The Riverside Bookshop blog
Elizabeth Strout – Oh William!
John Le Carre – Silverview
Elif Shafak – The Island of The Missing Trees
Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and The Sun
Cecily Gayford – Murder by The Seaside
Elizabeth Day – Magpie
Sally Rooney – Conversations With Friends
Daisy Buchanan – Insatiable
Rutger Bregman – Humankind
Meg Mason – Sorrow and Bliss
Marion Billet – Busy London
bell hooks – All About Love
Colm Toibin – The Magician
Bernadine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other
Chris Power – A Lonely Man
Paperback, Nosy Crow, £6.99, out now
What should you do if your best friend always wants to play hide and seek but never wins? Frank the fox faces just this dilemma with his bear friend Bert.
In this simple and funny picture book for young children, we explore ideas about what makes a good friend. Frank gives Bert an extra-long count so that he can hide really well… but Bert’s unravelling scarf gives him away. Should Frank stick strictly to the rules of the game, and tell Bert he’s been found, or should he let Bert have a moment of glory?
This is a cheerful story but is also a useful introduction to the complexities of friendships. For little children who are starting out on friendships, it might be useful to know that the kind thing to do isn’t always the same as the rule-based thing to do. Reading this made me realise how much social interaction of this type is not obvious at all, but has to be learnt.
I approve strongly of another of Frank’s expressions of friendship, which is re-knitting Bert’s unravelled scarf so that the friends can play hide and seek together again (it looks like a chevron stitch pattern to me). Friendship, kindness and knitting – what’s not to love?
Review by Bethan
Meg Mason – Sorrow and Bliss
Riku Onda – The Aosawa Murders
Daisy Buchanan – Insatiable
Marion Billet – Busy London
Caleb Azumah Nelson – Open Water
Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and The Sun
Taylor Jenkins Reid – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Alice Oseman – Heartstopper Volume 2
Douglas Stuart – Young Mungo
Joseph Hone – The Paper Chase
Nicholas Nassim Taleb – Antifragile
Shirley Jackson – The Missing Girl
Catherine Belton – Putin’s People
Tom Burgis – Kleptopia
Emily Danforth – Plain Bad Heroines
Hardback, Macmillan, £12.99, out now
Epic Adventures is a pleasingly large non-fiction picture book for children about great train journeys. From the Shinkansen bullet train in Japan to the Trans-Siberian express, this colourfully illustrated book inspires the wish to jump on a train and head off on an adventure. As we are just opposite London Bridge station, this urge is particularly strong just now!
You can tell this was written by a real train fan, as it has excellent facts and is suffused with enthusiasm. Sedgman is also author of train-based adventure stories for children including The Highland Falcon Thief, and the accessible prose in Epic Adventures shows that he is used to writing for children. He addresses the colonial heritage of some of the railways concerned, and the displacement they caused, which is important. I also appreciated the emphasis on rail as a more environmentally friendly form of travel.
My favourite of the many colourful illustrations is the northern lights overhead as the Arctic Sleeper speeds through to Norway.
As a fan of armchair rail travel (see The World’s Most Scenic Rail Journeys and Mighty Trains, on television) this inspires me to do some actual rail travel as soon as possible. Good for perhaps age 7 and up, Epic Adventures has history and geography, festivals and food. A nicely exciting gift for a young would-be traveller.
Review by Bethan
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
This bank holiday, Monday 2 May, we will be open 11am to 5pm.
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
Kotaro Isaka – Bullet Train
Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and The Sun
Eliot Higgins – We Are Bellingcat
Jeremy Atherton Lin – Gay Bar
Tim Marshall – Prisoners of Geography
Julian Barnes – Elizabeth Finch
Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451
Catherine Belton – Putin’s People
Sarah Winman – Still Life
Bella Mackie – How to Kill Your Family
Emily Danforth – Plain Bad Heroines
Tom Burgis – Kleptopia
Luke Kennard – The Answer to Everything
Albert Camus – The Plague
Sathnam Sanghera – Empireland
Thank you to Jeremy Atherton Lin for visiting to sign copies of Gay Bar! Nab one before they go.
