The Riverside Bookshop blog
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
Frances Spufford – Light Eternal
We are delighted to be open again, and we are looking forward to helping folks find books, cards and Moleskines here in London Bridge.
We have slightly revised opening hours for now:
Monday to Friday – 10am to 5pm
Saturday – 10am to 6pm
Sunday – 11am to 5pm
Please bear with us if we need to adjust these at short notice as we go forward. If you’re planning a special trip to London Bridge to see us, ring first.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us while we have been closed by sending lovely messages and buying from our storefront on bookshop.org. It has helped us stay cheerful and we hope to see you all in person soon.
… and we look forward to seeing you all then.
Please check back here for news of revised opening times, as we may operate slightly shorter hours for a while.
With best wishes to all of our customers –
Team Riverside
We will be closed until the end of lockdown, and we will not be able to do ‘click and collect’.
Many thanks to all those who have sent good wishes. If you’d like to support us while we are closed, please consider buying books through our page on Bookshop.org – https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/theriversidebookshop. We get a percentage of the sale price, and your books are delivered direct to you.
We wish all of you the very best, and look forward to seeing you again when we are able to re-open.
We will be open for call/email and collect Tuesday 22 and Wednesday 23 December between 11am and 3pm.
If you have already ordered and paid for your items, you can turn up and collect at the door during these times.
If you want to buy items in stock in the shop you will need to call or email to check availability, then pay for them over the phone. You will then be able to collect them at the door during the times listed above. Please be patient if you have to wait at the door – we will get to you but you may have to wait while we finish dealing with another customer on the phone.
Thanks to everyone for your patience and kindness during this time. We have been so grateful for the good wishes and thoughts of our customers throughout this most difficult year. It’s helped us more than we can say.
Team Riverside
Dear friends
thank you for your patience while we are closed today. The announcement of new restrictions in London means that we are not allowed to open to the public. We hope to provide an opportunity at least for customers to pick up orders during this week, and will post details here and on Instagram later, so please check back.
In the meantime, if you would like to check in about the status of an order you have made with us, or have any other queries, please do contact us on info@riversidebookshop.co.uk.
We wish every one of you all the best, and hope you stay as safe as you can.
Team Riverside
We are so pleased to be open again!
Weekdays – 10am to 5pm
Saturday 10am to 6pm
Sunday 11am to 5pm
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
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!
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.
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!
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
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
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
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.
Dear Customers,
We’ve missed you!
We plan to reopen on Tuesday 7th July.
Opening hours will differ from our regular hours as we will be working with a much smaller team but we still hope to be open seven days a week.
Initially we will open:
10am to 4.30pm on weekdays
11am to 5pm on Saturdays
11am to 4pm on Sundays
We will be closed Sunday 12 July.
It may take us a while before we have all the new books you might need but we will be offering our usual ordering service and will be happy to take orders via phone or email once we are up and running.
best wishes
The Riverside Bookshop
We are monitoring the situation daily and have no confirmed cases of coronavirus among our staff to date. We will take immediate action if needed and will notify through our Instagram and/or blog if we need to close the shop for a period of time. So it’s business as usual for now.
If you are planning to make a special trip to see us, please ring us before you travel – 020 7378 1824.
Best wishes from all at the Riverside Bookshop.
Paperback, Andersen Press, £6.99, out now
Wolf in the Snow is an adventurous and heart-warming winter story. Told through pictures, with almost all of the words being the sounds made by the human and non-human animals, this is an instantly engaging story.
A little girl in a red coat leaves her school just as a blizzard is starting. As the snow becomes heavier, she finds a wolf cub who has accidentally become separated from their pack. She tries to get the cub back to the pack, and will not abandon it. But when she becomes lost, will anyone be able to find her and bring her home?
Like all the best children’s books, this is appropriate for every age. I’m not surprised that it won the Caldecott medal. I love that the author’s note at the beginning includes: “thanks to Kira Cassidy of the Yellowstone Wolf Project for taking the time to answer my questions about wolves and wolf behaviour”. The wolves and humans manage to be equally relatable, which is a remarkable achievement. It also has lovely messages about connection, taking risks to help others, love and friendship. A perfect gift book for winter, if you can bear to give it away.
Review by Bethan
We are looking for a PART TIME Bookseller to join our team permanently.
Bookselling experience is preferred and recent retail experience is essential.
As a key part of our small, friendly and enthusiastic team, you will provide excellent customer service and help keep our well curated stock interesting. Come and join London Bridge’s independent bookshop.
You would need to be available to start in late November/early December, to work weekend shifts, and to work flexible weekday shifts as needed.
To apply, please send your CV and a covering letter to Suzanne Dean, by email or post or by hand, by Monday 11th November. If you’d like more information, please phone or drop into the shop. Call 020 7378 1824 or email info@riversidebookshop.co.uk.
