This is Your Time is a stunning new book by Ruby Bridges, who as a six-year-old in 1960 was the first black child to attend an all-white primary school in New Orleans.
The book is small in size but huge in meaning. Bridges talks about the hate she faced outside her school gates every day from white adults who wanted to keep segregation. There is a black and white photograph on every other page, including some truly shocking images. A tiny Ruby is escorted into school by four federal marshals; racist protesters hold up a black doll in a coffin; and images of police targeting civil rights demonstrators in 1963 and 2020.
But there are also hope and joy, friendship and solidarity, and great faith in young people. Bridges writes to young readers: “I am so inspired by you and by everyone out there making change happen. I know, and you must remember… what can inspire tomorrow often lies in our past”. She knows this because of her lifetime of work telling young people her story.
Ruby Bridges’ message of courage and friendship is essential for all people. A gift to the future from one whose courage helped shape the best of the present.
This excellent picture book has possibly my top back cover text ever: “There is a spot. It is the perfect spot to stand. But somewhere above there is also a rock. A rock from the sky”.
The Rock from the Sky is new from Jon Klassen, author of Riverside all-time-favourite the Hat Trilogy (https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2016/11/30/we-found-a-hat-by-jon-klassen/). There really is a rock from the sky with dramatic consequences (Chekhov’s rock, perhaps). Some characters will be familiar… I think this is one of the turtles from We Found a Hat. Although it may be a different turtle in a similar hat. It is hard to say.
There are shades of Wes Anderson in the title cards for each section. It is also stuffed with very quotable lines. The turtle picks a spot to stand in. “What do you think of my spot?” “Actually I have a bad feeling about it”. “A bad feeling?”. “Yes”.
Maud the guinea pig loves judo. She’s only just arrived at Kit’s house, as a surprise birthday present. But Kit’s other pets aren’t impressed – they’ve got a schedule to stick to and it doesn’t include her. One of them calls her a weirdo … but what is a weirdo, and is she one?
Luckily Maud happens upon the very cheerful Emily Brookstein, who tells her that “life’s too short not to be a weirdo”.
This excellent picture book has wonderful illustrations, colourful and joyous, by Magenta Fox. Zadie Smith is best known as a ground-breaking novelist and essayist (her book of essays, Intimations, has been one of our bestsellers of the last year). Nick Laird is a novelist and poet, also usually writing for adults.
A kind and ultimately happy book about embracing your differences and life being much more interesting for everyone as a result. Just lovely.
Real Life, the debut, Booker Prize shortlisted novel from American writer Brandon Taylor is a triumph. Real Life is a campus novel which follows Wallace, a gay black protagonist as he navigates the academic institution, a burgeoning romance and the fallout of childhood trauma. The novel takes place in a Midwestern university where Wallace is often singled out. Taylor’s depiction of racism on campus is uncompromising, a dinner party scene, in particular, reaches a striking and uncomfortable crescendo.
While reading this novel I was struck, not just by the story, by Taylor’s immense technical skill. Taylor’s prose is unparalleled, spare and focused, yet at times dreamlike, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf or Henry James. A section where the book moves, cinematically, from the protagonists present to his childhood in Alabama, took my breath away. I highly recommend this book to fans of James Baldwin and Donna Tartt, and I will be eagerly awaiting Brandon Taylor’s collection of short stories, published in June.
We are delighted to be open again, and we are looking forward to helping folks find books, cards and Moleskines here in London Bridge.
We have slightly revised opening hours for now:
Monday to Friday – 10am to 5pm
Saturday – 10am to 6pm
Sunday – 11am to 5pm
Please bear with us if we need to adjust these at short notice as we go forward. If you’re planning a special trip to London Bridge to see us, ring first.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us while we have been closed by sending lovely messages and buying from our storefront on bookshop.org. It has helped us stay cheerful and we hope to see you all in person soon.
We will be closed until the end of lockdown, and we will not be able to do ‘click and collect’.
Many thanks to all those who have sent good wishes. If you’d like to support us while we are closed, please consider buying books through our page on Bookshop.org – https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/theriversidebookshop. We get a percentage of the sale price, and your books are delivered direct to you.
We wish all of you the very best, and look forward to seeing you again when we are able to re-open.
We will be open for call/email and collect Tuesday 22 and Wednesday 23 December between 11am and 3pm.
