Bookshop Feature: PANDA'S BOOKS AND RECORDS in Levenshulme, South Manchester, by Paul Magrs

 

"Let’s do it. Shall we do it? Shall we save the bookshop on our high street?"

Paul Magrs is a novelist. His partner Jeremy Hoad is a Community activist, DJ, and Organiser of Levenshulme Pride. They'll celebrate their thirtieth anniversary as a couple in summer 2026. Together they opened Panda's Books and Records in November 2025.

It was something we always thought we’d like to do, at some point in our lives.

When the chance came along – Halloween 2025 – to take possession of our own bookshop it was like: if not now, when are we actually going to do it? We’re both in our late fifties. Our crazy freelance lives give us the time to do something as mad as this. Let’s do it. Shall we do it?

Shall we save the bookshop on our high street?

Jeremy and I have lived in Levenshulme, South Manchester, for twenty-one years. It’s a right mix-up of cultures and always has been. It’s wonderful here: lots goes on and there’s always a drama. Sometimes it feels like the whole world in microcosm: Middlemarch, plonked on the A6 between Manchester and Stockport. And the bookshop is right in the middle of that thoroughfare.

Ian and Suzy started up the shop six years ago as Bopcap Books, building a loyal clientele and a sense of pride in all of us, that our run-down bit of town had its own bookshop. Used and new, with lovely art prints and classic novels, wonderful picture books and funny greetings cards. When they found that for a variety of reasons they had to give up the lease to concentrate on their newer shop – the Quiet Cat, in Macclesfield – we saw their bittersweet message on the local Facebook group. ‘Does anyone want to buy a bookshop?’ How they’d had a lovely time being our bookshop but now they had to go. Was anyone in a position to take it over?

We took maybe half a morning, right at the end of October, to decide that it was exactly what we wanted to do. Jeremy and I jumped in with both feet.

I turned 56 mid-November and the very next day I began a new career.

‘Panda’s Books and Records’ opened on November the thirteenth.

 
Now I sit at my front desk, feet chilly on the concrete floor, with the doors of the old police station in which we’re based open to the street. Our shop is part of a complex of antique outlets at the southern end of Stockport Road. We have disco and New Wave music playing all day long. People dance in our shop! They actually dance and bop about, singing, as they browse! They just do it without even realising it. Early on in the lead-up to last Christmas I realised how much I disliked the hushed calm of many bookshops – with their mimsy plinky-plonk music playing – and their library-like atmosphere, or that horrible feeling of being a bit like school. I prefer a bit of noise in a bookshop. Besides the music there’s a great deal of chatter and laughter here. Old friends coming in, local faces, brand new customers. Everyone gets introduced and there’s a lot of kerfuffle almost every day. People telling us how glad they are that the bookshop is still here. We saved the bookshop!

A toddler starts jumping up and down with excitement because she realises that there are Pandas in every spare corner of the two rooms of our shop. Not just the giant one sitting on a wooden chair when you first come in, or the ‘real’ original Panda sitting sentinel on the windowsill. There are plush Pandas perched everywhere, more and more as you look. The toddler can’t keep herself from dancing with glee.

We sell vinyl albums as well, and this is something else that makes it less stuffy than other bookshops, perhaps. There’s a lot of talk about bands and LPs. Young guys buying albums that came out before they were born. Lots of nostalgia: people collecting up treasures they once had, then lost and wish for again. The importance of physical media is something that’s come to the fore in these uncertain times, as if we can only ever be really sure of the records we play for ourselves; the books we hold in our hands.

 One regular customer who we inherited from Bopcap books – a lady who is 99 and bright as a button – sits by my desk and calls out topics she’d like to read about this month: Postage stamps! India! Famous quotations! Then she tells me about her Aunt Linda reading ‘The Little Sea Maid’ aloud ninety-odd years ago and how the sound of that voice has never left her. And just yesterday there was the eight year old boy who came in with his family but looked at the children’s books option-blinded, and couldn’t find anything he might want to read. Then I said, ‘Have you heard of the Hardy Boys? I read them all at your age. They’re exciting and what’s brilliant is, you can read them in any order you like.’ I set out a whole load of the 1970s Armada paperbacks – the ones with wonderfully painted covers. He chose the spookiest one, with an old dark castle on the cover.

