Heron Books

In Wild Persistence, Katrina Naomi imagines what she might do if she could divide herself in two. The poem ‘Dualism: A Manifesto’ is itself split across the page. One side of the whole can write, paint, wear stilettoes, belt out Shirley Bassey, while the other reads Iris Murdoch in cream and brown brogue. The two halves complement and oppose one another, a conflict explored throughout the collection. ‘One side of me could be utterly lovable,’ part of the page declares, ‘The other who I really am.’ The part of me that wants to be alone in a cave with a book and the part that wants to be discussing that…

Whatever your almanac may tell you, it is not summer until the strawberries have swollen to indecent size, cucumbers are filling both sandwiches and jugs of Pimm’s and this music is playing. Happy Wimbledon fortnight to you all. Between matches there is just time to stretch out on a lawn with a good read: a novel plucked from the shelves or a book bursting with suggestions for delicious things to nibble whilst watching other people exercise in thirty-degree heat. Ripeness by Sarah Moss is a stunning novel following Edith, aged seventeen in the 60s, and Edith in 2023. Poised for university, her French-Israeli mother declares that Edith must spend the…

“You know what it’s like. The usual desire to kill…” Miranda writes to her sister, reporting on another exasperating visit to their parents who live somewhere inaccessible in France with two cats, Juno and Hodge, permitted in the house, the Bad Cats who are not and the llamas, Lorenzo and Leonora, who sleep in the kitchen when it’s cold and gather by the tennis court when it isn’t to watch the family’s attempts on the dangerously uneven surface. Lack of glasses or functioning hips notwithstanding. Prized possession at La Forgerie was once Boswell, the chest freezer which moved from England to France with them, along with its full contents. Leaving…

Independent Bookshop Week is flying by far too rapidly, fortunately leaving us with a mountain of books which will stand the test of time. Our partnership with Foundry Editions has taken us from Paris to Nicosia to Palestine, from Benidorm to the Villa Borghese and into the dark underbelly of Heron Books, that Narnia of the lower ground floor where we gathered on Wednesday to hear from Chiara Valerio, author of The Little I Knew, a brilliant depiction of a small community in which everyone knows each other’s behaviour and routines though not their motivations. We were joined also by Ailsa Wood, who translated The Little I Knew, and Richard…

What has a book ever inspired you to do?To plant a Sara van Fleet rose? Climb the Cairngorms? Run away to sea?Perhaps to bake peach cobbler? To make the perfect martini? To drink fewer martinis?*To go gently, look closely, sit quietly, write a diary, send letters?To howl at the moon? Protest? Rage?Set up a bookshop?**Film a video tribute?Chase after an author to tell them that you love them and gush about their Thomas Hardy-esque writing?*** In Steve Page’s case, the answer is: to write songs. Join us at 5pm in the shop tomorrow, Saturday, to enjoy the result. We are very excited to kick off Independent Bookshop Week with our…

BS8 may be beset by storms but I am sipping a brandy sour, curling my toes about delicate shells, toying with Reggie Kray’s cigarette lighter, and shaking sand from my hair. My nose is sunburnt. My vision hazy. The sky is the unlikely colour of Fanta and beneath it the sea invites all without the promise of release. This from the safety of the shop of course – whilst wearing two jumpers and indulging in nothing stronger than tea* – as I prepare for Independent Bookshop Week and our partnership with the publisher Foundry Editions. All of Foundry’s books are set around the Mediterranean and translate works previously unpublished in…

Leave the Trees, Please is the polite but firm message of Benjamin Zephaniah’s picture book, published posthumously and featuring a simple poem pulsing with life. Melissa Castrillon’s illustrations are crowded with detail: amongst the oak leaves, birds flit, squirrels bound, caterpillars squirm and ladybirds pootle. Acorns abound. Grasses wave and flowers flourish about the roots. In his book, Renaturing, James Canton demonstrates how this picture can be one we all recognise and enjoy. From planting wildflowers in a window box to creating a pond in even the smallest garden to leaving lawns unmown, he shows the difference we can make if we all act. Renaturing rather than rewilding is the…

Omar El Akkad began writing One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This after 7 October 2023. The book was published in February this year. He writes, ‘Words exist only in hindsight; time passes over and around them like water along a canyon floor. In the year or so between when I write these words and when they are published, perhaps so many innocent people will have been killed, so many mass graves discovered, that it will not be so controversial to state plainly what is plainly known. But for now we argue, in this part of the world, the part not reduced to rubble, about how words make…

‘What’s the theme this week?’Books were piling up on the desk. Twelve Post-War Tales, The Deserters, Allies At War, Shrapnel Boys…‘War,’ I said cheerily.Except perhaps it wasn’t. Isn’t. I picked up Graham Swift’s Twelve Post-War Tales and turned again to the opening story in which a British serviceman applies to a German government department to find out what happened to his relatives during the second world war. The British soldier’s family were German-Jewish. The German official whom he meets had been a soldier and a prisoner of war. Both men’s parents were killed by ‘the other side,’ though they mean different things by that. The British man has not applied…

I took a risk a few days ago, left my column of berets intact and donned a straw boater. From inside, the weather looked right: birds able to land without trouble, trees swaying gently. The wind swept the hat from my head the moment I was near the river. There was that laughing instant when it seems one will easily snatch it from the air and then, triumphant, look around as if to say, ‘that was close. Did you see?’ and a passerby will nod and smile, point even, in a silent reply of ‘good catch!’ But another gust and it was off. Inevitable. The boater and its burgundy ribbon…