The Riverside Bookshop blog
So excited to have all these new signed copies in the shop…
Jessie Greengrass – The High House
Jeremy Atherton Lin – Gay Bar
Emily St. John Mandel – Sea of Tranquility
Maddie Mortimer – Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
Catherine Prasifka – None of This is Serious
Laura Price – Single Bald Female
Ali Smith – Companion Piece
Nina Stibbe – One Day I Shall Astonish the World
Douglas Stuart – Young Mungo
Charmaine Wilkerson – Black Cake
Hardback, Picador, £14.99, out now
Three people, separately and at different points over three hundred years, experience an anomaly. In the middle of their ordinary lives, there is an instant of blackness, a violin, a strange sound. Then everything reverts to normal. One of these is an exile from England in Canada in 1812; one a novelist visiting Earth on a book tour; one is Vincent, a young woman walking through a wilderness. Also linking them is the detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts from the 25th century, who is investigating this glitch in time and space.
Sea of Tranquility follows St. John Mandel’s outstanding novel The Glass Hotel (see https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2020/08/05/the-glass-hotel-by-emily-st-john-mandel/). Several characters, including Vincent and Mirella, appear here. I shouted out loud, I was so delighted to see Vincent again. The humanity and relatability of the characters is clear, so much so that their extraordinary circumstances came to seem normal to me as I read. Off world colonies and multiple worlds are made familiar to us by the concerns of those living in them: fear in the face of danger, suspicion of overarching authorities, affection for home, and the pull of those you love. Olive, visiting Earth and more specifically Salt Lake City, says: “There’s something to be said for looking up at a clear blue sky and knowing that it isn’t a dome”.
Like Octavia E. Butler, whose novels I am belatedly discovering, St. John Mandel uses her futuristic work to explore ideas about ethics and responsibility. If you knew what was going to happen to everyone you met, would you be able to resist intervening in their lives? Who gets to decide what is the ‘right’ world, the ‘correct’ timeline, and why?
The novelist Olive Llewellyn speaks of pandemics to her book tour audiences, and the Covid-19 pandemic features as a historical incident. But as a new virus pops up on the news during the tour, her reactions to it feel very familiar to us. As do her feelings, in 2203, being asked about being away from her young daughter for work. A woman praises Olive’s husband for looking after her daughter. “Forgive me,” Olive said, “I fear there’s a problem with my translator bot. I thought you said he was kind to care for his own child”.
I enjoyed this novel so much. There is also a good cat in this book.
Review by Bethan
Thank you to Jeremy Atherton Lin for visiting to sign copies of Gay Bar! Nab one before they go.
Thanks to Laura Price for popping in to sign her new novel, Single Bald Female. Good luck with the book, Laura!
Margaret Atwood – Burning Questions
Lucy Caldwell – These Days
Marlon James – Moon Witch Spider King
Charlotte Mendelson – The Exhibitionist
Graham Robb – France: an Adventure History
Julia Samuel – Every Family Has a Story
Nikesh Shukla – Your Story Matters
Frank Herbert – Dune
Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Harper Lee – To Kill A Mockingbird
Jessica Harrison eds – The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories
Brit Bennett – The Vanishing Half
Sosuke Natsukawa – The Cat Who Saved Books
Sarah Moss – The Fell
Noor Murad, Yotam Ottolenghi – Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love
Elena Ferrante – The Lying Life of Adults
John Le Carre – Silverview
Sally Rooney – Beautiful World, Where Are You?
Roma Agrawal and Katie Hickey – How Was That Built?
Merlin Sheldrake – Entangled Life
Amor Towles – The Lincoln Highway
Matt Haig – The Midnight Library
Hardback, Picador, £14.99, out now
A wildly tense but very thoughtful novel set during the lockdown of autumn 2020.
