The Riverside Bookshop blog
Dear loyal customers of Riverside Bookshop,
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!
Love from,
The Team at Riverside Bookshop
Hardback, Faber and Faber, £14.99, out now
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.
Review by Bethan
Paperback, Sceptre, £9.99, out now
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.
Review by Bethan
Our bestsellers this week:
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osmon
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda
Hardback, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99, out now
The Lost Spells is the beautiful small sister of the Riverside favourite The Lost Words (https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2017/10/03/the-lost-words-by-robert-macfarlane-and-jackie-morris/).
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.
Review by Bethan
Granta, Hardback Fiction, £12.99, out now
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.
Review by Phoebe
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.
Get them before they are gone!
Hardback, Nosy Crow, £25, out now
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.
For autumn, a spider poem by Bashō:
With what voice,
And what song would you sing, spider,
In this autumn breeze?
The Britta Teckentrup illustrations are vivid and engaging. We at Riverside are massive fans of her work, especially the stunning Under the Same Sky (https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2018/01/16/under-the-same-sky-by-britta-teckentrup/).
This is a book to keep and share forever. It’s big, and heavy, and perfect for curling up with on a chilly autumn evening.
Review by Bethan
Paperback, Serpent’s Tail, £17.99, out now
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.
Review by Bethan
Our bestsellers this week:
Reni Eddo-Lodge – Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People About Race
Delia Owens – Where the Crawdads Sing
Phoebe Stuckes – Platinum Blonde
Zadie Smith – Intimations
Bernardine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other
We’re very excited to have signed copies of Platinum Blonde by Phoebe Stuckes and published by Bloodaxe Books.
Order from us by phone or email and get free delivery within the UK.
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.
Review by Phoebe
Paperback, Penguin, £6.99, out now
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.
Review by Bethan
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!
Hardback, Granta, £16.99, out now
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.
Review by Phoebe
This week’s bestsellers…
Sophie Ward – Love and Other Thought Experiments
Oyinkan Braithwate – My Sister the Serial Killer
Elena Ferrante – The Lying Life of Adults
Riku Onda – The Aosawa Murders
Hamish Hamilton, Hardback Fiction, £12.99, out now
An unsettling new vision from the author of The Water Cure. On the day every woman gets their first period they are assigned either a blue or a white ticket, the first signalling that they will not have children, the second indicating that they must. Calla is given a blue ticket, but later in her life she develops an intense, forbidden longing for a child. When she acts on this urge she is thrown into conflict with a mysterious and threatening regime that pushes her onto a journey into exile.
Blue Ticket takes its place in the pantheon of feminist dystopian novels, the women are central to the narrative, their dissent is not just prohibited, it is dangerous. Mackintosh deftly explores the boundaries between natural urges and the systems that constrain them. Although Mackintosh’s prose is heavy with description and poetry, I could see and touch all that she described, Blue Ticket is also surprisingly fast-paced. I found myself holding my breath towards the end, waiting to discover Calla’s fate.
Whilst the questions of the book are weighty, Mackintosh avoids addressing these to the reader directly, Blue Ticket is above all an intensely poetic exploration of freedom, choice and desire.
Review by Phoebe
Our opening hours for September will be:
Weekdays – 10am to 4.30pm
Saturday – 10am to 6pm
Sunday – 11am to 5pm
Our bestsellers this week…
Zadie Smith – Intimations
Lauren Wilkinson – American Spy
Kiley Reid – Such a Fun Age
Matt Haig – The Midnight Library
Riku Onda – The Aosawa Murders
Hi All! This bank holiday weekend our opening hours will be:
Saturday: 10am to 5pm
Sunday: 11am to 4pm
Monday: Closed
Hardback, Granta, £16.99, out now
Poet, author and essayist Ben Lerner’s latest novel, soon to be out in paperback, is as absorbing, dryly humourous and intellectually incisive as ever.
