Heron Books

Perhaps I ought to be careful recommending a book about a morose, cynical bookseller whose rage at customers conducting lengthy (and dull) phone conversations in his vicinity and asking for books of which he does not approve threatens to boil over into such a frenzy that he may actually throw The Power of Now at the next nose-picker interrupting his thoughts to ask for it. Any similarity between the character working at the fictional Mute Books, who spends his leisure time reading Barbara Pym in the bath, and real persons is purely coincidental. Though he has inspired me to add a Presbyterian, his bathing drink of choice, to my cocktail…

On Tuesday Jay Griffiths and Gareth Howell-Jones are coming to the shop to talk about how animals, hedgehogs included, heal us. Since I was once rescued from a difficult situation by a hedgehog, a hedgehog which had itself been saved by my mother and named Lord Emsworth by my father, I fully endorse this message. Jay Grifiths’ latest book, How Animals Heal Us, is lovely. So much more than a paean to relaxing with a purring cat (which does have pain-relieving powers, releasing oxytocin) or the benefits of caring for animals in combating loneliness, the author’s deep research looks at how animals can heal individuals, both physically and mentally, but…

Sometimes one is reading a book so good that finishing it is followed by a period of mourning. A version of the five stages of grief must be endured before even considering reading anything else. Denial that the story is over is followed by anger that one didn’t come up with the idea oneself. Then comes a period of bargaining in the form of begging everyone else to read it and to love it as much. The depression phase is sometimes closer to repression, for example if you have just read That Broke into Shining Crystals by Richard Scott, or expression if you have just read Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa…

Inclement winds, gathering clouds, flood waters, rain and snow: few of those of late in Clifton but I have been buffeted and shivering in the domains of Sarah Hall, Philip Pullman and Sverker Sörlin where winds and snow are noisy with personality. Helm by Sarah Hall is named for the north-easterly wind which besets Cross Fell in the Pennines. Pictures of the bank of clouds which sweeps in with the wind across the Eden Valley are well worth gazing at, as the voice of Helm acknowledges: ‘The valley – after some Chistian-Pagan bunfighting – is [named] Eden. Seriously? OK, it is quite pretty.’ The helm wind is chilling and fierce,…

With thanks to the spider awaiting me last night, hanging upside down an inch above my pillow, not to mention the poltergeist which has set up noisy residence in my washing machine, I feel ready to declare that spooky season is upon us. Thus, in ascending order of age appropriateness and/or tolerance for the uncanny, the unsettling and the downright horrifying, some grotesque recommendations for you and your coven… Two interactive board books for minuscule monsters: Five Little Ghosts by Alex Barrow introduces a family of rather sweet and behatted ghouls trying to cause a scare, though mostly just worrying their mother, while Feed your Monster by Anna Milbourne, illustrated…

Do you want a book that discusses Campari, Joni Mitchell, Talk Talk, lebkuchen, sweet cicely and quinces and offers recipes for oregano flower focaccia, potato and celeriac boulangère, gooseberry Eton Mess, not to mention herb sugar, harira soup and fig crumble? And all this while walking across the West Country with an enthusiastic dog, picking gorse flowers, listening to the blackbirds and even hearing a cirl bunting? Yes, I thought so. The things Mark Diacono can do with a broad bean flower are wildly hunger-inducing. And what that man suggests for rhubarb. Well… How he manages to work Robert Duvall into his musings on the scent of Elaeagnus ebbingei or…

I read a 700-page novel so that I can insist you should too. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai is so good that it is a struggle to emerge. Like Sonia’s mother, one wants to remain in its pages: ‘When Dickens is better than your life, then why live your life?’ she wonders. (Sonia has a ready answer though it goes unuttered.)    From Vermont where she is studying, Sonia calls her parents crying. She is lonely. Her family in India, never physically alone, do not empathise. But they do scheme: perhaps, her grandfather thinks, she should be introduced to the grandson of a friend of his,…

‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ Lea Ypi is asked repeatedly as she tries to enter countries and archives. Fun, she tries on one official, to little mirth in response. Personal research. Academic inquiry. Dignity, perhaps. At the start of Indignity, Ypi asks a taxi driver in Tirana to take her to the secret-service archive. (He does. Must try that sometime.) There she has permission to view documents relating to her grandmother, Leman, a woman whom she admired and loved, from whom she learned compassion and morality and about whom she perhaps knew little. This realisation was sparked by a photo posted on social media of her grandparents, ostensibly…

Autumn is here and the pleasing scents of pumpkin lattes and fresh paper must have gone to publishers’ heads for the number of books out this week is, in the best possible way, overwhelming. All-Consuming, fans of Ruby Tandoh may say. Espionage thrillers, epic art and history books, folklore- and mythology-inspired adventure stories and even a picture book called Harry and the Heron have all flown to the shop. How on earth does one plan one’s reading when unpacking such boxes of delights? I am not able to help anyone decide between The Hunt for the Fog Town Moose, a quest to photograph a master-of-disguise in a foggy town, or…

All good things this week in many forms, from poetry to short stories to a novel, from a picture book about broccoli as well as goodness (as if those are not synonymous), to a board book teaching sign language, to a memoir about mother Mary (not that one). A little evil, a little naughtiness, a little silliness herewith too. The Greatest Possible Good by Ben Brooks opens with a family in their historic, tastefully modernised, Cotswold house eating a meal together but apart, its members focussed on a book, a podcast, a phone screen and an unsettled housefly rather than each other. Evangeline’s attempts to make her father read her…