Category: News

  • David Bowie Is: V&A exhibition catalogue

    Museum exhibition catalogues are probably purchased more out of a sense of self-improving duty rather than pure pleasure, but the accompanying volume to the V&A’s blockbuster Bowie exhibition (until 11 August) is essential reading for fans – and it seems everyone’s a fan since the surprise comeback – of the man who defined an era…

  • Richard III: biographies and classic crime

    The surprise reappearance of Richard III, dug up in a Leicester car park, is a timely opportunity to try and disinter the truth about a king portrayed as a Machiavellian villain by Shakespeare. “We have to concede the curved spine was not Tudor propaganda, but we need not believe the chronicler who claimed Richard was…

  • Foreign Bodies

    To echo this week’s triumphant Booker speech by Hilary Mantel, you wait years for a Riverside blog on foreign crime fiction and then two turn up at once. But Radio 4’s scrutiny of European literary detectives in the weeks ahead cannot go unmentioned, and the station’s dramatisation of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s series featuring…

  • Halloween at the Riverside Bookshop

    Jeremy Dyson’s The Haunted Book – an account of real-life ghost-hunting from the member of the League of Gentleman – is the latest volume out in time for Halloween. Our other flesh-creeping picks include Susan Hill’s new ghost story, Dolly, and a fresh edition of The Mist in the Mirror; an anthology of the macabre…

  • Andrea Camilleri: Inspector Montalbano

    THE Scandinavian invasion has defined crime fiction in recent years as we embraced chilly, bleak and ingeniously gruesome novels from Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. Perhaps readers are now ready for a warmer crime climate. Just as Mankell’s Wallander novels benefited from TV adaptations, 87-year-old Andrea Camilleri’s enjoying a sales boost for his…

  • Winter Journal: Paul Auster

    Signed Copies We’ve still got a few signed copies of the New York author’s latest non-fiction work in hardback (£17.99) – a perfect gift for Auster aficionados. Thirty years after The Invention of Solitude, the 65-year-old has written another memoir, this time examining life through the history of his body – pleasure, pain, eating, sleeping…

  • Pat Barker: Toby’s Room

    We still have signed copies of this acclaimed new novel from Man Booker Prize winner Pat Barker. The author of the Regeneration trilogy returns to themes of trauma, friendship and art’s depiction of First World War suffering in Toby’s Room, a sequel (and prequel) to 2007’s Life Class.

  • Zadie Smith: NW

    Long awaited new novel that pays attention to the class issues in working-class north London,  comes signed by the Author! Only in the Riverside Bookshop.

  • Bring Up the Bodies: Hilary Mantel

    Sequels to Booker Award Winners do not come along often so we are not going to pass up the opportunity to point out the follow up to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.  Bring Up the Bodies, the second part of what it now to be a trilogy, has landed on the shelves.  Where it is not…