Guest review by Yvonne Coppard: FOUND IN A BOOKSHOP by Stephanie Butland

 

"A diverse collection of characters ... running the gamut of emotions and experiences as each faces up to the epic challenges of a stricken world."

Yvonne Coppard is a Writing Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and writer of fiction for children and adults. See more on her website.

When Covid lockdown is imposed, the owner of the Lost for Words bookshop in York faces up to the possibility that she and her staff may lose their livelihoods. Then an old customer asks for help in locating a book, which sparks the idea for remote selling with a twist. As well as ordering specific books, customers can call or email to ask staff to browse and select books for them. Connections are made between a community of people from different walks of life who take comfort and inspiration from books. This is the basic conceit that allows Butland to introduce a diverse collection of characters, weaving their back stories together and running the gamut of emotions and experiences as each character faces up to the epic challenges of a stricken world. There are some heartrending moments but the book is, at heart, a joyous story.

For many of us, those long years of pandemic became a dark tunnel of loss and grief, lit by occasional beacons of hope as ordinary people stepped up to do extraordinary things for strangers they would never meet. The characters in Found in a Bookshop draw the reader into many of the experiences we recognise, in our own lives or the lives of those around us. New relationships begin, old ones strengthen or crumble. There is violence, and loss, and misunderstanding. But there is also humour, heroism and, above all, good old-fashioned kindness.

This is the only book I have read where Lockdown is part of the story. I found any creative attempt to analyse or absorb the events going on around me impossible. Found in a Bookshop is a book I will keep, as a story-snapshot album and aide-memoire of extraordinary times I hope never to see again.

Found in a Bookshop is published by Headline.

Independent Bookshop feature No.15. Alexis Thompson of The Woodstock Bookshop: THE GAELIC GARDEN OF THE DEAD by MacGillivray

 

"This will haunt you, if allowed to do so ..."

Alexis Thompson is a writer and bookseller based in Oxford. He has led poetry walks in London on the Modernists for the International Times and New River Press, curated and read in London and Edinburgh and was writer-in-residence with The Parlour Collective. He recently completed an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford and has had fiction and poetry published in MONK and the New River Press. In 2020 he was the editor of Blackwell's Poetry #1. He is currently finishing a debut novel, titled A Pit of Clay.

As of 2022 he is manager of The Woodstock Bookshop, noted for its yearly poetry festival under its previous owner Rachel Phipps. The Woodstock Poetry Festival is set to return in November 2023 for the first time since 2019.

'I open with a mouth of burning coal', writes poet MacGillivray in this astonishing third collection. Here we have the Gaelic alphabet of trees which, for those of you who don't know, assigns all the letters of the Highland alphabet to specific trees and this gives Book I of The Gaelic Garden of the Dead its unique structure.

But The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is a trilogy; Books II and III deal with a sigil sequence and sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots, consecutively (a discussion of the sonnets was featured on BBC Radio 3 The Verb: listen here) and the whole collection unfolds in your hands like an arboreal haunting; a lament to the loss of an ancient language - particularly relevant now, as Scottish Gaelic is predicted to become extinct by 2031 - and the beleaguered fate of a great queen. Although this sounds far-stretching, in MacGillivray's hands, the interwoven historical with the poetic potency of the book is both striking and what a reader might seek out as tonic from the observational, minimalism of most mainstream contemporary poetry.

'Love’s eyes are colourless:/ a motive for moving through underworlds' asserts MacGillivray, summoning Jean Cocteau, T.S. Eliot and deeply embedded folkloric Scottish roots: there are psalms for lightning; salt, snow and sleep coronachs (the third part of a funeral lament); and references to old Gaelic customs: 'Walking to the heartland of the Gaelic alphabet/ where spirit multitudes sleep rough/ among the bales of slaughtered wheat,' I drank my lover’s blood', a reference to the Gaelic tradition of drinking a little of the blood of a loved one who has been killed in battle. Here we have not only an arboreal meditation on the nature of these trees (ranging from Ailm 'A' for pine, to Quert for 'Q' which is apple - here described under the 'School of the Moon': a traditional name for the teaching of cattle rustling, done at night.)

