Tell Me http://bepalmer.blogspot.com/2012/05/). I had this book as a child. I can remember so many of those poems now.
One of the things that makes the book truly exceptional is the framing of the stories as being absolutely similar to stories of current refugees. “This story is about things that happened to my family a long time ago, back when photos and films were in black and white. But when I think about it, my relatives were refugees – a lot like the people you may have seen on the news recently… So I hope this book becomes part of a bigger conversation about the refugee crisis. About how to find fair and decent ways of helping people like my relatives” (p. 5). Deep humanity emerges from the book which contrasts with the inhumanity that caused the deaths of all these much-missed people. This makes The Missing both beautiful and essential reading right now.
Review by Bethan
February 2, 2020
January Bestsellers
1. Nora Ephron – I Feel Bad About My Neck
2. Greta Thunberg – No-one is Too Small to Make a Difference
3. Josh Cohen – Not Working
4. Charlie Mackesy – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
5. David Wallace-Wells – The Uninhabitable Earth
6. Bernardine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other
6 = Emily Maitlis – Airhead
8. Bridget Collins – The Binding
8 = Livia Franchini – Shelf Life
8 = Tayari Jones – An American Marriage
8 = Oyinkan Braithwaite – My Sister, the Serial Killer
12. Lucy Foley – The Hunting Party
13. Nathan Filer – This Book will Change Your Mind About Mental Health
13 = Deborah Orr – Motherwell
13 = David Nott – War Doctor
13 = Laura Shepherd-Robinson – Blood and Sugar
13 = Kiley Reid – Such a Fun Age
13 = Taylor Jenkins Reid – Daisy Jones and the Six
19. Malcolm Gladwell – Talking to Strangers
19 = ed. Alain de Botton – The School of Life
19 = Sally Rooney – Conversations with Friends
19 = Jeanine Cummins – American Dirt
19 = Richard Powers – The Overstory
24. Stephane Garnier – How to Live Like Your Cat
24 = Elizabeth Strout – Olive, Again
24 = Sara Collins – The Confessions of Frannie Langton
24 = Andrew Sean Greer – Less
24 = Okechukwu Nzelu – The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney
24 = Candice Carty-Williams – Queenie
24 = Ian McEwan – The Cockroach
24 = Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
24 = Lemn Sissay – My Name is Why
24 = Carmen Maria Machado – In the Dream House
24 = Various – Dog Poems
24 = Esi Edugyan – Washington Black
24 = Lillian Li – Number One Chinese Restaurant
February 1, 2020
Square Haunting by Francesca Wade
Faber, Hardback, £20.00, out now
Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting is an incredible achievement, informative and detailed yet thrilling and poetic. It is a shared biography of five fascinating women: H.D., a poet, Dorothy L. Sayers, a detective novelist, Jane Ellen Harrison, a classicist and translator, Eileen Power, a historian and broadcaster and Virginia Woolf, a writer and publisher. The book is based around Mecklenburgh Square, a square on the fringes of Bloomsbury where, coincidentally, all of these accomplished women resided at one time or another. This book is not just a history of these women and their work but also of a time where women were starting to live and work independently.
The subject matter itself is fascinating but Wade’s prose is what elevates this beyond the realm of academic biography. The stories of these women’s lives while residing in Mecklenburgh Square are told with astonishing sympathy, I felt a great affinity for these women while reading about their lives, loves, and their striving to have their work recognised.
Wade has rightly gained a great deal of praise for this stunning work of biography; I would recommend it to anyone who has ever wanted A Room of One’s Own.
Review by Phoebe
January 21, 2020
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Serpent’s Tail, Hardback, £14.99, out now
Carmen Maria Machado’s astonishing follow up to her debut collection of stories Her Body and Other Parties is a memoir detailing the abuse she suffered at the hands of an ex-girlfriend. Machado recounts the story of the relationship through the lens of different literary tropes and genres: ‘The Dream House as Pulp Novel’, ‘The Dream House as Soap Opera’.
The story is fragmented but the prose is clear-eyed and sharp. Machado mixes the personal and political effortlessly, both confiding in the reader about her own experience of abuse and contextualising her experience as part of a wider problem, that of the silence around abuse in LGBTQ relationships: ‘we are in the muck like everyone else’, she states. The book is an incredible feat of writing by Machado, the most terrifying section of all is, somehow, a ‘choose your own adventure’ section, and the ending is a surprising, uplifting twist.