If you have already ordered and paid for your items, you can turn up and collect at the door during these times.
If you want to buy items in stock in the shop you will need to call or email to check availability, then pay for them over the phone. You will then be able to collect them at the door during the times listed above. Please be patient if you have to wait at the door – we will get to you but you may have to wait while we finish dealing with another customer on the phone.
Thanks to everyone for your patience and kindness during this time. We have been so grateful for the good wishes and thoughts of our customers throughout this most difficult year. It’s helped us more than we can say.
thank you for your patience while we are closed today. The announcement of new restrictions in London means that we are not allowed to open to the public. We hope to provide an opportunity at least for customers to pick up orders during this week, and will post details here and on Instagram later, so please check back.
In the meantime, if you would like to check in about the status of an order you have made with us, or have any other queries, please do contact us on info@riversidebookshop.co.uk.
We wish every one of you all the best, and hope you stay as safe as you can.
A kingfisher sat on a riverside branch, so close that I could see blackblue feathers in the early morning light. I was in a London park, near where I live, last weekend. I was alone, with no special equipment or expertise, but I was paying attention to the river. The kingfisher hunched, and tidied itself up, and after a few minutes flew off when a runner came along.
If you have found yourself noticing nature more during this year, this book of essays by Melissa Harrison is for you. Compiled from her columns in the Times, in the early pieces Harrison is living in South London and gives great descriptions of the nature and wildlife of Tooting Bec Common. Who knew you could see a hobby flying over Lambeth? “There are pockets of South London that seem utterly rural: paths edged with cow parsley and dog roses and overhung by oaks through which the sunlight filters down, green-dappled and shifting” (p. 44).
Half way through the book, Harrison relocates to rural Suffolk, and a different kind of natural life. “There are baby rabbits everywhere right now, and sitting in my oak I watched an alert doe shepherd four kits out from the warren by the path to feed… The evening sun picks them out as they play, gold-edged and painterly: humble but quite lovely in the low, warm light” (p. 174). One of the things I love about The Stubborn Light of Things is that Harrison doesn’t say that it is easier or better to be a nature watcher in one place or the other. Her curious gaze finds things to wonder at in both places, a reminder that we only ever need to start where we are.
As readers of her gripping novels At Hawthorn Time and All Among the Barley will know, she is not afraid of addressing difficult things, and here she references the climate emergency and local campaigns to protect wildlife (for a review of one of her novels, see https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2015/05/24/at-hawthorn-time-melissa-harrison/).
After reading this, I found similar ideas in On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz (which I am half way through). Horowitz walks round her Manhattan city block with several different people who are expert at different things, and finds out how little we notice in the normal run of things (one of the people is expert at being a toddler and another is expert at being a dog – see https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/08/12/on-looking-eleven-walks-with-expert-eyes/).
Harrison’s popular lockdown podcast encouraged us to pay attention, and this book helps us do just that. Joanna Lisowiec’s exquisite illustrations and gorgeous cover art elevate a good read into a beautiful item.
unfortunately, in line with government guidelines, we will be closed from Thursday the 5th of November until further notice. If you wish to order from us in the meantime we can be found via our profile on bookshop.org here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/theriversidebookshop
Thank you for your continued support during this difficult time and we hope to be back with you soon!
Snow is an engrossing noirish mystery from the author of Blue Guitar and The Untouchable. It’s 1957 in County Wexford, and a priest is found dead and castrated in a snowbound country manor. Inspector Strafford, called to investigate, suspects a cover up may be in progress. He’s a Protestant from the upper classes of society, and class and religion affect everything that happens in this story. He is an appropriately lonely outsider, driven to get to the truth and wondering what he will do with it when he finds it.
Banville usually writes crime or mystery novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, including the superb Quirke mystery series. Snow is a must read for Quirke fans as some of those characters appear here. The sharp wit we expect from Banville/Black is evident here. “It had snowed continuously for two days, and this morning everything appeared to stand in hushed amazement before the spectacle of such expanses of unbroken whiteness on all sides. People said it was unheard of, that they had never known weather like it, that it was the worst winter in living memory. But they said that every year when it snowed, and also in years when it didn’t snow.” (p. 3)
There are several knowing nods to other crime fiction – Snow opens with a body in a library, for starters. But while it’s a proper mystery, this is not cosy crime. There is corruption, and hypocrisy, and Banville skewers these where he finds them. He is not afraid of tackling difficult themes. Isolation is not picturesque here, but it can be witty: “He had seen a robin yesterday, too, somewhere. It was the time of year for them. Christmas. Yule logs. Holly wreaths. Loneliness.” (p. 172).