As with her other collections, the experience is not only of potent poetics but is educative, while never feeling didactic. In reading the book, one feels enhanced as if by secret or lost knowledge into this Gaelic otherworld. Book II, A Crisis of Dream, operates as a visual gateway of pattern-poem sigils between Book I and Book III.

The reader is then confronted by In My End is My Beginning, a line better known from Eliot’s Four Quartets, having been borrowed from Mary Stuart. Book III presents a 'descent' of thirty five sonnets - one for each step Mary descended on her way to execution, which are then 'chewed up' (here a nod to the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) for the fifteen minutes Mary's mouth was said to have moved, after her decapitation. The result is deeply moving: the sonnets were composed in situ in many of the sites Mary lived in and at Fotheringhay, on the anniversary morning of her execution. Replete with rich imagery summoned from Mary's own poetry (we learn she was a part of Ronsard's poetic circle 'The Pleiades'), MacGillivray's response and elaboration to Mary’s death and writing evidently comes from a place of deep research and profound sympathy for Mary’s plight, not merely as a historical figure, but as a human being:

I dreamed of a sawdust chandelier
whose crystals were drops of driftwood dredged
from all the world’s shipwrecks: god’s figurehead,
and it swung, as I dreamt, ever closer to my fear,
softly releasing sweet incense into the clear,
black night air, as that great barge carries the dead,
but instead of my death, it passaged my dread
and the water it ploughed comprised of one tear.

This formal descent of sonnets is then wildly torn up: 'my bled out, love flushed, young, wild skeleton!' for the counterpart to The Descent; The Blade and in both sequences, Mary emerges as an impassioned poet which reflects something of her true personality.

This is an ambitious and electric collection - a far cry from the usual - and will haunt you, if allowed to do so.

For fans of Barry McSweeney, William Burroughs and Sorley Maclean.

The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is published by Bloodaxe Books.  

Independent Bookseller Feature no 14: Claire Grint of COGITO BOOKS, Hexham, chooses EXPECTATION by Anna Hope

"Beautifully realised characters, elegant, emotionally direct prose and clever fluid structure." 

"Cogito Books has been in my family since we first opened our doors in 2001. I became much more involved with the shop after graduating, so it was a natural transition for me to take over the business when my Dad retired. With a small but dedicated team of three experienced booksellers, we put the customer at the centre of everything we do – and we love nothing better than sharing recommendations and talking about books.

A family business from the outset, Cogito Books was established by my Dad back in 2001. I joined him in 2005, then  took over when he retired in July 2012. I love books and people, so running a bookshop has always been a perfect combination for me. The relationships we build with customers are absolutely central to what we do – and nothing beats the feeling of helping someone to find the perfect book and hearing that they enjoyed it.

What makes our bookshop unique? The relationships we build with customers are absolutely central to what we do – from discovering their reading tastes to knowing the details of their lives. We’re lucky to be at the centre of a thriving community, running three monthly book groups in addition to author events and weekly storytelling sessions for children. Customers often comment on the sheer range and breadth of books we stock; being independent, we’re lucky to be able to get behind books we love and to provide a curated, personalised experience." Claire Grint

See more on our website.

This novel is utterly luminous; the lives of friends Cate, Hannah and Lissa leaping straight out from the page and resonating in the very deepest sense, as we’re invited to recognise and celebrate the experiences which mould us as human beings. The novel pivots around the year 2010, where we find Cate struggling to cope with new motherhood and her in-laws, Hannah undergoing gruelling IVF treatment and Lissa beginning to think that she’s running out of time to achieve success as an actress. The past is then woven into the present, with subsequent sections diving back through the years to reveal more about the roots of the women’s friendship; the experiences which created it and those which are beginning to fracture it on both subtle and dramatic lines. 

The issues in the novel are ones we can all recognise; examining friendship, feminism and family in our complicated century. The beautifully realised characters, elegant, emotionally direct prose and clever fluid structure create a portrait of lives both full and vivid yet tinged with the melancholy of regret. The novel tells of chances not taken, of mistakes made; of the gap between expectation and our often painful, compromised yet ultimately precious reality.