Machado is quickly gaining a reputation as one of the great prose stylists of our time, this book is further proof of her extraordinary ability as a writer. As Machado states in her preface: ‘If you need this book, it is for you.’
Review by Phoebe
January 8, 2020
Bottled Goods by Sophie Van Llewyn
Paperback, Fairlight Moderns, £7.99, out now
This little book is written ‘in flash’ meaning that each chapter could be a stand-alone piece of very short fiction, but all together they make sense as a whole novella. The overarching narrative concerns the life of Alina, a teacher living in communist Romania in the 1970s. Her life becomes increasingly unbearable after her brother-in-law flees the country and the communist authorities’ interest in her and her husband grows. As a fan of flash fiction anyway, I enjoyed how the small chapters allowed this tension to build and it was interesting to experience this in a different way to a standard novel. A lot of the chapters also have pretty cool titles, for example, ‘What We Had To Give Away So That We Could Buy a Fourteen-year-old Dacia So that We Would Have an Independent Means of Transportation in order to Flee From the Country.’ That particular chapter is presented as a table, by the way!
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019, Bottled Goods is funny in a dark kind of way and also contains elements of magical realism. One character can shrink other people down in order to keep them away from trouble and out of the hands of the secret police. There are other aspects of folklore which pop up in a plot that is otherwise rooted in the harsh reality of communist Romania.
Fairlight Moderns are a new publisher and are obviously ready to take risks on exciting fiction such as this. I think this is great and the longlist for the Women’s Prize shows that it has paid off.
Review by Cat
January 5, 2020
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Hardback, Fleet, £16.99, out now
This is a completely gripping novel based on the horrific true-life events at the Arthur G Dozier School for Boys, in Florida. Elwood has just started to be involved in the civil rights protests sweeping the US in the 1960s, but can he use what he has learnt to survive in the notorious Nickel Academy?
Elwood is inspired to join the civil rights movement after listening to a Martin Luther King record bought by his grandmother. He tries to stick to everyone’s rules, but events overtake him and he ends up in a reform school. Torture and death are rumoured for some of the boys at Nickel Academy. How can you survive, or keep your soul alive, where there appears to be no rescue on the horizon? Can you do both of these things at the same time?
I read this short novel in a single sitting, knowing that I would not be able to think properly about anything else until I had finished it. The characters felt so real, I had to know what happened to them. Knowing that it was based on real events, I was concerned that the novel should do justice to the horrors uncovered (see https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/a-type-of-justice-florida-reform-school-yields-evidence-of-more-graves, and https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/20/colson-whitehead-reality-is-kids-shot-by-racist-cops for Whitehead’s own views on his novel). It absolutely does.
The Nickel Boys speaks to current debates around historical abuse, institutional racism, and how we deal with the shadows of the long past. It engages with questions of whose voices are listened to and whose are not: why did it take so long for the authorities to listen to survivors?
Review by Bethan
January 4, 2020
The Wolf the Duck and the Mouse written by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Jon Klassen
Paperback, Walker Books, £6.99, out now
This is a very funny picture book, suitable for all humans. The wolf eats the mouse, who quickly discovers that a duck (a previous wolf-dinner) is already living a very nice life inside the wolf. They become fast friends and enjoy dinners and dancing in their new home. This internal party time is less fun for the wolf, however…
It’s worth reading this book for the expressions on the animals’ faces alone. There are many dramatic developments and they are delivered with great style.
This team have produced several excellent books, but this is my favourite so far. Here at Riverside we are also massive fans of Jon Klassen’s Hat trilogy (https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2016/11/30/we-found-a-hat-by-jon-klassen/). Read this book and feel your life improve immediately.
Review by Bethan
December 3, 2019
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
Paperback, Pushkin Press, £9.99, out now
I fell upon this book at The Book Hive in Norwich, and read it immediately. This beautiful new edition of a 1934 is a fresh and joyous account of a woman wintering over in the Arctic. She says everyone should spend a year in the Arctic to get their priorities right.
Christiane Ritter, a visual artist from Austria, spent the winter in an extremely isolated small hut with her husband and another hunter in Spitsbergen/Svalbard. She was often alone, and her writing about this is some of my favourite in the book. At one point, she spends nine days on her own trying to stop the hut being entirely buried under snow and ice. After the storm is over, peace reigns. “But it is as though things up here have acquired a light of their own, as though they themselves emitted rays of the most beautiful and mysterious hues. All the mountains, tremendous in the foreground and sharply edged in the distance, are glassy-bright with rigid ice, glass bright the foreland and glass bright the cliffs along the shore that, transfigured by frost and surf into high, round domes of ice, drop steeply into the sea”.
