January 8, 2020
by Team Riverside
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
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January 5, 2020
by Team Riverside
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
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January 4, 2020
by Team Riverside
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
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December 3, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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December 3, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
Posted in Fiction, News, Nice things, Non fiction, Signed Copies |
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November 13, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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November 2, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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October 30, 2019
by Team Riverside
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.
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October 5, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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September 8, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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September 7, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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August 26, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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August 20, 2019
by Team Riverside
We will be open on Monday 26 August from 11am to 5pm.
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August 20, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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July 20, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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July 4, 2019
by Team Riverside
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.
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June 25, 2019
by Team Riverside
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!
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June 19, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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June 11, 2019
by Team Riverside
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.
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June 8, 2019
by Team Riverside
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
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May 20, 2019
by Team Riverside
Excellent limited edition Lord of the 
Rings notebooks from Moleskine are now in stock.
The large size features an illustration of 13th January 3019 – ‘The Company reaches West-gate of Moria at nightfall’.
The small gold size notebook cover shows 23rd September 3018 – ‘Frodo leaves Bag End’.
The small grey size one shows 2nd March 3019 – ‘The Ents march on Isengard’.
All editions come with a Cirth Alphabet insert.
Get your lists made, your poetry written, your work done: “It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”
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May 20, 2019
by Team Riverside
We will be open on Bank Holiday Monday, 27th May, for all your book needs… special opening times apply, 11am to 6pm.
Hope to see you then!
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May 16, 2019
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Sceptre, £18.99, out now
This wonderful book, marketed as fiction but often feeling like memoir, tells the story of a young woman who moves to New York City in the late 1970s looking for adventure and to write her first novel.
Following the main character S.H. in her progress is immersive, we are there when she moves into her small apartment and hears her neighbour chanting manically through the wall. We eat her meals with her and meet her new friends.
This narrated past from the speaker’s position as an older woman in almost present-day America is also mixed with two other texts, her diary from the time in present tense, and the novel she is writing – a mystery about two teenage detectives.
The three sections work well together and are all compelling in their own ways. Seeing the character develop the novel is especially exciting for people interested in the writing process or those who write themselves and including both the diary from the time and the reflections of the older woman creates some insightful moments of the past and the present interacting. This is one of the things the book does very well, meditating on memories and how we relate to them differently as we get older, as well as the role writing plays in this. Hustvedt also thinks about how significant moments are recorded in our minds as they happen and how some are forgotten. About her friend Whitney the older S.H. says:
“I loved her then. I love her now, but while I was in the throes of living it was impossible for me to know whether a moment would be significant or whether it would vanish into oblivion along with so much else.” p.300
Whitney, who we meet as a vibrant young woman when S.H does is one of the characters who transcends the different time periods in the book as we hear about her life as she grows older with S.H.
The book also has a strong feminist message, Hustvedt and her character rail against the so called Great Men, academics and artists who command people’s respect while patronising women and stealing their work.
There is also a very satisfying moment at a dinner party where S.H. encounters a condescending older man.
The man says he does not want to hear any more “philosophies from female nether-regions”, and then asks the protagonist, “I don’t suppose you have anything to add to this venerable debate, my dear?”
She begins her reply with, “You have made a statement, but have delivered it as if it were a question. I find the technique dubious, if not reprehensible…” (p.234-5) and goes on to take him down philosophically in a way that one would usually articulate as a type of staircase wit. It was brilliant to read anyway and cemented the tenderness I felt for the character.
Hustvedt’s New York City is exciting and her characters warm and comforting, I loved being in their world and was sad to leave it at the end. As an older woman her observations about the present day are poignant and I also enjoyed the little illustrations throughout.
Review by Cat
Posted in Fiction, Reviews |
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May 7, 2019
by Team Riverside
For the Harry Potter fan with their own spells to write, these gorgeous Moleskine Limited Edition notebooks are now in store.
Choose from the Marauders’ Map or Wingardium Leviosa.
“Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it”.