Hardback, Picador, £16.99, out now
Ted Chiang is perhaps best-known outside science fiction circles as the writer of the short story on which the 2016 film Arrival was based. Inside those circles, he’s the much-praised winner of a dozen sci fi writing awards – an incredibly high hit rate for a guy who’s only published seventeen short stories. This, his second collection, compiles his noughties-teens output and two originals in a single thought-provoking volume.
The deeply imaginative worlds Chiang creates within, philosophical questions he explores and his commitment to the teasing out of conundrums both moral and scientific have drawn comparisons to Borges and Calvino; given this, it would be tempting to say that these stories are in danger of “transcending science fiction”. But that would be to play down the fact that each of them revels in the genre. They are, unapologetically, part of that canon; the title story is effectively a meditation on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, while references to tech innovation, alien worlds and near-futures abound.
In this way, it’s doubly impressive that Chiang’s use of oft-trodden genre tropes yields such new and innovating results, ones that feel extremely pertinent to the present day – at times, terrifyingly so. It helps that he is, in an unflashy way, a master craftsman. His chameleonic style alters cleverly to service the needs of each story – our narrators are variously un-humanoid beings with recognisably human feelings of existential angst, fabric merchants from ancient Iraq, and an omniscient, unaffected third person narrator, recounting a truly distressing tale of Frankensteinien neglect and anonymous cruelty.
His ability to build suspense, meanwhile, is subtle and brilliant. In Exhalation our mysterious non-human storyteller’s perfectly plausible withholding of information as it tells its tale fuels our curiosity, its peculiar world introduced to us piece by piece. Reading The Lifecycle of Software Objects, meanwhile, is like watching a small child slowly crawl closer and closer to a cliff-edge. There’re shades of Michael Haneke in its blending of creeping dread and apparent mundanity, as well as in its dispassionate depictions of awful brutality; but it’s his ability to steadily crank up the unease well before any actual unpleasantness arrives that’s hugely impressive. And, because it’s fantastic sci-fi, it also takes place in an immersive world of just-on-the-horizon technological speculation (techulation?), feeling all the more grimly-plausible for that.
All-in-all, this is a collection that deserves to reach well outside of the sci-fi sphere – even if the stories themselves work inside it so adeptly.
Review by Tom
Happy Easter to all of our customers!
Our opening hours are as normal with the following exceptions:
Good Friday (19 April) – 11am to 6pm
Easter Saturday (20 April) – 10am to 6pm
Easter Sunday (21 April) – CLOSED
Easter Monday (22 April) – 11am to 6pm
Paperback, Penguin, £9.99, out now
If the sheer breadth of mindfulness, meditation, wellbeing and guidance books is really stressing you out, let us recommend The Science of Meditation, by science journalist Daniel Goleman and professor of psychology and psychiatry Richard J. Davidson.
This impressive work’s greatest strength is its ability to operate on many levels at once. On the one hand it’s an interrogative history of the scientific study of meditation, detailing the (more often than not, flawed) ways in which the results of this esoteric practice on the mind and body have been tested and evaluated. This technical content, while extensive, is never too dense, and always clearly laid out – so whether you’re learning about the neural profiles consistent with different meditative states, or how a sense of purpose in life can release an enzyme capable of protecting the strands of your DNA, you’re always taken through complex ideas one step at a time. it’s comprehensive but never woolly – in their own words, our guides aim to “keep it simple”.
On the other hand, it is an argument for the wide-ranging benefits of meditation. When Goleman and Davidson aren’t merrily shooting down vast swathes of studies into mindfulness practices for potentially biasing their test-subjects and making specious assumptions, they’re digging deep into sturdier research that shows the myriad ways in which these techniques can help a person. Lieutenant colonels diminish the symptoms of PTSD, zen students show improved resistance to pain, Tibetan monks (with PhDs in science) cultivate enhanced levels of compassion… The upshot, argue the authors, both long-time meditators, is that depending on your needs these practices can do a whole lot more than a) calm you down and b) bring you closer to oneness with the universe.
Which brings us to the book’s final function: that of a very useful guide on how to utilise different forms of meditation (it turns out there are quite a few) in your own life, depending on what you want to achieve from them. And – of course – they have the science to back up why each form may be the right one for you and your joint pain, or your anxiety, or your self-criticism.
Clear-headed, rigorous and insightful, this is the book for you if you want neuroscientific certainties with your spiritual enlightenment, and as a study of what we can say for sure about meditation and its psychological and physiological potential at this time it certainly feels damn near definitive.
Review by Tom
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
We’re working on a new downstairs poetry display… and we’ve included quotes on belly 
bands so you can try before you buy and see why we like them all so much. The section will be ever-changing but at the moment it features Mona Arshi, Rachael Allen, Warsan Shire, Hannah Sullivan, Hera Lindsay Bird, Claudia Rankine, J.O. Morgan, A. K. Blakemore, Emily Berry and Richard Scott.
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
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