Elif Shafak – The Island of The Missing Trees
Taylor Jenkins Reid – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Stanley Tucci – Taste
Ali Smith – Companion Piece
Douglas Stuart – Young Mungo
Bella Mackie – How To Kill Your Family
Patrick Radden Keefe – Empire of Pain
Michael Lewis – The Premonition
Sathnam Sanghera – Empireland
Caleb Azumah Nelson – Open Water
Frank Tallis – The Act of Living
Adam Hargreaves – Mr. Men in London
Eliot Higgins – We Are Bellingcat
Kotaro Isaka – Bullet Train
Mary Lawson – A Town Solace
Thanks to Laura Price for popping in to sign her new novel, Single Bald Female. Good luck with the book, Laura!
Paperback, Nosy Crow, £6.99, out now
All Through the Night is a cheerful and entertaining picture book for young children about “people who work while we sleep”. We find out about cleaners and paramedics, journalists and bakers, and all kinds of folk who make our lives possible. It is a friendly and useful explanation about busy life carrying on even while we sleep.
The narrator’s mum goes out every evening to work, driving her big orange bus, and helping people get about. She is the one who helps everyone get to work and get home again. There is also a shout out for mums and dads of newborn babies who have to stay up before their babies have learned to sleep at night. The police are called to a noisy street but it is only a fox family rampaging through the bins.
All Through the Night is a treat for repeated re-reading. Children will love to spot the bus on every page; the delivery driver from the previous page dropping flour and sugar to the baker; the fox cubs who’ve been at the bins disappearing behind a bush while the railway repair worker use their digger.
For children whose caregivers work nights, I think this will be an affirming thing – to see their person’s work in a story book.
I love that the author and illustrator in their book dedications both thank people who work at night. This fits with the very personal and sincere feel of the book, which has the same joy as the classic Richard Scarry book What do People Do All Day? (https://uk.bookshop.org/books/what-do-people-do-all-day/9780007353699) but it is much more realistic!
Review by Bethan
Happy Easter!
We will be open:
Good Friday 15 April – 11 to 5
Easter Saturday 16 April – 10 to 6
Easter Sunday – CLOSED
Easter Monday – 11 to 5
Elif Shafak – Island of The Missing Trees
Michael Lewis – The Premonition
Riku Onda – The Aosawa Murders
Bella Mackie – How To Kill Your Family
Tom Burgis – Kleptopia
Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now
Taylor Jenkins Reid – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Eliot Higgins – We Are Bellingcat
Kotaro Isaka – Bullet Train
Damon Galgut – The Promise
Michael Bond – Paddington
Stanley Tucci – Taste
Colm Toibin – The Magician
Dave Eggers – The Every
David Baddiel – Jews Don’t Count
Hardback, Bloomsbury, £6.99, out now
This is an excellent new short story from the author of Circe and The Song of Achilles. I’ve not read those yet but I will do now, having read Galatea.
Galatea is being kept a virtual prisoner in hospital on the wishes of her husband, with the complicity of the medical staff. Her husband, a sculptor, created her out of stone to be his perfect woman: compliant, beautiful, and with no will or wishes of her own. But Galatea is developing a secret plan for her own freedom, and that of her young daughter Paphos.
The story is Miller’s response to Ovid’s telling of the Pygmalion myth: “…others (myself included) have been disturbed by the deeply misogynist implications of the story. Pygmalion’s happy ending is only happy if you accept a number of repulsive ideas: that the only good woman is one who has no self beyond pleasing a man, the fetishization of female sexual purity, the connection of ‘snowy’ ivory with perfection, the elevation of male fantasy over female reality”.
Miller offers a sharp take on abuse and control in relationships, and specifically men’s control of, and ideas about, women. As Galatea says: “The thing is, I don’t think my husband expected me to be able to talk”.
Accordingly here, some of the content is challenging. This is appropriate given the subject. I don’t always find fiction with mythical or fantasy elements convincing, but the ease and confidence with which this is written makes Galatea feel very real. I felt like Galatea herself was demanding that I witness her struggle, her cleverness, and her courage.