Kate, the single mother of teenage son Matt, is ordered to remain at home. After several days, she feels that she cannot stand it for another minute. Fell walking near her home is how she usually manages her mental health, and so she decides that a short walk has become essential. She leaves home without telling her son or anyone else, although she is seen by her next door neighbour Alice who is shielding and unable to leave her house. She plans to be quick but time passes and she does not come home. Should her son call the police or rescue services? What if she is arrested and charged, and cannot afford to pay the fine? Alice faces the same dilemma, and Alice’s adult children (who have strong views about telling her what to do but seem not very helpful in practice) urge her to tell the police that Kate has illegally left the house.
Kate’s thinking will resonate with many: “She forgets everything these days, stands to reason that when you deprive people of external stimulus their brains slow down, almost a survival strategy, who could bear to be running on all cylinders and locked in like this, you’d go mad, poison yourself with your own fumes”. While walking, she falls in an isolated spot, and cannot get home. Dark falls.
The Fell is a very quick read but covers so many important human things. What are our duties to each other in extreme situations? How much can we prioritise our needs over those of others?
In addition to the voices of Kate, Matt and Alice, we hear from Rob the mountain rescue guide who is sent to find her. Rob faces his own challenges: forced to leave his daughter to attend the rescue, she is unhappy and disappointed and is sure to let him know it. Between these four perspectives, Moss delivers sensitive and relatable thoughts about how lockdowns and individual stay-at-home orders have played out in real life. These lives touch and overlap and human connections happen.
I did not think I would ever want to read a pandemic novel during a pandemic: there is quite enough of all that going on in my real life without it spilling over into my leisure reading. But The Fell is the best type of fiction. It is compelling on its own terms, as I was desperate to find out what happened, but also useful in unpicking what the crisis means about us, as individuals, as communities, and as a society. This is exactly what Moss is brilliant at, especially in Summerwater and Ghost Wall (see https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2019/09/08/ghost-wall-by-sarah-moss/). The Fell is helping me to process what’s going on, and work out what I think about it.
Review by Bethan
Hardback, HarperCollins, £20, out now
This is a delightful, mildly spooky picture book from the author of Lost and Found.
There are supposed to be ghosts in our host’s large old house, but she has never seen them – can you? With the help of tracing paper inserts and atmospheric photos, we can not only find the ghosts but also see the hijinks that they get up to.
It is a brilliant idea, and a timeless book. It goes for funny rather than scary, and the ghosts are quite endearing. You find yourself thinking that living in a haunted house might be quite jolly.
We have signed copies in store. Happy Halloween!
Review by Bethan
Hardback, Penguin Fig Tree, £20, out now
You must be careful when reading this book. You might end up with a shopping list that suddenly includes good vodka, Valtellina cheese, and bushels of fresh tomatoes. I read it on a Sunday afternoon, snacking enjoyably throughout, and had a deeply relaxing time.
Tucci is just as funny, smart and interesting in Taste as he is on his excellent TV show Searching for Italy (https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/stanley-tucci-searching-for-italy-restaurants/index.html). He gives an enjoyable account of moments in his life through food, including hilarious dialogue with his family, right the way through to a surprisingly relatable account of being stuck indoors in London with his kids during the first lockdown. Aged about six, watching a food show on television, his mother tells him that the presenter is cooking a duck. He says “A duck?!!!… From a pond?” His mother says “I guess so. I don’t know”.
Dotted throughout are hungry-making recipes. Achievable cocktails accompany grand epics like the timpano (as seen in the movie Big Night), which turns out to have been a source of both joy and stress in the Tucci household over a run of Christmases. Jay Rayner has a smashing time cooking it with Stanley Tucci though (see https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/oct/17/the-day-i-cooked-timpano-with-stanley-tucci-jay-rayner).
Fans of Big Night and Julie and Julia will find cheerful behind the scenes gossip here. Tucci namedrops with abandon, which is the only possible way to do it with style. Ryan Reynolds, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Marcello Mastroianni and endless friends from the world of food pop up. Taste is both thoughtful and sweary, one of my favourite combinations.