Get this for a mystery-loving friend for Christmas, and read it sneakily yourself before wrapping it. Enjoy the atmospheric twilit cover while you’re at it.
The book’s subtitle is A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle. It is not grandiose or heavy, but rather an entertainingly written with focus sharply on those who have sewn textile art to tell stories.
Some stories were familiar and some completely unknown. Sewing features as part of war, propaganda, survival, protest.
The emotional connections between makers and their work emerge strongly. Particularly moving is the story of the Changi quilt, which Hunter visits at the Red Cross archive with a descendant of one of the makers. She notes that it was made by women prisoners of war in a Japanese camp in Singapore during the Second World War, to communicate with their men (who were held separately – see also https://changi.redcross.org.uk/).
Hunter is interesting on her own making, and is a “banner-maker, community textile artist and textile curator”. The book is partly memoir. Her frequent focus on activism in the text is a bonus.
I had not heard of the stories of women in Chile, who used the sewing of arpilleras (embroidery on burlap) to protest against the Pinochet dictatorship. “The arpilleras depicted domestic scenes of loss: a woman standing by herself in the doorway of her home, a family mealtime with one empty place. There were also exterior scenes: a marketplace with no food on its stalls, unemployed youngsters scavenging for cardboard to sell, policemen making an arrest, a tree with pictures of lost relatives instead of leaves all backgrounded by the Andes mountains and a shining sun or bright moon” (p. 155 – see also https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/history-of-quilting-arpilleras-made-by-chilean-women-to-protest-pinochet.html).
Threads of Life will send you off on a bunch of reading jags, and also make you search for images of the works discussed. An illustrated version of the book with colour plates would be wonderful, but in the absence of that get ready to be introduced to the stories behind intriguing sewn art from all over the world.
Superb illustrations of the natural world accompany poems or spells, to bring us closer to the non-human lives we live alongside. Morris’s The Snow Leopard remains one of my favourite books of all time (https://www.jackiemorris.co.uk/the-snow-leopard/). The images in the verses are as vivid. From snow hares to swifts, proper attention is paid. A hare runs through the snow: “Each long line of tracks a row of inkwells in the white”.
This art can act as a summoner, to bring these animals and plants into our everyday lives. If we don’t notice them, we miss out, and are less likely to act to protect them. The Lost Spells is a pleasure to fall into, despite its constant awareness of nature being under threat.
Happily, it doubles as a puzzle book – there’s a magic glossary at the back showing the animals and plants you can hunt for in the illustrations. You can hunt in real life too, as it is pocket size so that you can take it out and about with you, which is a delightful thought (even if you are curled up indoors staying warm). Just looking at the pictures will take you to another place. The perfect gift for a nature lover.
A genre-defying novel from the bestselling author of Convenience Store Woman, newly translated into English. Natsuki has spent her whole life not fitting in, failing to live up to the expectations of her family. She confides in her mysterious cousin Yuu and her toy hedgehog, Piyuut, who she believes is an emissary sent by the Magic Police on Planet Popinpobopia. But a tragic event during a family vacation in the wild Nagano Mountains sets Natsuki on a path of alienation, with catastrophic consequences.
Murata’s second novel in English deals with some of the same themes as her first, but while Convenience Store Woman asks how to rebel against familial and domestic structures, Earthlings asks if these structures are necessary at all. The events of the novel are shocking and unpredictable. The structure resembles that of a horror film, Natsuki’s traumatic experiences with a neglectful mother and an abusive teacher drive her deeper and deeper into a fantasy world where she is waiting to be collected by aliens from her home planet. She attempts to escape her family through a loveless marriage, but not even this can save her from their controlling influence. Her behaviour becomes erratic, even sadistic, and culminates in a bloody conclusion, involving her cousin, her husband and a return to the mountains.
Whilst I thought this was a steep departure from Convenience Store Woman, which I thoroughly enjoyed, this second novel in English confirms that Murata is a fantastically exciting writer and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.
