January 6, 2019
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Quercus, £12.99, out now
A teacher is murdered in Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex. Her school has an historic connection with ghost story writer R M Holland. As pupils and colleagues try to come to terms with her death, the story surrounding it unfolds with Gothic overtones.
Investigating is Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur, an excellent character with an acid tongue and a sharp mind. On arriving at a witness’s home, she sees that the witness has been reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and remembers that the murder victim had been “sitting in the dark with her herbal tea. Someone really should tell these women about Netflix” (p. 138). Her genial home life gives me the same cosy feeling I get reading this aspect of Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti crime stories (see https://theriversideway.wordpress.com/2017/06/20/earthly-remains-by-donna-leon/). She is an old student of the comprehensive where the murder happened, and knows all the rumours and ghost stories which surround the school. The story is told from the perspectives of Harbinder, Clare (a colleague of the victim), and Clare’s daughter Georgia, who is a pupil at the school. Also woven in are sections of R M Holland’s ghost story.
It helped that the abandoned cement works and nearby strip of workers’ houses where some of the action takes place are familiar to me, as I used to go past them on the bus… and I had often thought that it was quite a creepy place. But I’m pretty sure this personal experience isn’t necessary for others to enjoy the book!
This was a perfect holiday read for me. I had never read any Elly Griffiths, but a friend bought me this standalone mystery novel for Christmas. I devoured it in two days when I should have been doing other things. I am now looking forward to reading her series set in Norfolk, which my friend says is just as good. There are two good dogs in this book.
Review by Bethan
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December 19, 2018
by Team Riverside
We have you covered this Christmas for all your books, gifts, cards and wrap… and here are our current bestsellers to get you thinking:
Michelle Obama – Becoming
Anna Burns – Milkman
The Story of Brexit
Sally Rooney – Normal People
Yotam Ottolenghi – Simple
Private Eye Annual 2018
Genki Kawamura – If Cats Disappeared from the World
How to be Right – James O’Brien
Stephen Hawking – Brief Answers to the Big Questions
Women and Power: a Manifesto – Mary Beard
Leonard Cohen – The Flame
Andrew R Grumbridge – Today South London, Tomorrow South London
Scarlett Curtis – Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies
And we have some excellent children’s books as well:
Vashti Harrison – Little Leaders
Marion Billet – Listen to the Christmas Songs
David Walliams – Ice Monster
Amy Sparkes and Nick East – Ellie’s Magic Wellies
Happy Christmas from everyone at Riverside!
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December 5, 2018
by Team Riverside
We are getting ready for Christmas and New Year… here are our seasonal opening times:
Monday 10 December – 9 to 6
Tuesday 11 December – 9 to 6.30
Wednesday 12 December – 9 to 6.30
Thursday 13 December – 9 to 6.30
Friday 14 December – 9 to 6.30
Saturday 15 December – 10 to 6
Sunday 16 December – 11 to 6
Monday 17 December – 9 to 7
Tuesday 18 December – 9 to 7
Wednesday 19 December – 9 to 7
Thursday 20 December – 9 to 7
Friday 21 December – 9 to 6.30
Saturday 22 December – 10 to 6
Sunday 23 December – 11 to 6
Monday 24 December – 9 to 3
Tuesday 25 December – CLOSED
Wednesday 26 December – CLOSED
Thursday 27 December – 11-5
Friday 28 December – 9-6
Saturday 29 December – 10 to 6
Sunday 30 December – 11 to 6
Monday 31 December – 9 to 4
Tuesday 1 January – CLOSED
Wednesday 2 January – 9 to 6
… and then we are back to our regular hours!
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December 2, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Scribner, £14.99, out now
The list of places Nancy Campbell covers in researching The Library of Ice was enough to make me keen to read it. Upernavik Museum in Greenland, Vatnajökull in Iceland, Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam…
Campbell is an artist, writer and poet, and The Library of Ice could be considered travel writing, cultural history, nature writing, or memoir. It’s not necessary to pick these bits apart: the book as a whole works well as a meditation on ice. She is an engaging guide, and her curiosity leads to adventures in the archives and outside.