Lerner’s work is often described as autofictional, and in this instance the coming-of-age story of Adam Gordon, a gifted high-school student in Topeka Kansas during the ‘90s (like Lerner) and budding poet (like Lerner) whose parents are psychologists (like Lerner’s) seems to hew close to his lived experience. As in his excellent previous novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, his general approach involves laying a forensic bedrock of reality, from the references to and even cameos by historical figures like Bob Dole, Paul Manaforte, Fred Phelps and Tupac to discussions of real works of art and films, institutions and global events. In this recognisably concrete world, Adam’s encounters with his violent “bro” friends, figures of the nascent alt-right movement, Westboro Baptist Church and developing field of psychology are weighted with the reality of an anthropological study, or longform reportage.
Disquietingly convincing, too, are his investigations into the persuasive power of words. The journeys of he and his parents enfold psychoanalysis, poetry, rap, political debate and constant internecine argument, and the weaponising of rhetoric – the verbal deftness of the point made often trumping the veracity of what’s said, in a queasy presaging of modern political discourse – tends to be the order of the day. In this way, young Adam Gordon’s micro-level experiences reflect the coming world of alternative facts and virulent division towards which he, and his country, are being pulled.
Which is all interesting and vital enough, but Lerner adds to this an occasional grain of the surreal which harks straight back to his poetic beginnings. There are slippages between time periods and points of view, and visual motifs – paintings, hospital rooms – that return at odd, flashing moments, as if the novel is beset by glitches. This feels like a very modern form of surrealism, less dreamlike flight of fancy than the kind of punch-drunk informational overload brought on by a heavy internet binge. In this way, the abstract and concrete sit comfortably and beguilingly together, in a work which is just as adept at communicating bursts of feeling as it is at adroitly analysing. Essential modern reading.
Review by Tom
Paperback, Sort Of Books, £9.99, out now
My favourite in this collection of essays is ‘In Quinhagak’, where Scottish nature writer and poet Kathleen Jamie travels to a small village by the Bering Sea, mainly home to Yup’ik people. She makes genuine connections with people she spends time with there, noticing different ways of experiencing time, and alternative ways of relating to history and land. She finds the Yup’ik people’s ownership of their land, and care for it, intriguing, contrasting it with the almost total private ownership of land in Scotland (p. 89).
In ‘Links of Noltland 1’, working alongside archaeologists on remote Orkney, Jamie gets to see Neolithic treasures near their original sites, including the famous Westray Wife (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_Wife). She is invited for dinner with a group at a colleague’s house. After dinner, “…the others were sprawled on their orange sofas watching some old Quentin Tarantino film on Netflix. They looked like the seals hauled out on the weedy shore. If seals could watch Netflix, they would” (p. 154). The humour throughout the book reminded me how much I loved her raucous poem The Queen of Sheba (https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/queen-sheba).
Inevitably, the climate emergency shadows everything. Jamie is thoughtful about it, and is not defeated. She notes impacts observed by people living on land they have been familiar with for generations. “We all know it. We can’t go on like this, but we wouldn’t go back either, to the stone ploughshare and the early death. Maybe that’s why the folk here don’t embrace their Neolithic site much. It’s all too close to the knuckle.” (p. 156). Early trips to Tibet, and memories of her mother and grandmother, make this a wide-ranging and always interesting collection.
As a huge fan of her previous collections Sightlines and Findings, I had asked for this for my birthday and was delighted to get it. Reflective, enjoyable, and enlightening.
Review by Bethan
Hardback, Granta, £12.99, out now
How does a person who cares (possibly too much) for others respond to their woes, and to the all-time-great woe of the climate emergency? Serious subjects are addressed with joy and great style in this funny and kind short novel from the author of The Department of Speculation.
Lizzie lives in New York with her husband and son. But this is regular Brooklyn, not glitzy, and her snapshots of ordinary life are a treat. She chats to Mohan, who’s working at the bodega. “I admire his new cat, but he tells me it just wandered in. He will keep it though because his wife no longer loves him”.
She’s a librarian with an academic background, and her old tutor (now hosting a podcast on climate change) hires her to answer podcast correspondence. The listeners’ emails are revealingly fraught or apocalyptic. A podcast guest “…signs off with a small borrowed witticism. ‘Many of us subscribe to the same sentiment as our colleague Sherwood Rowland. He remarked to his wife one night after coming home: “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.””