I sit in our shop beside the Christmas tree we got from a local give-away group – its lights twinkle long past Christmas and its branches are now almost completely crowded with scarlet gift tags, on which we’ve asked people to write down their favourite book recommendations. Jeremy is on his feet all day while I serve customers and try to get back to my current read. He’s a dervish of bookcase reorganisation: everything has moved and changed its place in the past two months. Sometimes more than two or three times. He’s always looking for the perfect placement for each genre so that, as people walk around the shop, it tells its own story in exactly the right way. Each genre has been broken down into sub-groups and each shelf is labelled. People like our labels – Science Fiction and Fantasy became ‘Monsters and Planets’, History is now ‘Queens and Tyrants.’ I think we’ve taken the feel of the previous bookshop and evolved it gently to suit our own tastes in music and books and art: more nostalgia, more pulp, more kitsch and fantasy.

 

Every day we get people coming in with bags of books for sale or donation. Sometimes wonderful dragon hoards of gold. At times quite startling things that we might or might not take. Every day I bring in boxes of my own books from our over-stuffed house. It is as if I always knew this time would come. I have no one to actually pass my creaking, towering stacks onto and yet it seems as if I was always planning one day to put all this surplus stuff into a bookshop.

It’s a treasure trove, an exhibition, a museum, a superstore, a starship fuelled by writing and pictures and printed pages: capable of taking you anywhere in the galaxy. And I get to sit at the helm of this ship for four days of the week.

And I’ve remembered something I kind of forgot when I stayed at home, being a freelance writer every day. I really like being in the middle of the community, talking with people about life and books in the afternoon. It reminds me of my first job, at UEA, when I was first teaching Creative Writing there, in the late 90s. I used to sit in my office, drinking coffee and talking as if books and essays and stories were the most important things in the world. So it’s good to be somewhere that reminds you that they are.

There’s something very civilising in these tricky times, about being in a place devoted to passing on messages down the ages. That’s all books and pictures and stories really are: messages that say, ‘Hey, hello, how are you all doing in your own era? We’ve been having a right old time of it here. You won’t believe what’s going on here, back in time. It’s all kicking off! Listen to this…!’

It's being at the heart of an endless conversation. A convergence of so many dimensions. And that’s where I want to sit for slightly more than half of every week.

NINTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Michèle Roberts chooses OFFSHORE by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

 "Her genius is to record her characters’ flounderings with infinite compassion. Her imagination works as a kind of embrace, both tender and supremely intelligent."

Photograph: Viv Pegram

Michèle Roberts is half-French and half-English. She has published fifteen novels, plus poetry, memoir, essays and artist's books. Her first cookery book French Cooking for One came out in 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia. She lives in London.

My (highly subjective) definition of a classic novel is one that I regularly re-read. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore (1979) perfectly fits that bill. I enjoy it more every time I read it, relishing its celebration of unconventional attitudes, its sharp observations of the thrills and dangers of life afloat, its wry, dry humour that makes me burst out laughing. Fitzgerald’s humour is rooted in her lack of sentimentality, her honesty about human behaviour, the messes we make, our illogical yearnings, the way we sabotage ourselves. Her genius is to record her characters’ flounderings with infinite compassion. Her imagination works as a kind of embrace, both tender and supremely intelligent.

The novel’s ending is pre-figured in its beginning. Grace, a leaky old barge with a rotting anchor, no cabin doors and unreliable plumbing, is moored at Battersea Reach on the river Thames. Other nearby boats are in similarly dodgy condition. Sooner or later, we begin to suspect, disaster will occur; possibly even drowning.

On board these rickety, rackety craft live an eccentric crew of neighbours, all lovers of the water in different ways. Chief among them, on Grace, is Nenna James, her two young daughters Martha and Tilda. Nenna is estranged from her husband, who skulks in a rented room in far off north-east London. One strand of the engaging plot concerns Nenna’s hapless attempts to stay afloat morally and financially, to keep an eye on her truant children, to deal with her need for love and sex. Fitzgerald draws splendid sketches of the earnest priest visiting from the local convent school Martha and Tilda attend, the hopeful marine artist trying to sell his boat while knowing it is riddled with leaks, the chancer-thief hiding his stash of stolen hairdryers below decks on another craft nearby, the kindly ex-naval stalwart who tries always to do the right thing: “Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment. Fortunately he did not have to define duty. War service … and his whole temperament before and since, had done that before him.” Even Nenna’s cat, Stripey, is given a portrait, a place in the story.

Fitzgerald writes well about men. In these pages they may be unheroic, self-deluding and occasionally incompetent (just like the female characters) but they are never mocked. Richard, the ex-naval officer, says to Nenna: “I can’t for the life of me see why, if you really feel something, it’s got to be talked about. In fact, I should have thought it lost something, if you follow me, if you put it into words.” Later in the chapter he does manage to pursue his conversation with Nenna, and to act on his feelings. When they return from a trip in his dinghy and tie up alongside his boat, Lord Jim, he realises “He had to do the right thing. A captain goes last onto his ship, but a man goes first into a tricky situation … Their sense of control wavered, ebbed, and changed places.”