The book is full of intriguing and pleasing facts and stories. I was pleased to learn of the origins of Torvill and Dean’s immortal Bolero skating performance, and of Robert Boyle’s attempts to research the phenomenon of cold and his irritation at the difficulty of his experiments.
Despite my longstanding Antarctic obsession, I did not know that George Murray Levick of the Scott expedition in 1912 was so horrified at what he found to be the ‘hooligan’ and ‘depraved’ behaviour of the penguins that he censored his scientific reporting on the Adélies. In the Natural History Museum archive survives a copy of a report Levick wrote for colleagues, limited in circulation and with a note on the front saying: ‘The sexual habits of the Adélie penguin, not for publication’.
Campbell’s awareness of damage from climate change informs much of the book, and her accounts of traditional knowledge of ice reminded me of some of the testimony from Mary Robinson’s excellent book Climate Justice (https://theriversideway.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/climate-justice-hope-resilience-and-the-fight-for-a-sustainable-future-by-mary-robinson/).
If you enjoy good books about cold places, such as Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita or The Magnetic North, this will be a chilly pleasure.
Review by Bethan
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November 3, 2018
by Team Riverside
- Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman
- Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race – Reni Eddo-Lodge
- Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
- Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney
- Everything I Know about Love – Dolly Alderton
- Fire and Fury – Michael Wolff
- This is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay
- The Power – Naomi Alderman
- Women and Power: A Manifesto – Mary Beard
- Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie
- The Secret Barrister – The Secret Barrister
- Men Without Women – Haruki Murakami
- Normal People – Sally Rooney
- The Refugees – Viet Thanh Nguyen
- The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy
- Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls – Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo
- Manhattan Beach – Jennifer Egan
- Swing Time – Zadie Smith
- Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders
- My Name is Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout
- Exit West – Mohsin Hamid
- Flights – Olga Tokarczuk
- Peppa Goes to London
- To Die in Spring – Ralf Rothmann
- Anything is Possible – Elizabeth Strout
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November 3, 2018
by Team Riverside
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
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October 17, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Chatto & Windus, £20, published 11 October 2018
Eve was Shamed is a timely and comprehensive update on women as they engage with the UK’s criminal justice system, from a legendary feminist human rights lawyer. The depth of her experience over years of legal practice and activism makes this a must-read. You don’t have to agree with everything she says to benefit from her thoughtful and erudite commentary.
17 years after I first read her classic book on women and the law Eve was Framed, Eve was Shamed shows where we have made progress and where so much remains to be done. Her account includes experiences of women lawyers, survivors of domestic or sexual violence, prisoners, judges, and others. She finds that “despite the dramatic changes which have taken place in women’s lives over the last four decades, women are still facing iniquitous judgements and injustice within the legal system. All the legal reforms have produced only marginal advances”. (p. 317)
Kennedy’s dual commitment to feminism and to human rights is particularly interesting. Her values inform her approach to her work, including her analysis of difficult or controversial situations in public life. She recounts occasions when this has led to conflict with people she has been allies with, and it is evident that she values the process of discussion and exchange that leads to resolution, even where this is uncomfortable or challenging. She notes: “feminism is about justice if it is about anything, and that means for men as well as women. Justice for women is not secured by reducing justice for men.” (p. 324)
She has lost none of her passion or commitment on the things that matter to her, making her a useful model for how to survive and remain effective during bleak times. Her considered solutions to problems are offered throughout, and this means that despite the subject matter you feel that real change is possible. Jacky Fleming’s inspirational cartoon remains helpful (see https://www.jackyfleming.co.uk/product/never-give-up/).