The perils of taking too much responsibility for others are teased out: Lizzie ends up taking a car service (taxi) she can’t really afford too often, as the driver’s business is failing and she doesn’t want him to suffer. How she eventually ends this entanglement is striking.
Offill has spoken candidly about trying to address a huge issue in a short novel. Being in relative denial about the impacts of the climate emergency is a fact of everyday life, so as a reader it’s interesting to watch Lizzie move away from ignoring it and towards acceptance of the situation. I agree with the Guardian interviewer who concluded: “At its core, the story asks: what happens after we start to pay attention?”. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/jenny-offill-interview – it was this interview that made me want to read the book, and also prompted me to finally read Stan Cohen’s States of Denial).
Enjoyable and relatable, but also very serious and relevant. A great short read with wisdom and heart.
Review by Bethan
Hello London Bridge! We have slightly adjusted our opening hours this week:
Weekdays:
10am to 4pm
Saturday: 10am to 5pm
Sunday: 11am to 4pm
Hardback, Macmillan, £14.99, out now
If you like your novels to take you to a series of elsewheres, and give you characters to get obsessed with, The Glass Hotel may be your perfect book.
It moves through striking settings: skyscraper Manhattan, a deluxe glass hotel in the Canadian wilderness, and a ship that the young and beautiful woman Vincent falls from as the novel opens. But who is Vincent, and why does she disappear? And why has someone etched in acid on the hotel lobby window “why don’t you swallow broken glass”?
Mandel has said that she wanted to write about the collapse of a too good to be true investment scheme, and those affected by it (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/04/emily-st-john-mandel-i-admire-novelists-who-are-pushing-the-form-forward-in-some-some). But the book is about our ability to delude ourselves more generally, to be able to carry on living with some level of knowledge of what is going on, but to be in denial about the true meaning of our actions until everything collapses. I had read Stan Cohen’s classic States of Denial just before reading this, and his themes of knowing and not knowing at the same time were echoed over and over in The Glass Hotel.
The Glass Hotel reflects the very different worlds an individual can occupy and move between. From poverty to wealth, abundance to ruin, work to permanent leisure. Vincent comments on the similarity between wealthy urban areas around the world after visiting Singapore and London, noting that they are a culture or nation of their own – “the kingdom of money”. One character, a former businessman, notices the world of shadows – people living in the margins compared to his more mainstream life. He sees people in Las Vegas holding up signs advertising ‘girls to your room in 20 mins’ (p.247). “He’d seen the shadow country, its outskirts and signs, he’d just never thought he’d have anything to do with it”.
It is also about how the people from your past might come back to haunt you, literally or figuratively.
The possibility of finding joy in difficult situations, and the value of resilience, recurs. Vincent’s brother Paul, meeting her after some time apart, notes: “He studied Vincent closely for signs of trouble, but she seemed like a reserved, put-together person, someone who’d conducted herself carefully and avoided the land mines. How did she get to be like that, and Paul like this?”.
I fell into this novel and didn’t want to stop till I’d finished.
Review by Bethan
Paperback, Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99, out now
This might be the best myster
y I’ve ever read. I immediately reread it and liked it even better second time around.
A prominent local family host a party at their smart villa in a seaside town in 1970s Japan. Seventeen people are poisoned and only one member of the family survives: teenage Hisako, a blind girl. Hisako claims that all she can remember is a blue room, and a flower.
Convinced that she is guilty of murder, a local police inspector tries for years to prove it. But an easier suspect takes his own life, and people start to move on. A gathering together of multiple forms of testimony helps to find an answer at last.
The Aosawa Murders is made up of witness accounts, stories and other ‘found’ testimony. You read along, almost as an investigator yourself, and the process is extraordinarily engrossing. It reminded me of the things I liked best about Graham Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, but ultimately it’s not really like anything else (https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2016/09/07/his-bloody-project-by-graeme-macrae-burnet/).