Nenna’s younger daughter Tilda regularly swarms up the mast of the barge, the better to survey the movements of people below, the swelling tides, the shifting light. These are all lovingly, beautifully and accurately described. Tilda stands for the novelist herself, sometimes seemingly omniscient and sometimes inhabiting a close-up perspective, surveying the world she inhabits and has brought into being and valuing its goodness mingled with its flaws.

The major delight of this short, packed novel, for me, lies in its brilliant writing, which of course creates and illuminates its story and its characters. In the gap between land and river, wharf and deck, Penelope Fitzgerald entrancingly suggests that we can find and explore both freedom and belonging.

Offshore is published by Harper Collins.

Michèle Roberts' Negative Capability: a diary of surviving is reviewed here by Jill Dawson.

 

Q&A: Alison Layland talks to Linda Newbery about her new novel AFTER THE CLEARANCES

 

"It's not only a Welsh community, but also a large-scale environmental stewardship project that is threatened with destruction, uniting two of the key themes of the novel."

After the Clearances: They were eager to remind themselves, and teach the children, that nothing should be taken for granted; things didn’t just happen at the flick of a switch

In a fractured world, the past is never truly buried and the future depends on what we choose to remember.

On a remote island ravaged by storms, a community of exiles known as the Seeders fight to preserve a fragile, self-sufficient way of life. When Sandy arrives from the mainland bearing secrets, young Seeder Glesni is forced to confront long-hidden truths about her people.

Far away in the wild hills, Bela lives by her own rules. Fierce, unyielding and shaped by the land itself, her voice carries the weight of loss in a world scarred by collapse. But when she encounters Winter, a fugitive from a shadowy government programme, their unlikely bond forges a path that leads back to the Seeders and a reckoning with the myths that bind them all.

Rooted in Welsh history and rich with the rhythms of its language and landscape, After the Clearances is an evocative, hope-filled story of resilience, resistance and what it means to belong in the ruins of what came before.

Alison Layland answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on writing such a compelling follow-up to Riverflow. As you know, I admired and enjoyed that (a link to my review is below) and now find myself equally impressed by this new novel, which moves forward to 2056.

Alison: Thank you for the invitation; it’s lovely to chat with you here on Writers Review. I'm delighted you enjoyed both novels.

Linda: Although After the Clearances includes some of your earlier characters, it can also be read as a compelling stand-alone. It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but were you already thinking of this new setting and time period while working on Riverflow, or did the idea come to you later?

Alison: Although I knew the connections when I began writing After the Clearances, it wasn’t something I’d had in mind from the start. I was reluctant to let go of the Riverflow world, and since both novels are set against a background of concern for the environment, and the issues surrounding protest, it made sense to look at how my characters would be faring some 35 years on – the world has already changed considerably since 2019, with the effects of climate change becoming ever more apparent, and the UK laws on protest becoming increasingly draconian, so I wanted to imagine how things would be in the 2050s, when the Paris Agreement targets are supposed to have been met, but look unlikely to be achieved.

Linda: Clearances has a particular resonance in Scottish history and is equally dramatic here. Was After the Clearances always going to be your title?

Alison: It wasn’t; in fact, this is the first time I’ve been asked to change a title – no small feat, since I find titles difficult! My working title throughout the process of writing, which had become entrenched in my mind, was Tidings (reflecting both the ‘tide’ and ‘news’ meanings of the English word, as well as the Welsh word taid, grandpa, since Glesni’s grandfather is a significant figure). However, my publisher, Honno, had recently published a novel called Tiding, so we agreed to change it. The ‘Clearances’ in the novel refer to a government scheme of deliberate rural depopulation to new towns, with the aim of greater control and simpler distribution of scarce resources. This policy was officially dubbed the Resettlement, but popularly known as the Clearances (or Digartrefu in Welsh, with the added meaning of ‘making homeless’), with all the historical associations. There is a similar colonial feel to the hints in the novel at typical English attitudes to the Welsh language and culture.

Linda: I liked the framing of the story with the viewpoint of teenage Glesni, who was born on the island, Ynys Hudol, and has never known any other life. We meet the various other 'Seeders' as established members of the community (apart from Sandy, the new arrival), gradually learning about their occupations and experiences before coming to the island - Cai, for instance, had been a policeman who became disillusioned with increasingly draconian measures towards protestors. I found this effective - too much of this from the beginning would have taken our attention away from the island set-up. You obviously thought in great detail about Seeder philosophy and ground rules - there are sections of their manifesto, or creed, in the book. Was this your starting point, or did you elaborate as you got into the story?