Expectation is published by Transworld.

Personal book recommendation

Team 20th birthday celebration: Claire Grint, Hilary McCallum and Jenny Tattersall

Independent Bookseller feature no. 13: John Newman of The Newham Bookshop, IN MEMORY OF MEMORY by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale

 

"Part travelogue and part philosophical, social and historical enquiry, written with intelligence. wit and great perceptiveness."

John with colleague Vivian Archer

The Newham Bookshop was established in 1979 by local parents as part an educational charity, as a non-stigmatising gateway to literacy and numeracy support for adults and a source of income for the various projects. We have always been underpinned by values that are inclusive and which celebrate diversity. THE focus is on multiculturalism - valuing everyone and learning from each other in a vibrantly diverse part of East London. We are community-focused, supporting local and London-wide events, conferences and festivals.

I've personally been involved with the shop since the mid 80’s, first as an employee in 1989, then children’s buyer. Vivian Archer, manager since 1987, encouraged me to return to bookselling when John and Jean, stalwarts of the children’s shop, retired. I have never regretted the move for one moment and despite the almost ceaseless changes within the industry I never ever wake up reluctant to go to work! 

We've been supported by many authors over the years, with regular events and signings. One of our earliest and most important supporters was the late writer and compiler of oral histories Gilda O’Neill, who was always generous with her time and never missed an opportunity to point people in our direction. Benjamin Zephaniah and Michael Rosen have also been hugely supportive, giving us the confidence to develop the events which are now integral to our business. More recently we've enjoyed working with a host of locally-based authors, including Courttia Newland, Onjali Q. Rauf, Salena Godden, Irenosen Okoji, Vaseem Khan and Luan Goldie. It's a must for bookshops to cultivate relationships with authors and illustrators and develop ways of working together.

During these periods of enforced isolation over the last fourteen months I have found myself slowing down and as I have adapted to having less choice about how I spend both my working and social life. It has also occurred to me that I have rediscovered a sense of freedom to do two things I have not immersed myself in as thoroughly since childhood, namely being outside in nature and being inside with a book. I have had so much time to walk, read and reflect on both of these activities without distraction for long periods and it has been both a solace and a boon in these sad and difficult times. Suddenly books that I might have put aside to read later were being read and digested.

Into this unexpected space I received a proof copy of this particular book and I knew I wanted to revisit it when I was kindly asked to submit a review as I had found it both stimulating and engaging for a number of reasons. As a lover of books, it is difficult not to be drawn to Fitzcarraldo Editions, an imprint that takes its name from the typeset it uses and which houses pages between blue or white covers which just to hold is an aesthetically pleasing experience.

I studied history as an undergraduate in the late 1970’s and within this I had also taken a course on the Emancipation of the Jews in Europe taught by the late Chimen Abramsky. At the same time, I knew little about the day to day lives of Russian Jewry in the late Tsarist and Soviet periods. Stepanova’s family lived through and ultimately her branch of her family survived these times although others were victims of Pogroms and the Holocaust itself. How they did so is revealed through shared memories, correspondence and other artefacts.

The book began in the author's mind when aged ten but the major impetus came when the author engaged with the contents of her late Grandmother's Moscow apartment which provided links to a journey across time and place to locate members of her family and the worlds they inhabited. What follows is part travelogue and part philosophical, social and historical enquiry written with intelligence, wit and great perceptiveness.

Stepanova, in partnership with her English translator, has created a wide ranging, beautifully written exploration of a family history which links to major events and social history in Russia and parts of Europe where her ancestors and their descendants studied and made lives for themselves over the course of the Twentieth Century. There are enlightening sections on the large numbers of Russian women, including her own great grandmother, who studied medicine in Paris before the First World War as well as a son’s moving letters to his mother from the Siege of Leningrad. Stepanova seems to question how does one put these lives into the context of their times and how do we know whether in relation to Post Memory if “things were better back then”