Her experience of loss of self and sense of connection to all other living things at this point reminded me strongly of a beautiful moment in Alan Lightman’s book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, where he feels a connection to “all of nature, and to the entire cosmos” (see https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/03/27/alan-lightman-searching-for-stars-on-an-island-in-maine/).
The three hunt, clean and repair the hut, and undertake perilous journeys. To have a woman’s perspective is intriguing, including on how she is treated by the men, and how she observes her own responses to extreme conditions. Her particular version of rar (Arctic insanity) involves trying to clean the hut’s floor. It turns into an ice rink.
The hut is not a pure escape from the world. Some chilly blasts of news from rare visitors remind us that this is the 1930s and a worrying time: one of them asks, is there a war yet? More cheerfully, when the group visit their neighbour Sven (who is in fact very far away), they are impressed by his two charming dogs. Whenever the people are talking, the dogs wag their tails. Christiane realises that as it’s usually just Sven and the dogs, they are used to him talking just to them – so they assume this is what he is doing now, and reply.
There is a brilliant sharp foreword from Sara Wheeler, another author who writes beautifully about cold places (see the excellent Terra Incognita). A real treat.
Review by Bethan
December 3, 2019
New signed copies in!
Toni Adeyemi – Children of Virtue and Vengeance
Alain de Botton (editor) – School of Life
John le Carré – Agent Running in the Field
Jung Chang – Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister
Richard Dawkins – Outgrowing God
Carol Ann Duffy – Frost Fair
Emily Gravett – Meerkat Christmas
Frances Hardinge – Deeplight
Simon Jenkins – A Short History of London
Jay Rayner – My Last Supper
Lemn Sissay – My Name is Why
Nigel Slater – Greenfeast: Autumn, Winter
Zadie Smith – Grand Union
Rick Stein – Rick Stein’s Secret France
November 13, 2019
Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell
Paperback, Andersen Press, £6.99, out now
Wolf in the Snow is an adventurous and heart-warming winter story. Told through pictures, with almost all of the words being the sounds made by the human and non-human animals, this is an instantly engaging story.
A little girl in a red coat leaves her school just as a blizzard is starting. As the snow becomes heavier, she finds a wolf cub who has accidentally become separated from their pack. She tries to get the cub back to the pack, and will not abandon it. But when she becomes lost, will anyone be able to find her and bring her home?
Like all the best children’s books, this is appropriate for every age. I’m not surprised that it won the Caldecott medal. I love that the author’s note at the beginning includes: “thanks to Kira Cassidy of the Yellowstone Wolf Project for taking the time to answer my questions about wolves and wolf behaviour”. The wolves and humans manage to be equally relatable, which is a remarkable achievement. It also has lovely messages about connection, taking risks to help others, love and friendship. A perfect gift book for winter, if you can bear to give it away.
Review by Bethan
November 2, 2019
Letters from Tove by Tove Jansson
Hardback, Sort Of Books, £20, out now
These letters spanning more than fifty years give a compelling inside into the full and important life of a great writer and visual artist. Tove Jansson is best known in the UK as the author of the Moomins, and The Summer Book, although she was also a painter (and much of her work featured in a recent exhibition in London – https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2017/october/tove-jansson/).
Born in Finland in 1914 to a graphic artist and a sculptor, Jansson was a committed and honest letter-writer, reflecting on the times and places she lived as well as personal relationships. For anyone who loves the island where The Summer Book is set, these letters provide insights over years into how Jansson and her family and friends lived and worked there. Her late 1930s travels to Italy and France transport the reader to a sun-drenched but uneasy southern Europe.
Helpful editing from Boel Westin and Helen Svensson provides good context on what is happening in Jansson’s life and the world more generally, without being intrusive. Westin wrote Jansson’s authorise biography, Life Art Words, and knows her subject inside out (see also https://www.moomin.com/en/blog/an-artist-a-friend-a-lover-a-new-book-compiled-from-tove-janssons-private-letters-reveals-new-sides-of-the-moomin-creator/#d660ea76 for how the letters were selected). The letters are grouped by correspondent. You get a rounded picture of the individual as she writes to very close friends, to her mother, her partner, her publisher.