Issued in a beautiful small blue hardback form, it would make a great gift for the right person. I immediately reread it on finishing and it was even better the second time around. A vital read.
Review by Bethan
Paperback, Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99, out now
The second of Fernanda Melchor’s novels to be translated into English and also longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Paradais is a slight volume nonetheless packed with violence and tension. Polo, the protagonist, is a teenage alcoholic stuck in a dead-end job working as a gardener for a luxury housing complex. He is abused by his mother and his boss and his only real friend is the spoilt Franco, an overweight internet addict with a dangerous obsession with his neighbour, an attractive married woman. Polo’s anger and frustration with his family, his employer sends him spiralling towards destruction.
I haven’t read such a brilliant and horrifying study of the extremes of capitalism and machismo since American Psycho. Melchor’s description is rich and visceral, the oppressive heat outside and claustrophobic house where Polo lives are rendered in complex claustrophobic detail.
Paradais is a shocking and brilliant follow-up to Hurricane Season, I highly recommend this novel for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Bret Easton Ellis.
Review by Phoebe
Paperback, Ladybird, £6.99, out now
Gretel emerges from the ice to be feted as a Wonder Mammoth: an instant celebrity who makes lots of friends. But she is the last mammoth on Earth, which is always going to be tricky…
Her friends love her, as she is kind and strong and tells the best bedtime stories. When everyone thinks you are jolly and strong, how can you tell them that you are “scared… and sad… and worried… all at the same time”?
Kim Hillyard shows us that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is let your friends know how you are feeling, and that this is how things can start to get better. The friendly illustrations bring Greta’s world to life, and I found the colour palette warm, lively, and comforting.
Gretel’s friends prove most useful. They listen carefully, stroke her woolly feet, answer her questions, and help her find new things that she enjoys. Gretel is still the last mammoth, but she has reclaimed her Wonder and is no longer alone.
This sensitive picture book for young children is one of those brilliant things, a book that is really for all humans.
Review by Bethan
Paperback, Canongate, £6.99, out now
Alem is alone on his birthday and asks many different creatures what he should do – he is wondering where he should call home. None of them know but they all give him the same advice: “don’t ask the dragon – he will eat you!”
Alem is one to think for himself, so when he meets the dragon, he listens. The dragon turns out to be helpful, interesting… and vegetarian.
From celebrated poet and memoirist Lemn Sissay, with engrossing pictures from Greg Stobbs, this is an optimistic picture book for young children. A fun rhyming book to read aloud, this would be perfect for storytime.
With the new animal friends he’s made, Alem celebrates his birthday and discovers that home was inside him all along. For readers of Lemn Sissay’s excellent autobiography My Name is Why, the themes in this book will be especially resonant (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/29/my-name-is-why-lemn-sissay-review). To find your own place when you are alone can be extremely hard, but also sometimes joyful.
The party pictured at the end of the book is one I would very much like to go to.
Review by Bethan
Paperback, Two Hoots, £7.99, out now
We travel on the subway with young boy Milo and his sister, on a journey they make every month. It’s a trip that causes complex emotions…”as usual, Milo is a shook-up soda. Excitement stacked on top of worry on top of confusion on top of love. To keep himself from bursting, he studies the faces around him and makes pictures of their lives”.
The delicious and engaging illustrations in this picture book for young children draw us into Milo’s world. Imagining the stories of the strangers he sees on the train, he assumes that a smartly dressed boy lives in a castle with servants, and that a woman in a wedding dress is off to marry a man a city hall. But why do we assume these things about people we don’t know? Can Milo reimagine the stories he gives to people?
When it emerges that he and the other boy are both visiting their mums in prison, Milo finds out that there are so many ways to imagine the lives of others.
One of the most moving and cheerful things for me about Milo Imagines the World was the effortless portrayal of family love transcending and enduring through imprisonment. I also liked that Milo processed what was going on through drawing pictures of what he was thinking, which his mum got to enjoy during his visit.
Not even remotely preachy, this book is a complete delight. And it might make you see your own tube journey, and the people you’re sharing it with, in a much more interesting way.