Alison: My story always featured the Seeders as an idealistic community, living apart from the world but trying to establish a blueprint for a new way of life, kinder to both the environment and people. At first, I introduced various aspects of the community’s rules, customs and values, largely from Glesni’s point of view, within the main narrative, but at a later stage decided I could say more, while interfering less with the story, by incorporating extracts from Seeds of Change, the founders’ record of their experience and a blueprint for the community. I found it surprisingly easy, presumably since the community’s ethos was already embedded in my mind, and founder Edith Turner’s voice flowed readily (the pamphlet is credited to both founders, but for some reason I think of it as her voice). The hard part was slotting the extracts in, at the beginning of the relevant parts of the novel and at key points in the narrative, while taking care to edit out the previous references as appropriate, to avoid repetition.

Linda: Bela's sections are different in tone and style from the rest - first-person and very direct, a stream of consciousness. Living in the woods, in solitude until the fugitive Winter comes into her life, she is alone with her thoughts and impressions. Did you decide on this approach immediately, or was it something that grew from the writing?

Alison: Bela was there as a character from the start, as was her voice and attitudes. However, as I tend to make things up as I go along (I’m very much a ‘pantser’ rather than a ‘plotter’, to use the common writers’ terms), I only worked out where her story fits in as the novel developed.

Linda: It does take the reader a while to realise how Bela's sections connect with those about the islanders - it's a puzzle that slowly comes together, with hints along the way. Did this require careful tracking as you wrote - i.e. what you want the reader to guess at any point, and how soon the links and connections should be revealed?

Alison: It definitely required careful attention, but more at the redrafting and editing stages – which is how I tend to work. In the finished novel, some aspects are maybe revealed sooner than I intended, though it has varied from reader to reader. As I got feedback from early readers, it became clear that there were certain connections that some people were missing altogether, which made me realise I was perhaps being a little too subtle! I won’t talk about specific examples because of spoilers, but I hope I’ve managed to retain a certain amount of mystery without being downright confusing!

I did apply careful tracking throughout, as I always do when writing. I have a detailed timeline, both of characters’ backgrounds and events referred to – in the characters’ past but our future. I also have a detailed outline of each chapter with key points, both to ensure balance between chapters from different characters’ points of view, and also so I can detect and correct continuity issues if, or when, I move things around.

Linda: The main part of the story is set in 2056 but we're referred back to a dramatic incident in the 2030s in which some of the island community may have been involved. That the UK (not Welsh) government plans to take over lovingly restored land for a dam and reservoir to provide water supplies - for England! - was particularly poignant. Were you thinking of real-life settings where this sort of thing has happened?

Alison: Yes; the fictional Irlas Dam incident is based in part on the Llyn Celyn dam and reservoir. In the late 1950s/early 1960s, the Tryweryn river valley was dammed and the Welsh village of Capel Celyn drowned, to form what is now known as Llyn Celyn reservoir, which to this day provides water for the city of Liverpool. Despite extensive protests, both by the villagers themselves and much further afield, the project went ahead, drowning a traditional Welsh-speaking rural community. It was an significant event in the burgeoning Welsh language movement, which ultimately led to the language being given its due status in Wales, and to the fight for devolution. The beautiful and apparently peaceful waters of Lake Vyrnwy and the Elan valley reservoirs conceal similar tragedies, but it was Tryweryn captured the public imagination. This was partly due to its immortalisation in a famous graffitied slogan near Aberystwyth in the early 1960s that has become an icon – it even has its own Wikipedia page if you want to read more. The slogan Cofiwch Dryweryn (Remember Tryweryn) has seen a revival in recent years, with copies springing up throughout Wales.

In After the Clearances, it is not only a Welsh community, but also a large-scale environmental stewardship project that is threatened with destruction, uniting two of the key themes of the novel and highlighting the interconnectedness of social and environmental issues.

Linda: The 'Seeders' community on Ynys Hudol is convincingly drawn - the daily lives of the inhabitants, their communal beliefs and practices, but also the conflicts and tensions. Some members of the group are described as 'purists' - they want to live entirely self-sufficiently without recourse to trips to the mainland, or the use of money, and without harvesting fish from the sea - while others are more pragmatic. All this has the ring of truth about it which I feel must surely come from your own experiences with activist or community groups?