Some of my favourites are her wartime letters to her closest friend, Eva Konikoff, who escaped from Finland to the US before the war began. She talks about the divisions and pressures of war, even within her own family: “Under the pressure of being obliged to keep quiet, anxious about their own little circle, everyone hunches more deeply into their shell. The great events unfolding around us, rather than widening our horizons, have shrunk them into petty stubbornness, we get manically hooked on the phraseology of misdirected nationalism, on slogans, boundaries grow less and less flexible, logic goes out of the window. But the old prejudices and principles continue to be defended.” (p. 138). Her experiences living through the Second World War, where one of her brothers is fighting and she does some agricultural war service, are formative.
Fans of her Moomin strips and novels will also find that many of the themes of those works draw on events and characters from Jansson’s life. At one point she considers dedicating Moominpappa at Sea to her father, with whom she had a very strained relationship, but thinks better of it as the character is based on him.
It is a real privilege to be admitted to the intimate thoughts of a favoured writer, and this collection is as compelling as any of her writings. A complete treat.
Review by Bethan
October 30, 2019
Talented part time bookseller required!
We are looking for a PART TIME Bookseller to join our team permanently.
Bookselling experience is preferred and recent retail experience is essential.
As a key part of our small, friendly and enthusiastic team, you will provide excellent customer service and help keep our well curated stock interesting. Come and join London Bridge’s independent bookshop.
You would need to be available to start in late November/early December, to work weekend shifts, and to work flexible weekday shifts as needed.
To apply, please send your CV and a covering letter to Suzanne Dean, by email or post or by hand, by Monday 11th November. If you’d like more information, please phone or drop into the shop. Call 020 7378 1824 or email info@riversidebookshop.co.uk.
October 5, 2019
Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Paperback, Virago, £9.99, out now 
The first paragraph hooked me right away: “It was 1947 when Mutt and I married. I was singing in Happy’s Café around on Delaware Street. He didn’t like for me to sing after we were married because he said that’s why he married me so he could support me. I said I didn’t just sing to be supported. I said I sang because it was something I had to do, but he would never understand that.”
A long overdue new edition of this important American novel has just been published by Virago. Praised by James Baldwin and Tayari Jones, and helped into print in the 1970s by Toni Morrison, Corregidora has lost none of its impact over the last 40 years.
It is 1947, and Ursa is singing the blues. Her husband wants her to stop her nightclub work now that she is married. He beats her up, leaving her unable to have children. Her recovery and relationships after her hospitalisation are at the heart of the book. But Ursa is also haunted by her family’s history, and particularly the horrific abuse suffered at the hands of the slave owner Corregidora.
I had never heard of this author before finding her in Toni Morrison’s recent collected essay, Mouth Full of Blood (https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2019/09/07/mouth-full-of-blood-by-toni-morrison/). This brutal novel grips right from the start, and there are no holds barred when Jones deals with women’s lives, sexuality, and the racism which infects Ursa’s past and present. I read it in a single sitting, unable to put it down.
Review by Bethan
September 8, 2019
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Paperback, Granta, £8.99, out now
I finished this slight novel in a corner of Oxford Circus tube station so that I wouldn’t be disturbed by commuters in the concluding moments of Silvie’s story. This is a book that crept up on me as I read it and then has been ringing between my ears ever since. Seventeen-year-old Sylvie (whose name is short for Sulevia, chosen by her father, after an ancient British goddess) is a funny, brave and beguiling narrator. Sylvie has been taken by her Father and Mother to an iron age re-enactment week in rural Northumberland. They are joined by an Experimental Archaeology professor and some of his students. What transpires is a masterly exploration by Moss of class, sexual and regional oppressions and the dangers of idealising the rituals of the past.
If Ghost Wall were a film it would be a Best British Bafta winning Andrea Arnold film. The descriptions of an oppressive summer and Sylvie’s burgeoning sexuality are glorious. “Her belly was rounder than mine, a pale curve dented by her belly button. I suddenly wanted to touch. I looked away. She splashed past me. Dan and Pete looked unconcerned, as if they saw women half naked in public every day, but I saw Pete glancing away and then back and then away again. Molly, up to her waist, reached round to unhook her bra from behind in a way I’d seen on TV though not, for example, in the girls changing room.” (p.56).