Review by Bethan
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October 10, 2018
by Team Riverside
Paperback, Granta, £8.99, out now
Not published until 2016, decades after Collins’ death, these short stories are dazzling rediscoveries. Set during the civil rights era, they explore this radical time with equal parts joy and heartbreak. I love the way her writing describes fully realised characters and the emotional connection between them. In ‘The Happy Family’ the narrator describes a younger man from the titular family, “Andrew had such an incredible presence that even I was often intimidated by him. He was one of those people whom you almost do not assign an age. He had the ability to focus himself on a moment, bring all his presence to bear and so charge the air that you were a bit shaken.”(p.78) When this man falls in love with a family friend, the description of it is beautiful, “I would give anything to see them again, loose limbed and free, coming into the apartment and heating it with a glow, an intensity so strong it made you tingle…” p.78-9)
I agree with Zadie Smith about this collection, she said “To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck, for us.” (http://kathleencollins.org/advance-reviews-for-interracial-love/)
Review by Cat
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October 8, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Bloomsbury, £16.99, out now
I wanted a book to remind me that climate change can be tackled, and to inspire me to engage with this massive problem without leaving me doom laden and depressed. This useful book by former Irish President and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson does just that. Taking a rights and justice approach is natural for her. “This injustice – that those who had done least to cause the problem were carrying the greatest burden – made clear that to advocate for the rights of the most vulnerable to food, safe water, health, education, and shelter would have no effect without our paying attention to the world’s changing climate”.
Robinson places the stories of people on the frontline of climate change at the heart of this short book, and sees her job as getting their voices heard. It was the stories of these activists, mainly women, which I found most useful.
Constance Okollet is a small scale farmer from Uganda who has organised women in her community to challenge climate change, has given evidence internationally on the direct impact on her region of extreme weather: “in eastern Uganda, there are no seasons any more”.
Through activism, Okollet met Sharon Hanshaw of Biloxi Mississippi (founder of Coastal Women for Change) and other climate witnesses. Hanshaw, a former beauty salon owner who saw her community devastated by hurricane Katrina, said: “Connecting with women who were facing similar issues across the globe, and standing up and working for solutions, was inspiring. It is women who bear the brunt of climate change”. (Read more of Hanshaw’s story here: https://lithub.com/climate-change-needs-to-be-about-economic-justice/)
The price some of the activists pay for their work is heavy. Robinson describes a tearful Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim of the Republic of Chad speaking of reporting back to the elders of her region: “I tell them that I will have a solution soon… They think I am finding a solution, but I know how slowly the fight against climate change is going and that a solution is not coming tomorrow. The solution for this problem will not be for them. It will not be for now.”
There has been some criticism of the book for failing to focus sufficiently on failures of states in addressing climate change (see for example Cara Augustenborg in the Irish Times – https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/climate-justice-review-irish-sins-cloud-inspiring-stories-1.3643596). Others may notice that Robinson does not for example address population control, or the issue of whether nuclear power should be part of the renewable energy that replaces energy from fossil fuels. But the book is not intended as a primer on climate change (though it can be read with no specialist knowledge). It is a call to positive action against despair, and is best summed up by the advice of Hanshaw, citing her civil rights activist father: “pray and believe, and always believe in what you can do instead of can’t do”.
Review by Bethan
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October 6, 2018
by Team Riverside
We are very happy to be celebrating Bookshop Day here in London Bridge’s local independent! Many stickers and balloons are about and the bunting is up.
Come and say hello! You might find a book to change your life…
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October 3, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Hodder and Stoughton, £25, out now
This gorgeous cookbook marries tempting recipes with luscious photos of both the dishes and the market. The recipes are unusual but achievable, and unsurprisingly give star billing to the exceptional ingredients for which the market is famous.
I immediately wanted to make (or more accurately, eat) the barbeced courgettes, burnt lemon and za’atar. Suzanne fancies Autumn Panzanella and Cat would like rhubarb and ricotta on toast. We could all do with a Gooseberry Syrup Gin Cocktail right about now as well.
The book is arranged by season, and includes helpful lists of what’s best at each time of year. It manages to capture some of the sensory delights of the market – Turnips greengrocer Fred Foster writes: “I like to think of our produce displays as live art. They draw people in and provide a backdrop to the Market… The seasons are crucial because ultimately they affect what the displays are made from. As the seasons change, the displays change. It’s continual. You can define the time of year by the colours you see”. (p. 205)
The first mention of the market by London Bridge was in a Norse chronicle in 1014 – a thousand years of tasty snacks, feast preparations, and irresistible tasters.