Review by Bethan
Tom Burgis – Kleptopia
Chitra Soundar – Sona Sharma Looking After Planet Earth
Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and the Sun
Catherine Belton – Putin’s People
Colm Tóibín- The Magician
Caroline Barron – A Map of Medieval London
Naomi Ishiguro – Common Ground
Madeline Miller – Galatea
Kes Gray – Daisy and the Trouble With London
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
Janice Hallett – The Twyford Code
George Orwell – 1984
Stanley Tucci – Taste
David Baddiel – Jews Don’t Count
Peppa Pig Emergency Heroes Sticker Book
We have a brilliant range of cards, gifts and wrap for all your Mother’s Day needs this year. Suzanne’s cheerful window display has us all smiling too.
If you need any book recommendations, just come and ask!
Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and The Sun
Catherine Belton – Putin’s People
Riku Onda – The Aosawa Murders
Rutger Bregman – Humankind
Marion Billet – Busy London
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
Tom Burgis – Kleptopia
John Preston – Fall
Eliot Higgins – We Are Bellingcat
Charlotte Mendelson – The Exhibitionist
Kotaro Isaka – Bullet Train
Tim Marshal – The Power of Geography
Rebecca F. John – Fannie
David Baddiel – Jews Don’t Count
Siobhan Dowd – The London Eye Mystery
Paperback, Vintage, £8.99, out now
As the Shinkansen bullet train speeds out of Tokyo, several of those on board seem to be on missions to kill. But who will kill, who will die, and why?
This is a speedy and satisfying locked-room crime novel. It’s not clear at the outset how the disparate group of characters are connected. What links a father bent on revenge, a hitman obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, and a professional killer who’s concerned that he’s unlucky and wants to quit? And what are the roles of those off the train, including a woman who is phoning with instructions?
So many questions, and Bullet Train presents an engaging mystery for readers to try and solve. It’s violent, but given the sheer number of murderers this is perhaps not surprising. This was part of my ongoing Japanese crime reading jag, following on from The Aosawa Murders (https://riversidebookshop.co.uk/2020/07/25/the-aosawa-murders-by-riku-onda/). Isaka is a prize winning author in Japan, and the movie starring Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock is due out this summer (see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12593682/).
For an escapist and entertaining crime read, this is a good choice.
Review by Bethan
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
Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and The Sun
Damon Galgut – The Promise
Colm Toibin – The Magician
Margaret Atwood – Burning Questions
Rutger Bregman – Humankind
Patrick Radden Keefe – Empire of Pain
Natasha Lunn – Conversations on Love
Caleb Azumah Nelson – Open Water
Frank Tallis – The Act of Living
Georgia Pritchett – My Mess is a Bit of a Life
Taylor Jenkins Reid – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Adam Rutherford – Control
Michelle Zauner – Crying in H Mart
Victoria Mas – The Mad Woman’s Ball
Coco Mellors – Cleopatra and Frankenstein
Tim Marshall – The Power of Geography
Caleb Azumah Nelson – Open Water
Frank Tallis – The Act of Living
Riku Onda – The Aosawa Murders
Maggie O’Farrell – Hamnet
Patrick Radden Keefe – Empire of Pain
Karen McManus – One Of Us is Lying
David Baddiel – Jews Don’t Count
Gertrude Stein – Food
bell hooks – All About Love
John Preston – Fall
Sathnam Sanghera – Empireland
Natasha Lunn – Conversations On Love
Marian Keyes – Rachel’s Holiday
Richard Osman – The Thursday Murder Club
Paperback, W H Allen, £9.99, out now
The Madhouse at the End of the Earth is an engrossing account of a journey to Antarctica in 1897. One thing after another goes wrong for the crew of the Belgian whaling ship the Belgica, and they get stranded for the whole of the winter darkness, their ship frozen in a sea of ice.