Moss vividly transports the reader to a stiflingly hot, uncomfortable summer. We experience Sylvie’s tastes of exhilarating freedom and crushing debasements with her, as she comes of age in a brutal and brilliant climax. I feel this is an important piece of fiction about female friendship and what it means to be a victim. Silvie is an inspired heroine and no typical victim. Moss isn’t afraid to look at toxic masculinity in both its blatantly violent and also subtle, middle class, well-educated forms. The result is a quick read that leaves you gasping for breath and willing Sulevia to take hold of the goddess-like qualities she can just about touch with her fingertips.
Review by Eleanor
September 7, 2019
Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison
Hardcover, Chatto and Windus, £20, out now
This is an outstanding and highly relevant selection of essays from the great American novelist and intellectual. She reflects on writing and literature, on prejudice and racism, and on politics and technology (among other things).
She gives highly personal tributes to friends and inspirations, including beautiful pieces on James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe and their influences on her own writing. On James Baldwin, she writes: “I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you made on me, the challenges you issued to me were nevertheless unmistakeable if unenforced: that I work and think at the top of my form; that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy; that ‘the world is before [me] and [I] need not take it or leave it as it was when [I] came in’.” (p. 229). I have just read some of Achebe’s essays (see https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2018/08/26/penguin-modern-series/). Morrison’s explanation of the importance of his work in enlarging the horizons of writers who came after makes me determined to read his novels.
I did not intend to read Mouth Full of Blood straight through but rather to savour it, but ended up devouring it over a couple of weeks. Morrison has great clarity of mind and expression, and is unafraid of dealing with difficult and painful subjects. She remains deeply humane, and often funny too.
Despite the age of some of the pieces, the collection remains fresh and engaging. Some themes are timeless. On racism and fascism, and and how to recognise them, she writes: “Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move towards a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another” (p. 14).
Review by Bethan
August 26, 2019
Dinner with Edward – The Story of an Unexpected Friendship by Isabel Vincent
Hardback, Pushkin Press (One imprint), £12.99, out now
This is an engaging true story of a New York friendship between Edward, an elderly widower, and Isabel, a Canadian journalist recently moved to the city.
Over several exquisite home cooked meals Edward and Isabel talk about the large and important things in life – love, food, loss. Isabel has been covering the Bosnian war, where she met her Serbian husband, and has a new job. Her marriage is failing, and she has a young daughter. Edward is the father of her friend, and he is recently widowed after having been married to the love of his life for many years. He had worked as a tailor, a welder, and in a factory. He and his wife wrote plays as well as raising their children.
The food and drink in the book are mouth-watering. I must try his way of making a bourbon and pastis cocktail, which can be adapted with absinthe to make green fairies (p. 54). I sometimes want books which are consoling or comforting without losing their edge, and this definitely met this criterion. It was a helpful distraction in a stressful week. It also reminded me of the very great sensual pleasures of eating and drinking thoughtfully.
Dinner with Edward is not rose tinted: Edward’s daughter warns Isabel that her father can be quite controlling, and this manifests in him insisting that Isabel try dressing or making up in a particular way (p.71). However, it is clearly only ever done on Isabel’s own terms, and does inject a little Cinderella feeling into a bleak time in her life. Sometimes you just do need some great clothes that you can’t afford.
The book is very New York – I had never heard of Roosevelt Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island) – and the thrills of hunting down delicacies in little shops and markets feature strongly. I loved the glimpse of a life open to new friends and acquaintances. In the age of online friends, we can make unexpected ones if we approach things with an open heart. Edward continually finds people interesting, and takes emotional risks despite having had several terrible heartbreaks in his life. The joys can that can be found in hard times leap out, as does the importance of being open to possibilities and saying yes to things. A little gem.
Review by Bethan
August 20, 2019
The Way to the Sea – the Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary by Caroline Crampton
Hardback, Granta, £16.99, out now
The Isle of Grain, Deadman’s Island, Bedlam’s Bottom, Shivering Sands. There are strange and evocative names scattered over this liminal place, the Thames Estuary. The Way to the Sea is a readable and engaging tour of this diverse and often mysterious landscape.
Starting at the head of the river, Crampton travels the length of the river telling both her own story and the river’s as she goes. Her parents sailed to Britain from South Africa. They moored in St Katherine’s Docks, just over the river from the Riverside Bookshop, and then settled in the UK. As a child it was normal for the family to travel from Kent in the own boat, docking upriver for a weekend away. She captures the sensory experiences of the river, its distinctive smells, its mud and sudden fogs. Some of the mystery of the estuary comes from communities that seem to be outside the mainstream of British life, either by choice or circumstance.