Supplement with The Art of Harry Potter – Mini Book of Graphic Design if you are in the zone!
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May 6, 2019
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Head of Zeus, £14.99, out now
This excellent supernatural horror mystery opens in 1913 with a 16-year-old girl in rural Suffolk seeing her father leaving the house with an ice pick and hammer. Maud runs after him shouting for help. Too late, she witnesses her father brutally murder someone in the lane outside. But was she really just a witness? And how did she know to shout for help before the attack?
Flash forward 50 years. The press have decided to dig deeper into the story, partly inspired by her father’s paintings. Now cult classics in the 1960s, he painted them in while in a secure hospital following the murder. At least one journalist thinks Maud may have committed the murder herself.
Something about Suffolk lends itself to gothic murder stories, and Wakenhyrst draws effectively on East Anglian myths. Mysterious nature surrounds the isolated gentleman’s residence where Maud and her father live, with the Fens as present in the book as any other character (including Chatterpie the magpie who is the cover star).
Paver explores the lives of women and girls in this remote setting, from maids to ladies of the house. While class separates individuals, women’s solid societal position as less clever, less important, less human than men prevails. Wakenhyrst is psychologically convincing, examining the ground between madness and possible supernatural influences. How people interpret events is interesting, as is the value given to each interpretation: “The rules governed every moment of Maud’s day and there were two different kinds. One sort belonged to the lower orders: it was called superstition and Father detested it, which meant that the servants observed their rules behind his back… The other rules were Father’s – and much stronger, as he had God on his side”.
The tale is creepy and chilling, but thought-provoking. It would lend itself to a firelit room with creaky floorboards, though I enjoyed it on a sunny day outdoors. It’s not cosy crime, with some of the plot being truly horrifying. We have one signed copy left of this physically beautiful book, so get it while it’s hot.
Review by Bethan
Posted in Fiction, News, Reviews, Signed Copies |
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May 4, 2019
by Team Riverside
Gorgeous new signed copies in…
Michelle Paver – Wakenhyrst
Robert Macfarlane – Underland
Marlon James – Black Leopard Red Wolf
Max Porter – Lanny
Elizabeth Macneal – The Doll Factory
Craig Melvin – The Belle Hotel
Posted in News, Nice things, Signed Copies, Special Stuff |
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May 4, 2019
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Hamish Hamilton, £20, out now
Underland is an exploration of the subterranean world, and Macfarlane interprets this widely. He ranges from a glacier in the middle of a warm mountain range to the tunnels under Paris, from mines under Yorkshire to London Bridge (which is hollow and can be climbed through by those in the know). He does not shy away from difficult subjects, dealing with war crimes and human rights violations in European caves and crevasses, as well as the Anthropocene and climate change.
It is always a pleasure to read a new Robert Macfarlane book. Here at the Riverside Bookshop we loved The Lost Words (see https://theriversideway.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/the-lost-words-by-robert-macfarlane-and-jackie-morris/). He writes beautifully and manages to include very diverse fields of knowledge without alienating the reader or appearing like a dilettante. His account of visiting an underground lab exploring dark matter gave me the first explanation of this phenomenon I felt even vaguely able to understand (p. 56). He can make mysterious landscapes vivid, as when walking in the Julian Alps: “Holes in the trunks of the beeches hold micro-gardens of moss and ferns. Dwarf pines spread between the boulders of the streambank. Harebells, gentians and edelweiss star the understorey. Little trout flick as quick shadows in the bigger stream-pools. Towering above us are scree-slopes and bone-white summits jagging several hundred feet up from the ridge line” (p. 231).
Happily for me, Underland also includes much ice and snow. There are reflections on physical culture and the impact of global warming: “There is something obscene both to the ice and its meltings – to its vastness and vulnerability. The ice seems a ‘thing’ that is beyond our comprehension to know but within our capacity to destroy” (p. 363). This reminded me of some of the things I liked about the Library of Ice by Nancy Campbell (https://theriversideway.wordpress.com/2018/12/02/the-library-of-ice-by-nancy-campbell/).