W.G Sebald is something of a torchbearer as Stepanova introduces links to other personages and their artistic legacy which often coincide with my own interests and preoccupations as does the writing of Sebald himself. These memorably emerge as essays within the book taking in themes which include the self-portraits of Rembrandt and photographer Francesca Woodman and the art of Joseph Cornell. Perhaps most movingly, Stepanova revisits Charlotte Saloman’s haunting “Life? Or Theatre” a work that I first encountered when I saw some of the original paintings in Amsterdam in 1988. The essays had me turning to my bookshelves and Googling images of the works under discussion

Anecdotes are many and I have no space to share them here but they seem to reveal as much about the human condition as anything else and highlight the impact of family secrets and links to personal histories we can perhaps all identify with. What survives does not always link us reliably or definitively to the past as Stepanova herself discovers. “Here is time passing, the human is washed away but objects keep their outline” Maybe it is the tangible things that matter most. I certainly think so as although I have my memories and photos aplenty I am best able conjure up one of my own grandmothers each time I use her bone-handled tomato knife.

In Memory of Memory is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions 2021

Read more independent bookseller features:

Books and Ink, Banbury (now Winchcombe)

Kenilworth Books

The Book Corner, Halifax

The Woodstock Bookshop

Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

Sevenoaks Bookshop

Sam Read Bookseller, Grasmere

Jaffe and Neale, Chipping Norton

Haslemere Bookshop

Orb's Bookshop, Aberdeen

 

P&G Wells, Winchester

Independent Bookseller feature No.12: Madelaine Smith of P&G Wells, Winchester. HER STORY NOT HIS STORY

 

"None of these books is a history book. Facts, as Kate Grenville admits, have been ‘slithery’ in the hands of the authors who have used what is known to tell a story set in a moment in time."

P&G Wells on College Street in ​Winchester, is possibly the oldest bookshop in the country having traded on the same spot, though under different names, since at least 1729. Tucked away in the streets to the south of Winchester Cathedral the shop offers an eclectic selection of local interest, adult fiction / non-fiction, children’s, teen and YA books as well as stationery and cards.

New Manager Steve Scholey took over in March 2020 and promptly had to close the shop due to Lockdown restrictions. The team have used the time well working on refurbishing and rearranging the shop at the same time as supplying books via click and collect. Steve has regularly been out on his bike to deliver to our customers. 

Madelaine Smith first started selling books at the age of eight when she set up a secondhand bookstall
outside the family home in Sydney. One way or another she has been a bookseller ever since.

I read quite widely and don’t consider myself a fan of any particular genre. I do have a few favourite authors who I return to again and again but also love discovering new writers. Looking back over the books I have read over recent months I was surprised to see just how many books I had read by women authors, and more particularly that I had read quite a number of historical fiction titles which had as their central character a woman or several women. What they had in common was the fact that greater or lesser known incidents from history were being retold from the point of view of a woman. Her story not his story.

I’ve known the story of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet since I was a child (I don’t quite know how... I come from a theatrical family... I had a soft toy cat called Hamnet!) and although Maggie O’Farrell’s wonderful Hamnet is nominally about the child it is really the story of the mother, Anne Hathaway, known throughout this book as Agnes.

Told mostly as the story of one summer’s day in 1596, the day on which Hamnet’s twin Judith falls ill with the plague, the story slips back and forth into the lives of Agnes and Will; how they came to be together, how their marriage, brought about by Agnes’s pregnancy, was an escape for both of them. Central to the novel though is the loss of their child, the deep unfathomable grief that this brings and the different ways Agnes and Will live with their grief.

A pregnancy also sets the lives of the characters in Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves on their future path. Curiosity leads 21 year old Elizabeth Veale to give up what she had been warned all her life to protect. John MacArthur, her flattering seducer marries her but soon it is clear that it is an unsuitable attachment. John’s ambition takes them to the new colony of New South Wales where he hopes to make his fortune.

Based on the real life story of John MacArthur who every Australian schoolchild learns was the ‘father of wool’, pioneer in the great staple product of Merino wool, A Room Made of Leaves puts Elizabeth, and her life at Elizabeth Farm* at the centre of the story where previously it was really only John who was given credit. I have read two of Grenville’s previous explorations of early Australian life The Secret River and The Lieutenant which were both very male-character-centred. There were so few women in the very early days of the Australian colony but they too have a story to tell. One thing I felt was missing was any real sense of how very difficult life must have been in the late eighteenth century New South Wales especially for a woman brought up in comfort. The heat, the dust, the fear for your children, the overwhelming difficulties of this new life didn’t really come across.