We are delighted to have a bunch of lovely new Art Angels cards in store. Some offer great views of London, and others focus on the natural world. We particularly like these two local scenes.
This gorgeous anthology of animal poems for children has just arrived, and it is a complete joy. There’s a poem for every day, varying from the funny to the serious, and the short to the reasonably epic. There are poets here I recognise and many that I do not. This book is ostensibly for children, but like the best children’s books is really for all humans.
This is an extraordinary and moving book, finding women’s hidden histories in the archives. Hartman makes the invisible visible, in many cases literally with vivid images that will stick in your mind long after you’ve finished reading. Photos, newspaper clippings, and contemporary documents let you see for yourself the stories of women refusing to live like slaves, and striving for freedom and joy.
Focussing on young black women in America in the early twentieth century, Hartman uses a vast range of archival material, and draws out the words and voices of those women wherever she can. Her approach is creative and hugely engaging, and you can tell it’s going to be something different from the cast of characters listed at the start of the book. Included are “Mabel Hampton: Chorine, lesbian, working-class intellectual, and aspiring concert singer” and “The Chorus: All the unnamed young women of the city trying to find a way to live and in search of beauty”. Some of the content is inevitably quite distressing. There is deprivation and glamour, imprisonment and rebellion, servitude and love.
The book’s subtitle is Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, and the lives of the women we encounter reveal the personal cost of social injustice and change. In an interview about writing the book, Hartman said she asked herself: “What is it like to imagine a radically different world, or to try to make a beautiful life in a situation of brutal constraint?” (https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives/). It’s not like anything else I’ve ever read. The closest thing I’ve found (and also excellent) for revealing hidden women in the archive is Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes (https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15502.html).
Michelle Alexander, author of the seminal book The New Jim Crow, rightly calls Wayward Lives “… a startling, dazzling act of resurrection”. This is exactly what it is. Stunning.
Jonathon Cape Vintage, Paperback, Fiction, £14.99, out now
Vesta Gull lives by herself, dependent on her dog Charlie for company, she feels alienated from the people in local town, she is seemingly destined to spend the rest of her life alone, until she discovers a threatening note in the woods and her world is transformed. ‘Her name was Magda, nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.’
Moshfegh’s other novels such as My Year of Rest and Relaxation seem to be inspired by writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, but Death In Her Hands is an altogether different adventure, a mystery in the mode of Shirley Jackson. In this case the ghosts vividly inhabit Vesta’s imagination, she is haunted by the voice of her controlling late husband and by the dead body of the girl she believes is lying in the woods. The people she imagines, such as ‘Blake’ the author, she thinks, of the note are often as real as the townspeople she encounters, creating an unsettlingly fragile boundary between real events and Vesta’s imagination.
As a fan of Moshfegh’s writing I found this to be an interesting foray into the mystery genre, Moshfegh twists the reader’s expectations all the way up to the novel’s horrifying and brilliant conclusion.
This is a cheerful picture book about a small girl’s mission to share her love of space. Rocket is a stargazer who lives in a town, and is determined that folks where she lives should come to the park to watch the meteor shower.
Rocket’s brother Jamal is lovely but he’s always looking down at his phone… like everyone else, he needs to look up!
With a shout out to the legendary Mae Jemison, Look Up! is a great way to show primary children how exciting space can be, and that it’s available to everyone. The enthusiasm in the book is infectious, helped by the lively and fun illustrations. I particularly liked the astronaut cat who appears on every page. I’ve already bought three copies as presents, and I’m pretty sure these won’t be the last.
We’re very happy to have Luan Goldie’s new book Homecoming in stock – and thanks to Luan for dropping by to sign the paperback of her Nightingale Point!
Rebecca Solnit’s latest work is a slim volume of memoir recounting her experience of living alone in San Francisco. Through the lens of her own journeys and interactions, Solnit takes us through subjects such as the art world, environmentalism, gendered violence, gentrification, and the writer’s own struggle to have her voice heard.
In some ways Solnit treads similar ground to her previous works, such as Wanderlust and Men Explain Things To Me, however her personal insight into these subjects is invaluable. I found her perspective on the changing landscape of San Francisco particularly interesting.
As always, Solnit’s prose is measured, although the main focus of the book is on how women are silenced, Solnit arms her reader with information and hope. She writes often of her friends, and how these connections have sustained her personally and professionally. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in feminism, writing and activism.