Among those on board is a doctor, Dr Frederick Cook, who will later be imprisoned in his native USA for fraud. But as those on the ship suffer the effects of cold, dark, and malnutrition, his innovation and care keeps his colleagues alive. As things get worse, and the Captain withdraws, Cook seems able to turn his hand to anything. One part of the story that stayed with me was Cook creating a treatment for crew members suffering from scurvy and depression (among other things) of standing unclothed and in private in front of a fire. As Sancton notes: “His wild idea to have his ailing shipmates stand naked in front of a blazing fire is the first known application of light therapy, used today to treat sleep disorders and depression, among other things.”
The Madhouse at the End of the Earth works in many different ways. It’s a story of adventure and survival, failures of leadership, and physical and mental courage. It contributes to the history of medicine, as Sancton discovers that Cook’s case study is still used by Jack Stuster, a behavioural scientist who works with NASA, among others. As a study of how people cope, or don’t, under extreme strain, it is fascinating.
Also on the unlucky ship is Roald Amundsen, later famous as an epic Antarctic explorer in his own right. The insight given here into his early life is intriguing. He emerges as stoic in himself, and unbending in his attitude to others.
Sancton evokes the harshness of the Antarctic landscape and the claustrophobia of the trapped ship very well. “Where the water ended, the snow began, as if the ocean had risen half way up the Himalayas”. The descriptions of sounds of rats eating the crew’s limited food are suitably revolting. His impressive use of archive materials including the ship’s logs, crew diaries, and accounts published later by those who had been on board lends credibility to his review of the psychological states and emotions of those he is writing about.
He notes the colonial context to this journey, namely Belgium’s grotesque history in Africa at the time of the expedition. I was troubled by the title, uneasy about the use of ‘madhouse’, but I eventually felt it made sense for the time Sancton was writing about.
I read it over two days while on holiday, and felt lucky to have the chance to race through it. Because the story was unfamiliar to me, despite my having read a lot about Antarctic exploration, I tensely awaited each new development. It held me till the last page.
Review by Bethan
Tim Marshall – The Power of Geography
Patricia Lockwood – No One Is Talking About This
Hafsa Zayyan – We Are All Birds of Uganda
Natasha Lunn – Conversations on Love
Virginia Woolf – Flush
Sathnam Sanghera – Empireland
Stanley Tucci – Taste
Frank Herbert – Dune
Sally Rooney – Conversations With Friends
Abdulrazak Gurnah – Afterlives
Mo Willems – Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus
Lorraine Mariner – Ten Poems on Love
Anna Malaika Tubbs – Three Mothers
Karen McManus – One of Us Is Lying
Peppa Pig – Peppa’s Magical Unicorn
Natasha Lunn – Conversations on Love
Frank Tallis – The Act of Living
Susanna Clarke – Piranesi
Tim Marshall – The Power of Geography
Damon Galgut – The Promise
Maurice Sendak – Where The Wild Things Are
Charles Dickens – The Great Winglebury Duel
John Preston – Fall
Caleb Azumah Nelson – Open Water
Claire Fuller – Unsettled Ground
Bernadine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other
Richard Osman – The Thursday Murder Club
Brit Bennett – The Vanishing Half
Francis Spufford – Light Perpetual
Tom Chivers – London Clay
Paperback, Metro, £11.99, Publisher
The pocket-sized London’s Hidden Walks series is well researched and handy. The latest addition, subtitled Every Street Has a Story to Tell, is a genial and inspiring guide to some hidden London treasures.
Who knew that the Spanish Civil War memorial was right next to Fulham Palace? Or that the cabman’s shelter in Pimlico, a small green wooden hut serving refreshments, is one of the sole survivors of more than sixty such? History, architecture, art, literature and generally bizarre things all feature.
South London is especially well represented here, with Clapham, Peckham and Tooting all featuring. Even in areas I know very well, I’ve learnt to look for some surviving gems because of this book.
Nicely illustrated with quirky photos and useful maps, this is a pleasure to read before you set out, as well as providing suggestions for good restaurants, pubs, and shops on the routes. The inclusion of notable ghost signs is especially welcome (I used to like the Barlow and Roberts ghost sign on Southwark Street near here, but it seems to be gone now – https://ghostsigns.co.uk/2021/10/barlow-roberts/). This book encourages us to look up: there is often something interesting up there.
Review by Bethan
The Riverside Way 