The voyage to Australia in Dangerous Women by Hope Adams gives a better indication of what the life of convict women being transported to the Van Diemen’s Land penal colony was really like in 1841; cramped, overcrowded, unclean, unhealthy. Based on a real journey this book really gave me a sense of the fact that so many women were transported for very petty crimes. Acting out of hunger or desperation they ended up being sent to the far side of the world with no possibility of ever returning ‘home’. My own great, great, great, great grandmother was condemned to death for stealing a hat. The sentence was commuted and she was transported to Tasmania in the very early days of this penal colony. Her small daughter joined her on the voyage but died on the way and was buried at sea.

Miss Austen by Gill Hornby shines a light on a woman whose life was much more comfortable though still for the most part ruled by financial insecurity. Cassandra Austen lived for nearly another 30 years after her sister Jane died and was in many ways the guardian of Jane’s reputation. Miss Austen set in 1840 focuses on an elderly Cassandra and her desire to find some letters that Jane wrote many years earlier. Cassandra is known to have destroyed a number of Jane’s letters and of course we will never know what was in those letters or why Cassandra felt the need to destroy them. This reimagining weaves facts and fiction together exploring the story of Cassandra towards the end of her life and revealing details of the Austen sisters’ lives and romantic disappointments, and above all their love for each other.

None of these books is a history book. Facts, as Kate Grenville admits, have been ‘slithery’ in the hands of the authors who have used what is known to tell a story set in a moment in time. The fact that all the stories do have some basis in the truth, are based on real people in real places is a perfect start for anyone interested to find out more about their life and times.

*Elizabeth Farmhouse was the very first ‘Historic House’ I visited when my 3rd form history class went on a school excursion. I remember very little about the house other than the fact that we had to remove our shoes when we walked inside as the floorboards were so old.

Hamnet is published by Tinder Press.

A Room Made of Leaves is published by Canongate.

Dangerous Women is published by Michael Joseph.

Miss Austen is published by Century.

NEW YEAR ROUND-UP: More authors and booksellers tell us what's on their reading piles

***

Susan Price:  Having just finished reading Dennis Hamley’s wonderful, subtle The Hare Trilogy, deciding what to read next will be difficult. My friend Karen Bush has just sent me Inheritance, a collection of short stories by a Robin Hobb, a writer we both admire. Another friend, Linda Strachan, has sent me her Guide To Writing for Children, which is a must-read. Visiting my local charity shop resulted in the purchase of Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods. And I firmly intend to re-read Isabella Tree’s Wilding, which I found exciting the first time.

***

Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham:  Have I read the Australian writer Patrick White before? I can't remember but a customer said I really have to read Riders in the Chariot (Vintage), which is about four independently damaged and discarded people wandering round the wreckage of a once fine city ... oh dear. But the cover blurb says there is a possibility of redemption. I hope so.

Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire (Monthly Review) comprises a short essay and material about this essay, first published in 1955 and is our bookshop open book group read in January. We try to vary our reading between fiction and non-fiction, and this came out of our discussion of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. The bookshop recently put on a talk by Priyamvada Gopal on her Insurgent Empire (Verso) which was inspirational, as part of an irregular series of events on race and Empire and this is a developing theme among our intellectual and activist customers. It's decades since I read Frantz Fanon and Edward Said but their work seems to be reaching a new generation. I need to revise.

I'm a sucker for Patti Smith so I'm saving her Year of the Monkey (Bloomsbury) for the two day Christmas break (poor old retailers, eh?). At heart I want to be Patti Smith, sitting in a cafe in New York munching sourdough toast with olive oil dribbled on it, drinking black coffee and rocking out in the evening. I do wear the same cap as she does, which is a start but it's too late to have been a friend of Robert Mapplethorpe and Allen Ginsberg. Here she wanders round the American west coast, writing her short dreamlike essays, illustrated by her usual Polaroid pictures.