I agree that battered family cookware can be heirlooms, as Tucci notes. There are often things that we associate strongly with the important cooks in our lives. A friend’s mum always made toffee in the same tin: it had hammer marks where years of toffee bashing had occurred. These things are precious.
Tucci’s account of his cancer, which leads him to have terrible trouble with food and eating during his treatment and recovery, is moving and important. That food for him is about connecting with others is clear throughout the book, and his deprivation of this key aspect of life during his illness hurts. His joy at surviving and being able to get back to eating with the people he loves leaps off the page.
I suspect that many people will buy this lovely thing for other people this Christmas. Do this by all means, but read it sneakily yourself first. It’s like being on a sunny food holiday with a generous and entertaining friend. We have signed copies!
Review by Bethan
Bernardine Evaristo – Manifesto
Elizabeth Strout – Oh William!
Amor Towles – Lincoln Highway
Karina Lickorish Quinn – The Dust Never Settles
Yotam Ottolenghi and Noor Murad – Ottolenghi Test Kitchen Shelf Love
Stanley Tucci – Taste
Maggie Shipstead – Great Circle
Oliver Jeffers – There’s a Ghost in this House
Matt Haig – A Mouse Called Miika
Richard Powers – Bewilderment
Colm Tóibín – The Magician
Roddy Doyle – Life Without Children
Ruth Ozeki – The Book of Form and Emptiness
Richard Osman – The Man Who Died Twice
Sarah Hall – Burntcoat
Leïla Slimani – The Country of Others
Catherine Madden and Anthony Elliott – Folds
Roma Agrawal and Katie Hickey – How Was That Built?
We were so delighted to welcome the author and illustrator to install a lovely window display for the new children’s book How Was That Built? by Roma Agrawal and Katie Hickey.
We have signed copies and we are so delighted with our window!
… are going fast!
Come down to nab yours today.
We were delighted to meet Gemma Reeves today when she came in to sign copies of her novel Victoria Park, which is now out in paperback.
Victoria Park has been a bestseller in Riverside for some weeks now. It was lovely to meet Gemma and we wish her all the best with the book!
We have some lovely signed copies in store:
Elif Shafak – The Island of Missing Trees
Leïla Slimani – The Country of Others
Mary Paulson-Ellis – Emily Noble’s Disgrace
Maggie Shipstead – Great Circle
Mary Lawson – A Town Called Solace
Rachel Roddy – The A to Z of Pasta
Michelle Zauner – Crying in H Mart
Eimear McBride – Something Out of Place
Meriel Schindler – The Lost Café Schindler
Jackie Polzin – Brood
Olivia Laing – Everybody
Tomi Adeyemi – Children of Virtue and Vengeance
Zadie Smith, Nick Laird and Magenta Fox – Weirdo
Ellie Pilcher – What Planet Can I Blame This On?
Omar El Akkad – What Strange Paradise
Ruth Jones – Us Three
Picador, Hardback, £16.99, out now
Michelle Zauner is perhaps best known for her music, produced under the moniker Japanese Breakfast, but this memoir proves that her talent stretches across multiple mediums. Zauner was in her 25th year and a struggling artist when her mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She upended her life and returned to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon to take care of her as her illness became terminal. The memoir is told as a kind of non-linear narrative, moving through Zauner’s reminiscences about her relationship with her mother which was extremely close yet often challenging, a familial relationship knotted with cultural differences (Zauner’s father is white and she was raised in America) and deep love.
Food becomes a touchstone throughout the book, Korean food particularly became a way for Zauner to connect with her mother, Chongmi, and other members of her mother’s family even after their deaths: ‘When I go to H Mart, I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck: I’m searching for memories. I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did.’
The result is a touching and sensual book. I felt Zauner’s profound love for her mother radiating off the page at every turn, but particularly in her depictions of her mother’s small acts of care. When Zauner tells her mother she wants some cowboy boots, Chongmi not only buys her some but carefully wears them in first. I thoroughly recommend Crying in H Mart for fans of creative non-fiction and contemporary food writing.