Riku Onda’s writing is beautiful and the translation seamless. The setting is so vivid it becomes a character in itself: “But the ocean here isn’t refreshing at all. Gazing at it doesn’t give you any sense of freedom or relief. And the horizon is always close, as if waiting for an opportunity to force its way onto land. It feels like you’re being watched, and if you dare look away for just a moment the sea might descend upon you.” (p. 14)
The need to reread immediately is a reflection of the intricate and satisfying plot. I suspected I could make more connections by having a second pass of the evidence, and I did.
The book literally gave me chills. There were a couple of moments where I gasped aloud. It’s both understated and electrifying and I’m still not sure how the author achieves this. The Aosawa Murders has opened up a whole world of Japanese crime writing for me. I went straight on to read The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada. I will never forget The Aosawa Murders.
Review by Bethan
Our bestselling books, from 7 July to today 21 July:
1. Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
2. Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People about Race – Reni Eddo-Lodge
3. My Name is Why – Lemn Sissay
4. Three Women – Lisa Taddeo
5. Talking to Strangers – Malcolm Gladwell
6. Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell
7. Black and British – David Olusoga
8. Machines Like Me – Ian McEwan
9. Normal People – Sally Rooney
10. City of Girls – Elizabeth Gilbert
11. Humankind: a Hopeful History – Rutger Bregman
12. Queenie – Candice Carty-Williams
13. Too Much and Never Enough – Mary L. Trump
14. Swimming in the Dark – Tomasz Jedrowski
15. Mouth Full of Blood – Toni Morrison
Paperback, Bloomsbury, £6.99, out now
Meesha has a loving family and a joyful and creative spirit, but she finds it hard to make friends. This latest picture book in Tom Percival’s Big Bright Feelings series deals with this common experience sensitively and with helpful practical suggestions.
Appropriate for infants and up, the gorgeous illustrations show how the world can be a little monochrome when we feel alone. Meesha makes her own toy friends out of bits and pieces, but finds that while they are very compliant, they are not much fun to play catch with!
The feelings of being alone in a crowd, and of lacking the skills to get involved with what other children are enjoying, are explored in an accessible way than many (including adults) will be able to relate to.
When someone takes a risk to come and talk to Meesha, will she be able to take a chance and involve him in her games? The author gives us handy hints: “… if you ever see someone who looks a little bit ‘on-their-own’, try to include them. Ask them what they like to do. You never know, it might be something that YOU love to do as well, and you might just have met your new best friend!”
A kind and useful book. If you like this, I also recommend Ruby’s Worry, an excellent book by the same author about getting help when the worry monster visits.
Review by Bethan
Paperback, Penguin, £9.99, out now 
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift” (p. 327). I came across Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and popular science and nature writer, through references to her earlier work Gathering Moss. She is the Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. Gathering Moss has been mentioned in literary reviews, in nature writing, in science writing, and on the thoughtful blog Brain Pickings (https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/13/gathering-moss-robin-wall-kimmerer/). Anything so niche, which appeals across such broad spectrum of readers, intrigued me.
I still haven’t managed to read Gathering Moss, mainly as it’s hard to find in the UK, but I am completely bowled over by her latest work, Braiding Sweetgrass. Wall Kimmerer shares her vast knowledge and wisdom about plants and the natural world and introduces a completely new (and yet also ancient) way of thinking about nature. She draws on her many roles: as a Native American, a mother, an observer, a scientist and a joyful activist.
She provides a refreshing and vital alternative approach to thinking about human and non-human life. Language is key here: for her, and the indigenous cultures she describes, every living thing is a who, not a what.
Her writing about specific engagements with nature is as engrossing as her big picture analysis, and often the two meet. As she and other volunteers gather to help salamanders across a busy road, so they will not be killed by passing cars, the second Gulf War begins. “Somewhere another woman looks out her window, but the formation of dark shapes in her sky is not a skein of spring geese returning” (p.349).
There is nothing fluffy or foolish about her coherent and radical ecology. “… it seems to me we humans have gifts in addition to gratitude that we might offer in return. The philosophy of reciprocity is beautiful in the abstract, but the practical is harder” (p. 238). She is ready to engage with the practical questions of how we live now, as a planet, as a species, as nations and as individuals.
Review by Bethan
We’re very excited to be back! Come and see us in London Bridge. 
We’re also happy to order books so give us a call or email.