***

Wes Magee:  In 1975 I traipsed to the Poetry Society HQ in Earls Court, London, and listened to a bespectacled, slight young man talk about his recently published first book. He reported the book’s unheralded emergence, and how ‘traffic continued to flow along the Brompton Road.’ Thus did I discover Ian McEwan’s collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, and marvelled at such a confident debut. Since then he has gone on to become a multi-award-winning author, whose novels unfailingly surprise with their virtuosity. I have read the lot, and it is with high anticipation that I look forward to opening his 18th, Machines Like Me, on New Year’s Day, 2020.

***

Rachel Phipps of The Woodstock Bookshop: The book I am most looking forward to reading is Actress by Anne Enright, which comes out at the end of February. I have to come clean and admit I read the proof, but a member of staff has snaffled it and I desperately want to re-read it. She is such a good writer, and this is about an actress and her daughter and their relationship – the daughter’s attempt to reconstruct and understand her mother’s life. I loved it and can’t wait to read it again, which is rare. I have a few days break over Christmas and will take books that I meant to read properly and haven’t – Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman, which I have been eyeing in the shop since it first appeared and reading little bits of here and there. It is over a thousand pages which does tend to deter people, but the few pages I have read are enticing. And A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, a collection of stories by Tamil writer Ambai, beautifully produced by Archipelago Books.

***

Linda Newbery:  I've already had one go but am allowing myself a second slot, for non-fiction. These two titles, Animal Languages and The Hidden Life of Trees, will complement each other: both look at the lives and communications of non-human creatures, from whale songs and the apparently complex information shared by prairie dogs to the mysteries of the 'wood wide web' by which trees nurture each other and create ecosystems. Both should illuminate how much in the natural world is overlooked by our anthropocentric short-sightedness.

***

 Daniel Hahn: Books I’m excited about for the early months of next year? OK, I’ve narrowed it down painfully to, um, thirteen, some of which I’ve read and some I’m looking forward to. My pair of top tips, though, both of which I have read and mean to read again:

Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes, is an utterly ferocious piece of storytelling from Mexico; it’s a village story, in part a story of mystery and myth, but told with uncompromising realist brutality and a kind of incandescence from which it’s impossible to look away.

Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is a novel of Israel and Palestine – it is huge and thrillingly original and political and intimate and perhaps the best book I’ve read this year. But I’m not telling you any more than that. Just order it now.

But oh, there’s so much else besides those two. Also in January/February we have Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day, currently next on my TBR; Andrew Krivak’s strange and mesmerising The Bear (I loved this – a proper read-in-a-couple-of-sittings kind of book); Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering, which I have not yet read but which looks intriguingly like a sort of grown-up Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story from Indonesia; and Paul B. Preciado’s bold, provocative and thought-provoking An Apartment on Uranus. Then through the spring we have the very short and very gripping Elly, by Maike Wetzel, and many new books by familiar greats: Samanta Schweblin coming in April, and Judith Schlansky, Andrés Neuman and Yuri Herrera in June. June is also when we get David Trueba's Rolling Fields (I loved this) - oh, and there’s a début by Elaine Feeney to look out for. It's called As You Were - I’m only fifty pages in and it’s already bursting with emotional power.

***

... and finally, an unusual approach from Sally Prue:  I've just read a library book chosen by a friend (just get anything! I'd said) about Edward VII's mistress Mrs Keppel. It was scattered with dreadful ahistorical generalisations and horrible snobbishness, and I enjoyed it hugely. I have therefore resolved that next year I shall read a) completely random books (I've usually neglected the bottom shelves in the library because of the strain to the knees and eyes) as well as b) as some scorned ones. For instance, I’ve never read Jeffrey Archer. Can he really be as bad as all that. Can he? I shall find out!

Guest review by Michael Lawrence - SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY by Sylvia Beach

"Authentic or not, Mr Whitman’s shop filled both a gap and a need, not least for cold hard-up souls like me, eager for words they could understand and a spot of free warmth in which to pore over them."

