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Be Kind to Your Local Bookseller this Christmas

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have noticed the many closed-down shops around. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to your local bookstore and buy your Christmas gifts from them rather than Amazon. I know it’s tempting to hit that order button, but can you imagine anything worse than a great big gaping hole where your cozy bookseller once was?

For bookish gift ideas see our Christmas post.

Happy Christmas!

 

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Margaret Atwood to publish sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale

No doubt inspired by our times, Margaret Atwood has decided to write a sequel to her dystopian best-seller The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testament will be published in September 2019 and will pick up on the story 15 years after the closing scene of The Handmaid’s Tale. I, for one, can’t wait for this book. If you haven’t already read The Handmaid’s Tale, now is the time, or if you have, how about trying another of her masterpieces, Alias Grace.

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Costa Award short-list 2018

Here’s the short-list selection for the Costa Awards 2018. As usual, there are five categories: Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Books. We absolutely loved Sally Rooney’s modern love story Normal People and Pat Barker’s feminist spin on The Iliad in The Silence of the Girls, both nominated in the Novel Award category as well as the strange and wonderful The Colour of the Sun by David Almond in the Children’s Book category. Category winners will be announced on the 7th January and the Costa Book of the Year on the 29th January. Which ones of these have you read?

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Bookstoker for The Wildsmith Papers

Images of beauty are all around us but have you ever considered beauty from a cerebral point of view?  Bookstoker is featured in The Wildsmith Papers this month with a post on curated fiction and non-fiction that challenge the idea of beauty and what beauty does to us. Have a look!

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The 2018 Man Booker Prize short-list

Yesterday saw the announcement of the 2018 Man Booker Prize short-list, a huge event in the literary calendar, particularly for those who made it from the long-list. A short-list nomination usually means a significant jump in sales and the opportunity to emerge out of the shadows and into the literary limelight. So which books made it to the short-list and what did we make of them?

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Autumn book treats

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Autumn book treats

There’s only one thing that can rescue me from end-of-summer blues: the promise of some great new books for autumn. And this year’s list of has some real gems. Just have a look.

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Is this Britain’s most glamorous literary festival?

I can’t think of a more glamorous literary festival than the Cliveden Literary Festival (29-30th September) taking place at Cliveden House just outside London. Seeped in a cocktail of royalty, aristocracy, sex and political scandals, most famously the Profumo affair, Cliveden has a history few authors could dream up. And it comes with a price to match. At £105 a day, it’s probably also the most expensive. But, hey, you don’t often get a chance to be in a room with Hanif Kureishi, Sir Anthony Beevor, Alain de Botton, HRH Princess Michael of Kent (uhm…), Sarah Waters, Edmund de Waal, Norman Foster, Naomi Wolf, I could go on and on. They really have a fabulous programme. Cancel that Christmas holiday and sign up today!

What I'm reading this summer

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What I’m reading this summer

Don’t you just love this side of summer? At this point it seems endless, hence the towering pile of books on my desk that I intend to read during the holiday. Maybe this will be the year I have time to read them all?!

 

 

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