As London Bridge’s local independent bookshop, we are big fans of our local market and have been known to head over there for emergency baklava to provide instant mood lifts for our hardworking booksellers. For a poetic take on the market, see also Michael Shann’s recent poetry collection To London (https://theriversideway.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/to-london-poems-by-michael-shann/).
Review by Bethan
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September 22, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Dialogue, £14.99, out now
Patrick Chamoiseau’s latest novel is a little masterpiece: perfectly-formed, mesmerising, thrilling, moving, eye-opening, distressing, poignant, the lot.
This is a deeply singular piece of work that takes a simple, if grim, narrative – the titular old slave, who has spent his life in bondage on a Caribbean plantation, flees it one day pursued by the plantation owner and his horrifying hound – and explodes it. The old man’s journey through the surrounding jungle towards possible freedom becomes a simultaneous freeing of his mind; what we’re experiencing, through Chamoiseau’s gobsmackingly poetic prose, is a kind of anti-brainwashing on the part of our hero, an awakening to the world, to the present, and to a past both personal and cultural which he has tamped down in order to survive the humiliation of his servitude.
The fact that a chase narrative of heart-pounding proportions runs perfectly in tandem shows Chamoiseau’s staggering mastery of his craft; they’re so perfectly intertwined that the old slave’s physical, spiritual and mental progress become one hypnotic, hallucinatory broth. He discovers as he runs scraps of his old language, is spellbound and shaken by newly-remembered Creole folk tales and the creatures which haunt them, and gradually rekindles the fires of a selfhood long discarded; all while fighting to stay one step ahead of a despicable slaver and fiction’s most malevolent dog.
The sum of this is a distinctly idiosyncratic addition to the canon of literature addressing slavery, one that lays bare on a micro level the psychological torment and cultural subjugation heaped on a slave while managing, incredibly, to be uplifting, at times joyful; the old man’s flight, and his mental and spiritual re-entry into the world, is powerfully moving. It’s hard to think of another character in recent fiction I’ve wanted to succeed more.
And speaking of characters – none of this would work if Chamoiseau’s protagonist didn’t resonate with the reader, but he, the plantation owner and even the dog feel carved out of stone, somehow managing to be both archetypes and intensely individual. For such a short, fast-paced novel these guys are brilliantly and vibrantly illuminated, meaning that even the undeniable villains of the piece become multidimensional.
And once again it’s translator extraordinaire Linda Coverdale behind the superlative translation, and whose note at the beginning in which she details the challenges of adapting Chamoiseau’s Creole and Creolized-French-peppered script is fascinating.
It’s a completely captivating book. Buy it, read it and read it again.
Review by Tom
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September 18, 2018
by Team Riverside
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.
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September 9, 2018
by Team Riverside
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
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September 9, 2018
by Team Riverside
Paperback, Avery Hill Publishing Limited, £9.99, out now
This beautiful graphic novel tells the story of South London’s great north wood. Remnants of the wood can be found in the names and places of Norwood, Sydenham, Forest Hill, Honor Oak Park, Crystal Palace, Gipsy Hill and others.
Using a local fox to guide us from prehistory to today, The Great North Wood shows how important the forest was to the development of South London and celebrates its continuity to today. On the way we learn some excellent facts. I was intrigued to find out that Pear Tree House block of flats in SE19 was built to be “a control centre in the event of a nuclear attack on London”, and the book even includes a floorplan of the reinforced concrete basement. Sharp modern realities exist alongside ancient magic in this enchanting account.
As so many of our regular customers head home from London Bridge to these areas, I am sure that they will recognise the depictions of bus stops and chicken shops. The gorgeous colour palette helps make this a book to return to again and again.
Many South Londoners will be getting this for Christmas from me. Hopefully they aren’t reading this.