 Between 1995 and 2015 I published a number of stories and forty-something books for children and teenagers. One of the books - Young Dracula - inspired five CBBC-TV series of that name; a series I didn’t like and which earned me little more than a fleeting ‘originator’ end credit and a handful of beans. While I enjoyed writing many of my books, others were such a tussle with editors and their various chippers-in that frustration and out-and-out rage became the order of many a day. When the new head of a certain publishing house informed me that my new ideas were ‘very funny with strong narrative voices but a little quirky and out-there at a time when we are looking for something a lot more obvious’ I knew it was time to move on. I’m still moving. Still writing too (it’s hard to give up), but not for children.

If we’d been of a similar generation, Sylvia Beach is someone I would very much like to have known. She preceded me by quite some way, but the bookshop described in this memoir - the name of it at least - had some relevance for me early on.

At the tenderish age of twenty-one I was a freelance photographer in London, taking pictures for the Financial Times, publishers, advertising agencies and so on. That meant a lot of snaps of politicians, pop stars, cereal packets, and women in various states of undress. But this was the so-called Swinging Sixties and I was bored with the parties and zipping round town in taxis just before dawn, so I handed the keys to my balconied flat in Pimlico - along with all my furnishings - to a BBC makeup girl of my acquaintance and hightailed it to Paris to try my hand at writing while starving. (I turned out to have a real gift for the second of these.) While renting an icy garret at the top of the Hotel Novelty at Odéon, I made frequent visits to the Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the Rue de la Bûcherie near Notre Dame. There I discovered treasures banned in England, such as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell, and Maurice Girodias’s Traveller’s Companion series. I also met a French composer who wanted help with a letter to the Dean of St Paul’s to offer him a piece of music he’d written in honour of Winston Churchill, who’d just died.

But this wasn’t Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia, a New Jersey expatriate, opened the original Shakespeare and Company – a lending library as well as a bookshop – on the morning of November 19th, 1919. Specialising in books written in or translated into English, in no time her shop became an essential meeting place for visiting English-speaking authors, some of whom used it as their Paris mailing address. The shop more usually associated with Sylvia was in the Rue de l’Odéon, but her first Shakespeare and Company was situated just round the corner in the Rue Dupuytren. When I came across the address of that shop some twenty five years after my impoverished sojourn at the Hotel Novelty my jaw hit my chest. The Novelty was at 10 Rue Dupuytren. Sylvia’s first shop was at number eight – right next door. It was like finding the bones of old Will himself in your sock drawer.

It was from 8 Rue Dupuytren that Gertrude Stein is said to have borrowed around seventy books in the two years before the shop moved to those larger premises. It was at number 8 that Sylvia, with no previous publishing experience, volunteered to produce the first edition of Ulysses in book form, in the process becoming James Joyce’s most vigorous champion. At that shop and its successor she entertained, in one way or another, many writers of contemporary or subsequent legend - Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, D H Lawrence and many others. There ought to be a commemorative plaque on the wall of 8 Rue Dupuytren, but there isn’t. There’s no indication whatsoever that the original Shakespeare and Company was housed there.

Sylvia ceased trading in 1941 after refusing to sell an officer of the occupying German forces her last copy of Finnegans Wake from her window display. Shortly afterwards she found herself in an internment camp, where she was held for six months. Almost exactly a decade after she shut up shop for the last time, an American bookseller called George Whitman adopted the name Shakespeare and Company for his own shop in the Rue de la Bûcherie, apparently with Sylvia’s blessing. The by-then celebrated banner gave George’s establishment a ready-made pedigree which to this day draws literary pilgrims by the planeload, many believing that they’re visiting the shop associated with all those famous writers of the past.

Authentic or not, Mr Whitman’s shop, now run by his daughter – Sylvia Beach Whitman – filled both a gap and a need, not least for cold hard-up souls like me, eager for words they could understand and a spot of free warmth in which to pore over them.

Some of the above is covered in more detail in my memoir Milking the Novelty, a copy of which, I’m happy to report, has found a place in the Rue de la Bûcherie Shakespeare and Company archive.

Shakespeare and Company is published by Bison Books.