Some of the stories she tells are relatively well known, like the highly explosive wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery which sunk in 1944. Monitored remotely by river authorities, if it were to explode it would cause widespread damage. Lesser known stories also pop up, including the RSPB takeover of former Ministry of Defence land at Rainham Marshes. Easily accessible by train from central London, visitors can now see rare birds (and if you are lucky, a weasel) amid the ruined shooting ranges and pylons (https://www.rspb.org.uk/reserves-and-events/reserves-a-z/rainham-marshes/).
Crampton is excellent at pulling interesting fiction and non-fiction references into her narrative. It was a pleasure to be reminded of Thames fiction including Phillip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, and Richard Jefferies’ After London. Joseph Conrad is often cited uncritically in discussions of the Thames Estuary, and it is excellent that Crampton gives proper space to Chinua Achebe’s 1975 lecture ‘An Image of Africa’ which, as Crampton writes, “skewers the racist assumptions that pepper Conrad’s writings” (p.94). The Way to the Sea is a useful companion piece to Rachel Lichtenstein’s Estuary, which takes a more artistic but equally interesting approach. Lichtenstein’s book references Robert Macfarlane’s excellent film, the Wild Places of Essex, which is another useful watch to complement this book (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qsxy5).
The personal and historic photos which break up the text help make this a quick and interesting read. If you have an interest in the Thames, past or present, this is a satisfying addition to your library.
Review by Bethan
July 20, 2019
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Hardback, Picador, £16.99, out now
Ted Chiang is perhaps best-known outside science fiction circles as the writer of the short story on which the 2016 film Arrival was based. Inside those circles, he’s the much-praised winner of a dozen sci fi writing awards – an incredibly high hit rate for a guy who’s only published seventeen short stories. This, his second collection, compiles his noughties-teens output and two originals in a single thought-provoking volume.
The deeply imaginative worlds Chiang creates within, philosophical questions he explores and his commitment to the teasing out of conundrums both moral and scientific have drawn comparisons to Borges and Calvino; given this, it would be tempting to say that these stories are in danger of “transcending science fiction”. But that would be to play down the fact that each of them revels in the genre. They are, unapologetically, part of that canon; the title story is effectively a meditation on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, while references to tech innovation, alien worlds and near-futures abound.
In this way, it’s doubly impressive that Chiang’s use of oft-trodden genre tropes yields such new and innovating results, ones that feel extremely pertinent to the present day – at times, terrifyingly so. It helps that he is, in an unflashy way, a master craftsman. His chameleonic style alters cleverly to service the needs of each story – our narrators are variously un-humanoid beings with recognisably human feelings of existential angst, fabric merchants from ancient Iraq, and an omniscient, unaffected third person narrator, recounting a truly distressing tale of Frankensteinien neglect and anonymous cruelty.
His ability to build suspense, meanwhile, is subtle and brilliant. In Exhalation our mysterious non-human storyteller’s perfectly plausible withholding of information as it tells its tale fuels our curiosity, its peculiar world introduced to us piece by piece. Reading The Lifecycle of Software Objects, meanwhile, is like watching a small child slowly crawl closer and closer to a cliff-edge. There’re shades of Michael Haneke in its blending of creeping dread and apparent mundanity, as well as in its dispassionate depictions of awful brutality; but it’s his ability to steadily crank up the unease well before any actual unpleasantness arrives that’s hugely impressive. And, because it’s fantastic sci-fi, it also takes place in an immersive world of just-on-the-horizon technological speculation (techulation?), feeling all the more grimly-plausible for that.
All-in-all, this is a collection that deserves to reach well outside of the sci-fi sphere – even if the stories themselves work inside it so adeptly.
Review by Tom
July 4, 2019
Unladylike Event
Our next event will be to celebrate the launch of Unladylike: A Grrl’s Guide to Wrestling by Heather Bandenburg, on 18th July.
Unladylike like follows the story of one unlikely woman wrestler and celebrates the relationship between feminism and wrestling. Read an extract here.
Heather will answer questions and sign your books.
This event is free but we have limited space so get your tickets now.
June 25, 2019
Stocktake this Thursday 27 June
We will be opening late on Thursday 27 June, after a short closure for our annual stocktake. Hopefully we’ll be open in the afternoon!
