Heron Books

When the spider the size of a fifty pence piece made her home above my bedside lamp, I felt revulsion. Her body has the gelatinous look of a Haribo sweet and as much to recommend it. One of us has to move, probably me, I thought. That glass and paper trick having gone awry too many times, I left her and her waving legs alone and prayed that she wouldn’t get cold and join me in bed. Now that I’ve shared the room with her for some time, I have grown more tolerant. Sometimes I wish her good night. She has quietly been performing on me an experiment to test…

I have been seized by illness. My fingers ache as though I have spent hours toiling over an embroidery or hitting refresh on the British Museum website. I suffer nightmares and wake in a cold sweat, strange images floating before my eyes of ships and arrows and dismembered limbs. At the edges shimmer foxes and crows, the stuff of Aesop’s Fables. People have become epithets: the postman, ‘The Deliverer’; Harry, after a battle with the printer, ‘The Conqueror’; I myself, ‘The Unsteady,’ following an encounter with some mead. Bayeux Tapestry fever is upon me. I have not yet secured a ticket to see this mighty comic strip but I am…

This is a huge week in publishing. In fact, between now and C*******s the schedule is relentless. There are hundreds of new releases jostling for our attention. Myriad more on the way. Many of them make compelling cases to be read urgently. Perhaps I can skip Rowdy Girl: Confessions of a Vegan Cattle Rancher and I may not try all the recipes from Marvel Studios: The Official Cookbook but how does one choose what to read first out of Stewart Lee’s Pea Green Boat, a diary of the owl from Edward Lear’s poem exposing just how ill-suited both Owl and Pussycat are for their adventure, Tom Cox’s new short story…

Travelling in the Rwandan countryside after the 2010 ‘election,’ the journalist Anjan Sundaram comes across a scene of devastation: huts with their roofs ripped off and burnt, more huts torn down – it looks like the aftermath of a war. Yet nearby are bunches of grass thatch which could be used to rebuild and the now homeless people do not seem to be the victims of violence, though many are suffering from malaria and malnutrition. What happened? The president, recently re-elected with 95% of the vote – miraculously the figure he predicted when the election was called – decided that grass roofs were primitive. Rwanda is modern now. The order…

Dear Reader/Diary, 14 August: pop into charity shop, just for a look, whilst waiting to meet someone. Catch myself alphabetising the poetry books. Emerge with armful of Virago paperbacks from a time when they could design covers and a hardback edition of T** W***** o* T***** (redacted in case I give it to Harry; note: find time to read it first. Query: is tendency to read presents before giving, for quality control, noble?) Since friend is three minutes late, presume plans are cancelled and go home to read The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield. 15 August: In heaven with Delafield. Victoria Wood plus Barbara Pym, before…

Let’s play: Poetry blurb or Sopranos episode?* ‘The life of a deeply flawed individual… The whole is a symbolic and panoramic commentary on the human condition.’‘Despairing, vengeful and destructive… unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded… works of great artistic purity…’‘Encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed, in that exhausted aftermath.’‘Urgent and unflinching, Killing Spree tests how the human spirit might endure under conditions set to undo it.’‘Fragrant lives, full of blood and perfume…’ Blurbs are really hard to write. Poetry blurbs especially. Collections are always by turns devastating and consolatory. Everything is about war, love, parenthood, bodies, rejecting binaries and exploring the (currently most…

You have twenty-eight days until you can read the book that I think you must read. You may need that long to prepare yourself mentally and physically, to clear your schedule of all distractions, to limber up and get your sturdier tote bag ready – at 640 pages it weighs 842 grams – and to ensure tea and biscuit supplies are stocked up because you won’t find a great deal of comfort within the pages of this superlative novel, The Disappearers by Marlon James. The blurb gives away too much. Here is what you need to know: it opens with a group of gay men gathered in response to an…

Had you told me that I would find all that’s good in humanity at the racetracks in January in nineties County Durham, I may have been a little doubtful. But Louise Powell’s novel Underdogs offers just that. Admittedly there are a fair number of fights, dirty dealings and no small element of tragedy yet the story of this impoverished, rain-soaked world told by ten-year-old George shines as brightly as Goldie the greyhound’s gorgeous coat. Goldie will save George and his father Reg from homelessness and hunger. All they have to do is pretend that she is their dog and follow the instructions of her real owner, Bertie, when entering her…

Thanks for asking but no, I won’t be watching Christopher Nolan’s new film. Really I have nothing against Matt Damon running around shouting at other men, beset by irresistible women whose sole purpose is him, and occasionally mumbling something about his wife. But I’m reading Emily Wilson’s book about translating ancient literature (into English, rather than for IMAX) and it’s going to take more than a clammy Tom Holland* to drag me away. Wilson is known for her celebrated translations into iambic pentameter of The Odyssey and The Iliad. In Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, she asks ‘How can we imagine the ancients, in all their strangeness and all their strange…

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who stand before an active volcano and think, Blimey, a volcano and those who stand before an active volcano and think, I should move here. Helena Attlee is in the latter camp. After years of visiting Sicily, she decided to settle on the slopes of Etna for a season. The volcano had been erupting almost continuously for a year. The windows of her new home are a little rattly.   The Fire in the Mountain: Sicily, Etna and Her People is an exploration of the relationship between Etna and her inhabitants. (She is female though vulcano and Mongibello, one of…