The book is as much about challenging our experiences of time and space as anything else. How do we find language that will be understood for certain thousands of years from now, in order to warn those in the far future of our sealed tombs of nuclear waste? Do we carve warnings into rock in English? Macfarlane notes that only about 1,000 people read Cuneiform on Earth now, where once it communicated powerful proclamations across vast spaces – how do we know English will still be understood? Should there be ceramic tiles with pictograms? Showing what? He asks us to expand our thinking: “…a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us” (p. 15).
Fans of Macfarlane’s writing on mountains, lost ways and obscure words have a treat in store with Underland. A bonus for the curious and engaged.
Review by Bethan
Posted in News, Non fiction, Reviews |
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May 2, 2019
by Team Riverside
We are open Bank Holiday Monday 
6th May 2019
11.00-18.00
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April 23, 2019
by Team Riverside
The bookshop is putting on an event in collaboration with The Grapevine Zine to celebrate the launch of Saltwater, the debut novel by Jessica Andrews.
Jess will read from Saltwater and there will be other readings from:
Zeba Talkhani, Megan Nolan, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Lucy Freedman and Catherine Madden.
The event is free but ticketed as there is limited space in our shop.
Get your tickets here.
Posted in Fiction, London, News, Nice things, Special Stuff |
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April 23, 2019
by Team Riverside
Hardback, John Murray, £16.99, out now
Heiða details a year in the life of a solo woman sheep farmer hard by the highlands of Iceland. Heiða Ásgeirsdóttir took over her family farm at Ljótarstaðir in her early 20s, when her father became ill. She is an environmental activist and poet as well, and during the year considers standing for Parliament for the Left-Green Movement (she is already a local councillor). From the farm, she can see highland pastures, a glacier, mountains. This is an engrossing quick dispatch from an unusual life.
Volcanic eruptions as well as extreme cold and snow on her remote farm make for hard work. Her commitment to her 500 sheep and other animals is evident, and leads to both her extreme work ethic and her worries when things go wrong. She is clear about the essential role farmers like her can play in conservation: “Icelandic agriculture is very close to my heart, no less than environmental conservation. As I see it, the two are totally intertwined since the farmer is entirely dependent on nature for his survival and has a duty, in my view more than in any other profession, to defend it by any means possible” (p. 161). Sometimes she works co-operatively with other farmers and family members, and you begin to understand how such working is essential to survival in extraordinary places.
She is resisting construction of a power plant near her farm, which would involve flooding part of her land. She resists despite the anxiety it causes her: “In these kinds of circumstance, I feel as if a knife has been thrust between my ribs – almost as if I’m having a heart attack” (p. 128). She also talks usefully about surviving depression: “now I also began to come to better terms with the things that I couldn’t fix, and to forgive myself for making mistakes…” (p. 273).
She notes that the farm has been worked since the 12th century. Refreshingly, she expresses her commitment to the land alongside her stance against discrimination: “I can’t bear prejudice based on skin colour, race, sexual orientation, nationality” (p. 249).
When Heiða gets to relax, it sounds heavenly, but you are clear it is hard won: “A winter’s night with a book is the best. Surrounded by stillness in my own mountain palace, lit up by stars and the moon; and maybe by the world’s most spectacular display of Northern Lights” (p. 205). There are memorable animals, including her cat Huggan (Solace) who can’t stand the smell of sheep and herds mice into the house. Also her excellent German Shepherd puppy Fífill (Dandelion).
The book is likely to be popular – Heiða has been interviewed in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/14/heida-asgeirsdottir-icelandic-shepherd-new-biography) and will appear at the Hay Festival. I wish they had done an illustrated version of this book, as the places and people are so intriguing. This will appeal to lovers of nature writing, to those who love to read about completely different lives, to anyone who wants a story of women doing it for themselves and to other activists who find themselves at the forefront when they already have vastly too much to do…
Review by Bethan
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