Alison: It’s largely human nature but yes, experience of community and activist groups comes into it! Although the Seeders are an idealistic community with a vision of how to live in the face of the effects of climate change, I wanted to make sure that they’re realistic, not all sweetness and light. There are always differences in opinion. For instance, there are constant debates within activist groups about whether it’s more effective to undertake direct action or concentrate on community-based activism, which takes time that we can ill afford to build up. I believe we need both – the attention-grabbing actions are still needed in the face of government inaction, but these need to be backed up by work at grass-roots level, both to do essential work in the community, but also to build up acceptance of, and support for, more radical protests.

Despite differences in opinion, the shared vision – both in real life and in the novel – is more important than the differences; my experience, for instance with deliberative democracy in people’s assemblies and guarding against the build-up of hierarchies, fed into the Seeders’ system of governance and decision-making, with Gatherings and regularly rotating co-leaders.

As far as the details of daily life are concerned, I enjoyed a number of fortnight-long stays on Ynys Enlli/Bardsey Island, which was the inspiration for my fictional Ynys Hudol. The guest accommodation there is lovely, the welcome warm and the island truly atmospheric, whatever the weather, but the houses have no electricity or running water and the facilities are basic (though there is excellent provision for guests, I hasten to add). These experiences helped to feed the detail of what life for the Seeders would be like. It also helped me become immersed in the atmosphere of the island – you can get a glimpse of this in the lovely video my daughter made on location to accompany the launch of the book. 

Linda: After the Clearances could be classified as cli-fi. All fiction set in the present day should surely at least include references to the existential crisis we all face, while stories set in the future will need to look at how the climate emergency has been addressed and how humanity has adapted (or failed to). Are there ‘cli-fi’ titles you particularly admire?

Alison: I recently loved The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger, published by Fly on the Wall press. With relatable characters and a brilliant combination of humour, tragedy and the tackling of serious issues, it’s the kind of enjoyable novel perfect for drawing people in – it’s made its way round my family with the speed of a calving glacier!

Another climate fiction novel I’ve particularly enjoyed is the magnificent Playground by Richard Powers, which does for oceans what The Overstory did so powerfully for trees.

And of course, there’s your own The One True Thing, a beautiful novel which may not immediately appear to be climate fiction, but has love of the environment and natural world firmly at its heart, as you suggest in your question.

Linda: Thank you! Can you give us any idea of what you'll write next? Are you thinking of making another leap forward in time with some of these characters, or will your next project go in a different direction?

Alison: I haven’t started writing a new book yet, but I’ve got ideas for Bela’s story in my mind – the events that led her to where she is now, and what shaped her unusual personality. Alternatively, I’m toying with the idea of connected short stories – before I began to write After the Clearances, I had an idea of people on Ynys Hudol sitting round a campfire, or the benches of the community’s roundhouse, sharing their stories. This didn’t come to pass, but may well make its way to the page in future!

Linda: Thanks so much for sharing these insights, and I hope After the Clearances will find its way to huge numbers of appreciative readers!

After the Clearances is published by Honno Press.

Linda's review of Alison Layland's Riverflow

Guest review by Penny Dolan: THE PLOT by Madeleine Bunting

 

"She sets this personal acre within the wider movements affecting the British countryside over the centuries, bringing in the topography, myths, history and custom, and expanding the vision out beyond the Hambleton Hills."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

A bookish friend had praised The Plot by Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting, so when the paperback lay there, face up on the Waterstones counter, what could I do?

I was already interested in the topic: an acre of land on the edge of the Hambleton Hills in North Yorkshire, where the sculptor John Bunting lived and worked from the Fifties. His ‘plot’ was up a rough track, some distance from the cold cottage where his artist wife looked after their six young children. John had, aged sixteen, seen the view from the ridge, and in his twenties, came back to make his live his life in that spot. Once I had come across a similar breathtaking view, from the top of Sutton Bank, a winding hill with a 1:4 incline. I stared, from the car park at the top, out over the Vale of York and right across to the hazy summit of Pen y Ghent, and saw why this was called ‘God’s own county.’

Madeleine Bunting, John’s daughter, wrote her memoir as a way of coming to terms with her father. To me, this was not a book like Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, wrung out of deep grief. Instead, Bunting’s book felt brisker, written in anger, puzzlement and sadness, as she tries to understand her father and his love for his remote acre. Named Scotch Corner, the plot is marked on OS Navigator 100.

John Bunting’s passion, even at Ampleforth, his prestigious Catholic school, was carving in wood and stone. He visited the workshop of the Robert Thompson, the ‘Mouseman of Kilburn’ just as, later, he sought out sculptors like Henry Moore, Eric Gill and Brancusi. Returning to the seclusion of the Hambleton Hills and North Yorks Moors, John made a thin living through various commissions and part-time teaching at Ampleforth, where Anthony Gormley was among his students.