Review by Bethan
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August 27, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Granta, £16.99, out now
This graphic novel has been making waves outside the comics scene, exemplified by its inclusion – gasp – in the Man Booker prize longlist this year, the first funny-picture-word-bubble book to be so.
And it’s easy to see why. This intelligent and affecting work has in its crosshairs a swathe of modern maladies, from the pervasiveness of fake news and conspiracy legitimacy to the prevalence of non-specific alienation and mental illness. Make no mistake, this is heavy – just listen to the plot: the titular Sabrina has, out of the blue, disappeared, and her quietly distraught boyfriend has moved in with an old school-buddy, the nominal centre of the story. He wants to help his friend, with whom he’d all but lost touch, but he’s got problems of his own – namely a failed marriage and a young daughter he never gets to see. And when new information about Sabrina’s situation emerges, his troubles are about to multiply in a distinctly 21st century way…
From this framework Drnaso constructs an unsettling, paranoid world, but it’s a very recognisable one, cleaving very close to our current reality. It’s a testament to his skills as a storyteller that every damning reference to modernity – from one character’s urge to another not to unplug his phone (which the latter is using for a pivotal phone-call) as he needs it charged for work, to a constant, inescapable onslaught of emails a protagonist must at one point suffer – feels natural and unforced. Awkward Skype calls, violent video games, online hate-campaigns, clickbait… they’re all peppered throughout without feeling like clutter. He hunts big game effortlessly while propelling a queasily gripping narrative, a world away from traditional missing-person procedurals but just as enthralling. Certain sequences really bring out the armpit-sweat.
But what of the graphic part of this graphic novel? Sabrina’s visuals are, frankly, bland, its characters simply depicted, androgynous snow-man shapes with dot eyes and thin lines for mouths; at times, they make Tintin look photorealist. When they experience strong emotion, there’s a haunting disconnect between their rudimentary features and their apparent anguish; but mostly each ambiguous countenance suits this sterile world of platitudinous conversation, missed signals and repression. Every backdrop is minimally, if accurately, drawn, bright colours are almost entirely absent, and somehow this banal milieu quickly becomes engrossing in its own way. Indeed, at key points in the narrative this unreadability on the part of the characters drives the tension wonderfully, as we cannot suss out their intentions or judge where they stand. Simply put, what at first might seem like an unexciting creative decision quickly reveals itself to be a brilliant and innovative use of the form.
All-in-all this is tough, smart, powerful stuff, form and content perfectly married to craft a cold world of unspoken pain and suffering. If it ticks your boxes, we’d also recommend Art Spiegelman’s superlative Maus, another amazing, devastating graphic novel which we happen to stock as well.
Review by Tom
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August 26, 2018
by Team Riverside
Paperback, Penguin, £1 each, out now
This is a superb series of mini books featuring extracts from works by twentieth century authors published by Penguin. The list is excellent and it is almost impossible to resist grabbing a fistful and bunking off work.
Several of the books are an easy way in to authors I have been meaning to read for ages. The short collection of essays by Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, boosted me into reading her full collected essays, Sister Outsider. In an hour’s reading, I had my brain shaken up and challenged by Lorde’s intersectional ideas and beautiful prose.
Other favourites so far include Chinua Achebe’s Africa’s Tarnished Name. The great Nigerian novelist gives us a series of short essays, and describes a visit to Northern Rhodesia in 1960 made while he was living as an exile in the US. He boards a bus and sits in the front, next to the driver’s seat. “When finally I turned around, probably because of a certain unnatural silence, I saw with horror that everyone around me was white. As I had turned around they had averted their stony gazes, whose hostility I had felt so palpably at the back of my head. What had become of all the black people at the bus stop? Why had no one told me? I looked back again and only then took in detail of a partition and a door”. He does not move, and when asked by the ticket collector why he is sitting there says: “… I come from Nigeria, and there we sit where we like in the bus”. He stays in his seat until he reaches his destination, and disembarks to cheers from the black passengers.
Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail feels timely and useful. “Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity”.