Independent Bookseller feature No.1: Sam Barnes of BOOKS & INK, Banbury, picks IN THIS GRAVE HOUR by Jacqueline Winspear

This is the first post in a new occasional feature - we're inviting independent booksellers to tell us about their favourite books. A big thank you to Sam Barnes for starting us off! If you're an independent bookshop and would like to join in, please contact us - we'll be very pleased to welcome you.

Sam Barnes is the owner of Books & Ink Bookshop, an independent bookshop in Banbury with second hand, antiquarian and new books. Sam opened the shop in 2005 and runs it full time, with a bit of help here and there from family! When not cataloguing stock and running the shop, Sam’s a voracious reader, an occasional review writer, a collector of Edward Ardizzone books and ephemera, and loves to get out exploring the great outdoors with a pair of walking boots and a camera. The bookshop is open Tuesdays to Saturdays but the website is open 24/7.

Sunday 3rd September, 1939, 11:15 am: Neville Chamberlain declares that Britain is now at war with Germany. People across the country sit gathered around wireless radios to hear the pronouncement. Maisie Dobbs joins her dearest friend Priscilla and Priscilla’s family to hear the devastating news; adults, all affected in some way by the previous war, exchange anxious glances with one another, while Priscilla’s teenage boys react in a more excitable way.

This is the opening scene for the 13th Maisie Dobbs mystery from Jacqueline Winspear; a historical mystery series based on the eminently likeable psychologist and private investigator, Maisie. Turning back the clock to book one, the series begins with Maisie setting up her own private detective practice in London in 1929. An independent, self-employed young woman setting up in professional practice in the 1920s - brilliant; I loved Maisie straight away. From the beginning you sense in Maisie a sensitivity, spirituality and sadness - all lending to her interesting and empathetic character - and as the novels progress, she develops into an investigator with a talent for solving crimes where compassion and understanding of the human psyche are frequently involved.

In this novel, frequent mention is made of Maisie’s backstory; her time spent as a frontline nurse in France during the 1914-1918 war and before that, her time spent in service as a young girl before she met a mentor who steered her onto her career path as private investigator. Both elements are important in the story, as thoughts of the first war are uppermost in the minds of everyone old enough to remember, and Maisie’s time in service regularly proves useful to her in her detective work, with her unique ability to find common ground with people of all social backgrounds.

Maisie is called upon by the Belgian Embassy to investigate the murder of a Belgian national, a refugee in Britain from the first war. A police investigation has been launched but, because of the pressures on the security services, the police are content to conclude an open-and-shut case of violent robbery. The Belgian Embassy aren’t happy with the conclusion and hire Maisie to do further digging.

It’s a time of upheaval in London; streets and playgrounds are quiet as children have been evacuated to the countryside; the skies are filled with immense floating shadow-creating barrage balloons; people are nervous and many men and women who came through the first war at great cost and personal sacrifice are now having to endure seeing their barely adult boys sign up to the forces. Maisie’s father and stepmother, living in the Kentish countryside, have some evacuees billeted with them; one of whom is a nameless silent little girl who arrived on the train from London but who does not appear on any records. Amidst trying to solve the case of the Belgian refugee before more murders take place, Maisie and her assistants also take it upon themselves to try and find out the story of the lost little evacuee, to see if they can find a living relative and work out where she has come from and how they can best help her. Themes of loss and displacement are to the fore in this mystery, making the story feel very relevant today, with the plight of refugees, and refugee children in particular, being uppermost in the thoughts and hearts of many.

Jacqueline Winspear creates believable and empathetic characters and paces her stories just right for the theme - page-turning but not at the expense of characters, descriptive writing or historical interest. Maisie comes through each case with grace, humility and prowess - not always successful in her cases but always changed in some small or subtle way, developing with each novel into an interesting and warm human character. While not ‘cosy-crime’ exactly, the series are a light read and the crimes not dwelt up on in great depth - no gore, no terror or forensic uglies. I can’t read (or watch) that sort of crime; it leaves me with an ingrained fear for days. I’d recommend Maisie Dobbs to even the most crime-sensitive readers - and, in fact, all of the readers I’ve recommended Maisie to in the bookshop, have come back for more doses, so that’s a pretty good testament.

In This Grave Hour is published by Allison & Busby.