Review by Phoebe
Hamish Hamilton, Hardback, £12.99, out now
Assembly by Natasha Brown is more than deserving of the glowing reviews it has already received. It’s a slight volume, the plot unfolds over a series of fleeting but intense vignettes and each is crafted to perfection, not a single word is wasted. At times it feels reminiscent of prose poetry or maybe a sparse drama. The narrator is quiet and controlled but burns with quiet anger, acutely aware of the injustices that plague her. She is a black British woman who has found significant success in the corporate world but seemingly at significant psychological and physical cost to herself. She is often a vessel for other characters racist hang-ups, one colleague vents to her about his hatred of diversity initiatives, another calls her office phone to tell her her hair is ‘wild’ and her skin is ‘exotic’. She has a jovial posh boyfriend, who like her attended Oxford and the action unfolds as she anticipates attending his parents lavish anniversary party.
Recently a reviewer compared Assembly to Mrs. Dalloway, but I thought of Brandon Taylor whose novel Real Life has similarly exquisite prose and a protagonist who is out of place in their surroundings and also of The Great Gatsby, although while Natasha Brown’s protagonist is, like Nick Carraway, among the rich and powerful, she is not impressed. When I got to the last page I was sorry to finish Assembly I thoroughly recommend it.
Review by Phoebe
Hardback, Penguin, £12.99, out now
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.
Review by Bethan
Visit us in London Bridge for new signed copies:
Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and the Sun
Yaa Gyasi – Transcendent Kingdom
Zadie Smith and Nick Laird – Weirdo
Megan Nolan – Acts of Desperation
Dolly Alderton – Ghosts
Prue Leith and Peta Leith – Vegetarian Kitchen
James Rebanks – English Pastoral
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris – The Lost Words
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.
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!
We were delighted to welcome Ben 
Aaronovitch to Riverside to sign copies of his new book, False Value. Come and get them while they’re hot…
Ben generously signed copies of his back catalogue too, so fans can upgrade their collection.
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
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
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
We have some lovely signed copies in store!
The Library of Ice by Nancy Campbell
Another Planet by Tracey Thorn
Adèle by Leïla Slimani
Jimmy Page by Chris Salewicz
How to Ride a Bike by Sir Chris Hoy
Get a head start on your Christmas shopping and snap up one of our excellent signed copies… when they’re gone, they’re gone!
Stephen Fry – Heroes
Max Hastings – Vietnam
Neil MacGregor – Living with the Gods
Geraint Thomas – The Tour According to G
Moeen Ali – Moeen
Neil Oliver – The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places
Matt Haig – Notes on a Nervous Planet
Tim Peake – Astronaut Selection Test Book
Peter Stafford-Bow – Brut Force
Sir Chris Hoy – How to Ride a Bike
New in:
William Boyd – Love is Blind
Michael Palin – Erebus: Story of a Ship
Neil MacGregor – Living with the Gods
Sir Chris Hoy – How to Ride a Bike
They won’t be around for long.
We have a few signed copies of their gorgeous new book Art Matters.
We have got some delicious new signed copies in… get them before they go:
Kate Atkinson – Transcription
Sebastian Faulks – Paris Echo
Tom Lee – The Alarming Palsy of James Orr
Patrick Gale – Take Nothing With You
Christie Watson – The Language of Kindness: a Nurse’s Story
We are delighted to have some signed copies of Patrick Gale’s new novel Take Nothing 
with You – get them while they’re hot!
Riverside Bookshop is pleased to be selling the first joint work from the excellent poet Catherine Madden and superb designer Louise Evans. It is a series of poems and 
illustrations in which the authors alternate inspirations. Half the poems are Cat writing in response to drawings by Louise, and half the drawings are by Louise in response to poems by Cat.
We have signed limited editions of this beautiful book for sale. And we are especially proud to have Cat as one of our expert booksellers here at Riverside.
A second book by Cat is due out soon!
The Riverside Way 