There are options for pure entertainment and for risky reading. Whether you need an emergency back up book in case you finish your current one on the tube, or whether you want to treat yourself to a pick and mix of striking ideas and great writing, this series is irresistible. For the full list see http://www.penguinmodern.com/. We love our display, too.
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August 25, 2018
by Team Riverside
We are delighted to have some signed copies of Patrick Gale’s new novel Take Nothing 
with You – get them while they’re hot!
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August 20, 2018
by Team Riverside
For all your book/chameleon storage needs, our stylish new bags will sort you out.
Made by the re-wrap co-operative, these cotton totes celebrate our 31 years as an independent bookshop.
Yours for only £5.99!
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August 1, 2018
by Team Riverside
Dear friends,
we will be open on Bank holiday Monday 27 August from 11am till 6pm for all your booky needs.
Hope to see you then!
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July 28, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Walker Books, £11.99, out now
Julian is a small boy on the subway with his Nana… but he is also a mermaid. After seeing three gorgeous women dressed up as mermaids on the journey, he tells Nana: “Nana, I am also a mermaid”. Julian dresses himself up as a mermaid while Nana is in the bath. He feels wonderful… but how will Nana react?
This is a stunningly illustrated picture book, with a joyous message at its heart. The colour and life in the pictures make you want to look and look, from the kids playing in the water from the hydrant to the older ladies swimming in the pool.
If you want a book with a superb grandparent in, this would also do the job! As with the best picture books, this is one for all humans, not only small children. Read Julian is a Mermaid and feel part of the kindness and delight that it celebrates.
Review by Bethan
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July 1, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Hodder Children’s Books, £12.99, out now
This book is extremely silly and a guaranteed good laugh for anyone aged about two and up. Dwayne and Jane-o want to see the volcano… they’ll catch a plane-o and climb down a chain-o… their enthusiasm is not in doubt but what will happen when they get there?
Well, the bright and engaging pictures tell the epic story of how friends and followers join them on their quest, including Roger the incredible colour changing cat and Dr Eyjafjallajökull. There are good in-jokes for adults as well as children, but they are not allowed to get in the way of a very funny story to read aloud. Fans of Stanton’s Mr Gum series will recognise the humour.
I treated the character list at the end as a Where’s Wally style list of folks to go back and find in the pictures, giving the book a good spin for older children. Also it was full of bonus jokes. This book is a proper treat.
Review by Bethan
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June 26, 2018
by Team Riverside
We’ll be closed for our annual stocktake on the morning of Wednesday 27 June. We hope to be open by mid afternoon, but give us a call if you want to check before visiting!
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June 17, 2018
by Team Riverside
Here at Riverside we’re pleased to see that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at the Donmar is getting good reviews – and particularly that its characterisation of the troublingly fascism-sympathetic Brodie cleaves to Spark’s original vision – because a few of us are massive fans of the late Scottish author (and total genius).
So it’s as good a time as any to say that we’ve got in a raft of her best works – some in absolutely gorgeous new editions from Polygon – from her complete short story collection to some deep cuts more than worthy of your time.
There’s early chiller The Ballad of Peckham Rye, in which a devilish stranger turns the titular district upside-down, showcasing Spark’s fully-formed blend of blitheness and villainy. It’s a twisting delight, shocking and beguiling, with the wicked purpose of a Grimm’s fairy tale.
Comic gem A Far Cry From Kensington is a blast, a coiled spring of absurd characters, mysterious goings on, blackmail and backstabbing, the upper-class ne’er-do-wells of Agatha Christie meeting the upper-class ne’er-do-wells of Oscar Wilde. The narrator Mrs Hawkins’ misadventures in publishing, as her honesty brings the ire of influential writer Hector Bartlett, are as nutty as her ruminations are sometimes thought-provoking.
Then there’s unsung masterwork Memento Mori, which we’ve got in a beautiful new Virago and a Polygon edition. It’s a piercingly funny, at times very moving examination of the ignominy of old age; and, it being Spark, it’s all wrapped in a delicious blend of mystery and deception. Easily as good as Ms Jean Brodie.