What marked Bunting out was that he was one of the young men who ‘escaped’ WWII, but not from its shadow nor its fallen heroes. Returning to Scotch Corner, he built a small ‘memorial’ chapel, as well as an everyday stone hut. Madeleine recalls his carved angel heads atop the doorway, and two crucifix and images of the Virgin and Child inside.

In particular, she describes sitting on the cold floor during mass, squashed between her siblings, because the chapel’s aisle was filled by her father’s life-size sculpture of a fallen soldier. Who was the soldier and why did this lost hero matter so much to John Bunting? And the other admired names she found in his notes? How did they and their reputations, over time, fare?

Gradually, Madeleine Bunting examines her father’s life, and the selfishness of his ’man among men’ attitude. After a day working in the hut, he spent evenings in the village pub, leaving his artist wife with six children in a cold, primitive cottage in the village. ‘It seemed that his belief in the dignity of physical labour meant that my mother’s should never end,’ adds the author. A not unfamiliar situation.

However, The Plot is far more than a single story, and stronger for it. In and among the author’s pursuit of her family story, she writes about the geography and history of that whole area, describing it as ‘a landscape known in reality and in imagination and in memory.’

She sets this personal acre within the wider movements affecting the British countryside over the centuries, bringing in topography, myths, history and custom, and expanding the vision out beyond the Hambleton Hills.

She writes about early flint-workers travelling the ridge; the people who marked the land with barrows; the foreign king who ‘wasted’ the North and made it uninhabitable for three generations; the incoming monks who gave order, wool and beautiful buildings to the area, and of the Scots drovers, bringing flocks of cattle to the markets of the south. She writes of the rise of Romanticism and the individualistic ‘view’ of the landscape; the arrival of sightseers, the railways bringing hunting parties, and the ugly sitka spruce plantations across the North Yorkshire moors. Separately, these histories might seem familiar but her overview is both thoughtful and interesting.

In her last chapters, Bunting considers the area of Hambleton in recent decades. She not only writes about the economic importance of grouse-shooting but also the tinder-box monoculture of the moors. She speaks of machines and pesticides, of the crisis in modern farming and in wider agricultural planning;. In particular, she draws attention to the nostalgia for rural life that has created holiday cottages, second homes and emptied out farms and village communities. Even, she says, her father who came here, in search of old, orderly society, might have seen the idyll disappearing as he carved.

This is, as my friend might have suggested, a very wise, worthwhile and intelligent book.

Afterword

A small but interesting point for food enthusiasts. While she was researching her book, Madeleine Bunting made friends with and relied on Fred Banks, a local farmer and self-taught historian. In the last chapters, Fred and his son Tom decide they cannot make a living from their farm and are thinking about buying a pub instead.

Now, in 2024, The Black Swan at Oldstead is a Michelin starred restaurant, and the main chef is better known as Tommy Banks, of  Roots cookbook fame.

The Plot is published by Granta.

See more of Penny's choices:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

RIVERFLOW by Alison Layland, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"It’s rare and refreshing to read a novel set in the here and now that has climate issues so firmly at its core."

This novel was a welcome surprise that came to me via a roundabout route. It began when I attended a Society of Authors ‘at home’ event – a workshop hosted by Lauren James, author of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe and Green Rising, and founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League. The focus of the session was how to bring climate concerns into fiction set in the present day – not necessarily foregrounding the various issues, but rather weaving in details as part of the daily lives and concerns of the characters.

I find it irritating to read fiction set in the present day that makes no reference to the climate emergency – especially when characters are taking flights here and there, driving big cars and eating steak in restaurants. It’s almost as if there’s a parallel world to ours with no looming crisis and with no need to change and adapt. It seems, both in young adult and adult fiction, that climate awareness is largely limited to ‘cli-fi’ – fiction usually set in the future, often involving fantasy. (An honourable exception to this is Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood – see our summer round-up.)

After the workshop I joined the Climate Fiction Writers League and was invited by Lauren to write a conversation piece with another author. This author turned out to be Alison Layland, whose novel, Riverflow, was published in 2019. As I haven’t yet published adult fiction with an environmental theme (working on it) Alison is to read my non-fiction title, This Book is Cruelty Free – Animals and Us. (For anyone who doesn’t yet acknowledge the link between animal agriculture and the climate crisis, please read the book, or for a more comprehensive overview, Philip Lymbery’s Sixty Harvests Left.) 