June 19, 2019
Big Sky by Kate Atkinson
Hardback, DoubleDay, £20, out now
“Nadja Wilk and her sister, Katja. They came from Gdansk, where they had worked in a hotel. Real people with real lives, not just ciphers for the tabloid newspapers”. Big Sky, the latest instalment of Atkinson’s series featuring private detective Jackson Brodie, starts with Nadja and Katja. Ready to leave their hotel jobs for better chances in the UK, they Skype with impressive businessman Mark Price who promises good placements and offers to pay for their travel. But: “The office was a fake. Anderson Price associates was a fake, Mark Price was a fake. Only the Rolex was real”. As always, Atkinson nails the nature of violence against women in this funny, smart and devastating book. She deals with hard subjects brilliantly, giving characters who elsewhere might simply be exploited victims both relatable features and agency.
We find Jackson looking after with his 13-year-old son while taking various low rent private eye jobs. Jackson is still for justice, though not always in a strictly legal way. He remains focussed on the unwanted and uncared-about. The book’s epigraph is revealing. Malcolm X: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who is for or against it”.
Many memorable characters from previous books turn up, which felt to me like a huge treat. Skilfully plotted, this gripping mystery sees many strands and lives woven together. A woman is murdered in her garden; a young girl hitch-hikes a lift from a lonely sea front; an interesting teenage boy looks after his young half-sister in between shifts at a ghost train and failing seaside theatre. Jackson remains an engaging commentator on the meaning of unexpected events. Watching a mother beat the living daylights out of someone who may have a clue about her missing child: “Jackson glanced around to see how the rest of the café’s denizens were reacting to this, but they all seemed to have quietly disappeared. Jackson didn’t blame them. Wives and mothers, he thought, you never wanted to get on the wrong side of them. Madonnas on steroids”.
Atkinson’s sentences are both completely precise and deceptively easy to read. I think it must take a great deal of work to produce something that seems so effortless.
There are two good dogs in this book.
Review by Bethan
June 11, 2019
Saltwater x Riverside x Grapevine Event
Pictures by Eleanor Wyld from our amazing night in collaboration with The Grapevine Zine to celebrate the launch of Saltwater, the debut novel by Jessica Andrews.
The event was sold out and very busy with readings from Jessica, Zeba Talkhani, Megan Nolan, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Lucy Freedman and Catherine Madden.
June 8, 2019
Everything in its Place – First Loves and Last Tales by Oliver Sacks
Hardback, Picador, £20, out now
This collection of essays from great science writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, is a real treat for anyone who loved his previous works.
As with his other books, the essays are readable, beautifully written and engaging. Known for his books The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia and Migraine among others, he also wrote about his own life. His insatiable curiosity shines through, and it’s clear that this carried on throughout his long and interesting life. He covers a wide range of topics, from the joy of swimming to his love of libraries, to a piece about ferns, and the life of Humphrey Davy.
He addresses the ethics of writing about people who are or have been unwell in a clear and helpful way. His book review of Michael Greenberg’s A Summer of Madness raises the question, as Greenberg is writing about his teenage daughter Sally’s first experience of mania. Writing the book “… was not a quick or easy decision for either Sally or her father. Greenberg did not grab a pen and start writing during his daughter’s psychosis in 1996 – he waited, he pondered, he let the experience sink deep into him. He had long, searching discussions with Sally, and only more than a decade later did he feel that he might have the balance, the perspective, the tone that Hurry Down Sunshine would need. Sally, too, had come to feel this, and urged him not only to write her story but to use her real name, without camouflage. It was a courageous decision, given the stigma and misunderstanding that still surround mental illness of any kind” (p. 182).
My favourite essay is Travels with Lowell, an account of a road trip he takes with photojournalist Lowell Handler to find out more about Tourette’s. In the course of the trip, they visit La Crete, a Canadian town where many of the population have Tourette’s and town life accommodates this. I loved his observation after visiting: “There is, among Orthodox Jews, a blessing to be said on witnessing the strange: one blesses God for the diversity of his creation, and one gives thanks for the wonder of the strange. This, it seemed to me, was the attitude of the people of La Crete to the Tourette’s in their midst. They accepted it not as something annoying or insignificant, to be reacted to or overlooked, but as a deep strangeness, a wonder, an example of the absolute mysteriousness of Providence” (p. 106).
This is a deeply humane and engrossing collection. Read this and then read Gratitude, a book for all time (https://theriversideway.wordpress.com/2016/06/19/gratitude-by-oliver-sacks/).
Review by Bethan