And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg – we’re carrying a multitude more, all of which prove that this brilliant novelist could go head-to-head with Highsmith when it comes to bleakness, Greene when it comes to conspiracy and Wodehouse when it comes to wit. Every story will stick in your mind long after you’ve finished it, and that’s a Riverside guarantee.
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May 24, 2018
by Team Riverside
Saturday 26th May – 10-6
Sunday 27th May – 11-6
Monday 28th May – 11-6
Have a good one!
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May 20, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Jonathan Cape, £18.99, out now
The answer given by nature writer and environmentalist Mark Cocker is ‘maybe’. This unusual book gives a brief history of attempts to protect nature in Britain over the last 150 years, told through the stories of some of the organisations and individuals involved. It is framed by the catastrophic findings of the 2013 State of Nature report, which found that 60% of native species in the UK had declined over the last 50 years, 31% badly, and that over 600 species were under threat of extinction. Cocker notes that the figures “don’t indicate the bottom of a curve: they chart the direction of an arrow. It means that, however bad things are, they will get worse without major change”.
Cocker is critical of the largest of the environmental organisations, including the National Trust and the RSPB, finding them sometimes overly concerned with competing for members and also unsuccessful in critical campaigning. He finds that failures to work together mean that whole-ecology approaches are being undermined by separate projects. But he allows that their difficulties may reflect something of the British public’s own ambivalence towards nature. He quotes a letter to the Daily Mail from a National Trust member apparently responding to the Trust’s campaign on climate change: “Thanks to Dame Helen Ghosh’s political agenda outside the true objectives of the National Trust, that’s £100 membership saved this year.”
He also gives due credit to individuals both within and without these groups who have been effective in seeking to protect nature, or who remind us to pay attention. I loved the example of his friend and colleague Tony Hare, who on looking at “a square foot of turf dotted with miniscule scarlet fungi and prostrate lichens” reminded his friend that “what was happening here was the same as any rainforest”.
The approach taken is not straightforward polemic. Cocker successfully mixes history with accounts of several localities as informal case studies showing how particular types of areas are faring. As a result, Our Place is readable and interesting.
Where the book has limitations they are deliberate and mostly acknowledged. There is not much about international frameworks or organisations working for the natural environment in my view, and marine protection is almost entirely missing. But as a personal rallying call for a different attitude to nature protection in the UK, it works, and shows that any of us can choose to pay attention to this critical concern. I echo his praise for those amateurs and professionals who study and protect even the unpopular or obscure bits of our natural world, and especially those who make this possible for children and young people.
Review by Bethan
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May 19, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, JM Originals, £14.99, out now
Sight, Jessie Greengrass’s debut novel, weaves an unnamed narrator’s meditations on her decision to be a mother, her own mother’s early death and her relationship with her grandmother in with historical stories of discovery and progress.
Greengrass dissects these scientific studies for their emotional resonance. Of Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of X-Rays one of the things she is interested in is his disappointment, where “afterward nothing was different at all, and although he had seen through metal and seen through flesh to what was hidden…what had been left was only so much quibbling at the bill” (p.45). Other cases that get this thorough treatment are Freud’s study of a phobic five-year-old known as Little Hans, as well as his relationship in general with his daughter Anna, and John and William Hunter’s 18th century discoveries on pregnancy.
In deciding whether or not to have a baby (we know from the start that she will settle in the positive) the narrator reflects on what she would be giving up in order to become a mother. The novel also questions what parents must then lose again in order for their children to reach adulthood successfully. On the narrator’s thoughts around her young daughter’s maturing past toddler-hood Greengrass’s insight is heart-breaking: “I know her less and less the more that she becomes herself. This is how things ought to be, her going away while I remain.” (p.2).
But what would be the alternative, we are asked, Anna Freud living in her father’s house with his analyst room still in the centre of it untouched – “a still unconsecrated monument” (p.125)?
All the stories interlink with the idea that someone has to lose something for society to seem to progress – parents have to lose the lives they had before in order to have children, and then lose the children again, women have to die painfully in labour so that surgeons can learn how to perform caesarean sections. Even the loss of mystery that seeing the interior of her hand brings is felt as death-like by Bertha Roentgen when her husband demonstrates his discovery (p.46).