Knowing nothing of Alison Layland or her work, I found myself immediately drawn to her characters, setting and plot. Riverflow is set in a small Shropshire village, Foxover, close to which Bede and Erin, a couple in their thirties, have lived off-grid on a smallholding for many years. Until eighteen months ago they shared Alderleat with Bede’s uncle Joe, until he drowned in the surging river, leaving Bede unable to accept that his death was accidental.

The frictions and rivalries of a rural community are convincingly depicted. Bede and Erin, former activists, clash with local landowner Philip Northcote who’s developing a fracking site. Bede, clever at mechanics and problem-solving, is an idealist, probably on the autism spectrum and at times infuriating to live with; to some villagers he’s known as Eco, a nice demonstration of the ease with which people can pigeonhole and ‘other’ an outlier, avoiding the inconvenience of acknowledging that his views are both valid and necessary. He and Elin are devoted to each other, but with the unavoidable sticking-point that Elin wants children whereas Bede thinks it would be irresponsible to bring a child into this threatened world. Elin, too, tries to steer a calm course through village conflicts while Bede can never curb a sarcastic or angry response when challenged.

Partly through snippets of the journal Joe kept hidden, we’re drawn into the backstory of Bede’s upbringing. Never knowing who his father was, he was brought up by his mother until her death, when her brother Joe took him in. But Joe had secrets of which Bede is unaware and which begin to threaten the self-contained life he and Elin have built at Alderleat. The plot centres on a series of incidents involving Philip Northcote, his widowed mother Marjorie with whom Joe had a close relationship, and attractive newcomer Silvan, Northcote’s gamekeeper, who befriends Bede and Elin. Bede is apparently being framed for acts of minor sabotage – releasing pheasants reared for shooting, scratching the side of Northcote’s Bentley – and then for a far more serious crime. The revelation of who's behind this malice is cleverly constructed, with several clues hidden in plain sight.

What makes Riverflow so appealing is the deft and delicate portrayal of the shifting relationship between Bede and Erin, alongside the details of daily life which are always underpinned by environmental aspirations and what it’s practical to achieve. It’s rare and refreshing to read a novel set in the here and now that has climate issues so firmly at its core.

Riverflow is published by Honno Press. The conversation piece between Alison and myself is now online here. 

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

Guest review by Graeme Fife: SUNSET SONG by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

 

"I’ve read few novels charged with so urgent an onward pulse of gripping drama played out on a confined stage."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

I owe my friend David, a native Scot, many books to which I was a stranger, but none of his recommendations has pleased, enthralled, astonished me more than this remarkable novel, written by a man three years before his cruel death at the age of 35. Merely to scan the list of his work begs the question: ‘When did the man sleep?’

The novel is set in a small farming community in the Scottish Highlands in the years leading up to the First World War. To recount the obvious elements of such close-knit society – the neighbourliness, the support and help, the loves and ructions, the content and the disquiet, the petty slights incurred through envy and misunderstanding, the greater spite engendered by rumour – is no more than routine. The fluctuations of human intercourse tauten and loosen, the human spirit abides in the villagers, shoves them aside, gives way to the relentless call of working the land, managing the livestock, making do, the common matter of living in some sketchy plenty beyond mere subsistence. There is joy and sadness reflected in the tumble of seasons, foul weather, broad warmth of summer, pinch of winter, burgeoning of spring, the days carolled by familiar birdsong. And the men and women, young and old, who people the tiny parish, who vote for a new minister to mount the pulpit of the kirk on the strength of his preaching, and gather for the weddings and funerals, the pitch and fall of life all round them.

I’ve read few novels charged with so urgent an onward pulse of gripping drama played out on a confined stage. Central to the story, Chris Guthrie, from quean (girl) to wife. It’s her story above all but the existence of one touches the being of all and that is part of Gibbon’s exceptional skill as a weaver of story. The lyric quality of the writing, the rhythms and thread of the narrative, never slackening their tug and pull, are utterly beguiling. I open at random. The villagers are out in the fields harvesting the straw:

‘Sore work Chris found it to keep her stretch of each bout cleared for the reaper’s coming, the weather cool and grey though it was. But a sun was behind the greyness and sometimes when you raised your head from the sheaves you’d see a beam of light on the travel far over the parks of Upperhill or lazing across the moor or dancing a-top the Cuddiestoun stooks, a beam from the hot, grey haze of that sky that watched and waited above the sweat of the harvesting Howe.’

Three place names tossed casually into the sweep of the description like fixing points, and Chris, herself, at once a centre of attention but only one of the many at work there in the days after reaping.