Sight also quietly wonders who the people are who have to make these sacrifices. Do mothers lose more than fathers? “The child was, for Johannes, still largely hypothetical: his life so far remained predominantly unchanged and what I felt as a set of prohibitions and a physical incapacity… was for him hardly more than anticipation waiting for Christmas to come…” (p.159). Whose corpses rot in basements so that we can see what our origins look like, as the unnamed dead model for Jan van Rymsdyk’s engraving The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus did? The answer more often than not is women or, as in Freud’s case of Little Hans, children.
At linking these stories to form the overarching questions I found Greengrass’s novel to be smoothly expert and I’m not surprised it has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year.
Review by Cat
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May 15, 2018
by Team Riverside
Posted in News, Nice things, Non fiction |
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May 7, 2018
by Team Riverside
Hardback, Penguin, £14.99, out now
This is a brutally honest autobiography covering the childhood of the author of superb 
fiction including The Gustav Sonanta, Sacred Country and Restoration. Her account of her 1950s childhood spans an idyllic family farm, a middle class London house, a freezing cold boarding school, and a Swiss finishing school. It seems clear that her parents and grandparents did not love her very much, if at all.
It is essential reading for any fan of her work, not least as she helpfully indicates where stories from her life have found their way into her fiction. In her novel Trespass, someone’s mother ruins their birthday by getting trapped in a swimsuit and making everyone else feel dreadful. This is a real event, and the effects have been lifelong, meaning Tremain struggles to celebrate her birthday. “… In my heart, I’m looking out for darkening skies, for the sound of the sea, for the thing that will sabotage the day – the thing that nobody else has seen”.
One saving grace is her nanny, Nan, who showed her how to love and be loved. During a revelatory conversation with a colleague she discloses to another person for the first time the loveless nature of much of her upbringing. The colleague replies: “… listen to me: you were lucky. You could have been a depressive mess by now, or you could be dead from drugs or drink, but you’re not. Nan saved you. She was your angel”.
Her mother is shown as very cold, but Tremain is fair in describing how she too was unloved by her parents, or at least loved less than her brothers. Her mother was also sent away from home at a very young age, which affected her for the rest of her life. Tremain’s even handed description of a horrifying event which happens to her mother while Rosie is a teenager feels both fair and sympathetic. Her father, as in her life, feels essentially absent from this book. He is a not-very-successful playwright and he seems sometimes to go beyond merely disengaged to being actively hurtful and hostile.
Her determination to write is a joy in the book, as are her discoveries of reading and music. Her friendships are vital to her and we see the beginnings of lifelong ones here. She writes of her friends with affection and crispness. Rosie renames herself Rose as she ends her childhood. She makes her young adulthood all her own. What might seem a mean time restriction on an autobiography works very well, and you could not ask for a more candid author. Recommended.
Review by Bethan
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March 31, 2018
by Team Riverside
Paperback, Walker Books, £6.99, out now
“ONCE there was Natalie… and then there was Alphonse too. Natalie mostly did not mind there being Alphonse.” This is a great way to start a picture book about the relationship between a small sister and brother.
Through bright and cheerful illustrations, Hirst shows the ways in which Natalie and Alphonse usually get on. But then Alphonse eats Natalie’s favourite book, on a day which has already been bad (“lunch was peas”). Natalie is angry and upset, and Alphonse doesn’t know what to do. The themes of being cross and hurt, not knowing how to make things better, and the difficulty and relief of making up are easy to relate to. As an adult this is one of the reasons why I like the book very much, and also why I think it is great for children aged about 2 and up, especially if they have siblings.
I like that the family live in a flat with a 1980s style balcony – I feel like these types of homes are not shown very often in illustrated children’s books, so it feels like a real gift here. Alphonse, that is not OK to do! features an excellent (if slightly alarmed) cat, and what I think is a cameo appearance by The Very Hungry Caterpillar. What more could you ask for?
Review by Bethan
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