There is a potent, elegiac quality in the writing itself, laced through as it is with many words of native Scottish. Scabrous opinion has it that the Scots language was invented to provide poets with a plentiful supply of off-the-peg rhymes. David has written about the Scots language which was ‘held [in check] forcibly by the English, curtailed, shamefully restricted then banned under threat of death, its richness lost over the centuries as English took its place. We fell dutifully into line like any other colony of the Empire. It rankles, still.’ Gibbon himself says that he’d hope that anyone reading the book might not feel put off by the inclusion of such vocabulary, but there is a Glossary and useful, too. The colour of the old language, still alive in its remnants, even today, underlines the sense of a way of life dwindling. The demands of the War lead to the felling of great swathes of pine forest, a detriment never fully repaired. Machines were already growling at the hooves of the working horses and the lean provision of what could be grown on small farms was increasingly challenged by the superabundance of town markets.

But above all, in Chris Guthrie, Gibbon has brought to life a woman whose feelings, thinking, passions, dismay and joy, bind this reader, at least, to wonder at the richness of fiction’s best inventions. She is not alone. She joins a varied cast of memorable characters - friends, neighbours, the likeable, the shifty, the dafties, the odd balls, the kindlier souls.

Last year, I named three books which I looked forward to reading. Had I but known, Sunset Song would have been there, at the top. I suggest, wholeheartedly, you consider adding it to your list.

------

Graeme is a regular reviewer here. Here are more of the books he has chosen:

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

Bright Day by J B Priestley

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham

West of Sunset  by Stewart O'Nan

Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu

Guest review by Victor Watson: SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

"I read this book with a sense of homecoming. This is where I began as a serious novel-reader, with Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and Hardy." 

Victor Watson began to write children's fiction after a long career as a teacher, both in schools and at Homerton College, Cambridge. He was involved in the setting up of Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle.

He has edited many critical works on children's fiction, including the Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English (CUP 2001) He is the author of the Paradise Barn quartet and his latest novel is called Operation Blackout. All his fiction is published by Catnip Press. See more at Victor's dedicated website for the Paradise Barn books.

I’d known about South Riding since my undergraduate days, but I didn’t get round to reading it until earlier this year, when I spotted a compact 1949 hardback edition in a charity shop. I bought it – and was immediately hooked. The story unfolds in such a measured and unhurried way that I was able to savour the reading of it over many days. It has a wide cast of characters from all levels of society, the landscape is vividly evoked, and the narrative voice is both compassionate and uncompromising. The dialogue is good too.

On the dustwrapper the author is quoted: ‘there is one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spritis; we are members one of another.’ It’s one thing to say that, and quite another matter to demonstrate it. But that ‘membership one of another’ is what South Riding creates and acts out – in a rural community, set in the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire, during the depression of the 1930s. Many stories form part of the bigger story, all told with a direct and un-showy realism, effortlessly intertwined in an entirely convincing world. Here, there is no artificial thematic tidiness: people’s lives are muddled and imperfect, randomly affected by their siblings, their love affairs, their weaknesses, their neighbours, their rivals, their own hidden motivation. And – since this is also a novel about local government – the characters’ lives are also shaped by decisions made in council meetings and planning committees about housing conditions and scholarships.

The characterisation is brilliant, from the scheming Alderman Snaith to poor Lily Sawdon dying of cancer; the clever working-class Lydia Holly, whose future life will be shaped by whether or not her social and family situation will allow her to take up the scholarship she’s been awarded; the unhappy Robert Carne, whose daughter is lonely and miserable and whose wife is in a mental home, and whose life-values are as threatened and uncertain as his estate is crumbling. The main character is Miss Sarah Burton who, in chapter 2, is appointed headmistress of Kiplington Girls’ High School, and who encounters setbacks, faces all manner of frustrations, and experiences a bitter and triumphant love. She almost gives up on her conviction that an unmarried woman in her forties can have a fulfilled and fulfilling professional life within and for the sake of the community. But not quite. ‘I was born to be a spinster,’ she tells herself, ‘and by God, I’m going to spin.’

I read this book with a sense of homecoming. This is where I began as a serious novel-reader, with Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and Hardy. It has a hugeness of scope and conception, inviting comparisons with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It reminded me how far most modern fiction has moved from such imaginative spaciousness. I estimate that South Riding is about 176,000 words long – but it had to be a long novel because it seeks to convey a comprehensive understanding of an entire community. It is a socialist view, as you would expect from an author who was for most of her life a close friend of Vera Brittain. I felt as I read it a determined writerly thrust, a brilliant craftswoman’s purposeful and unhurried faith in her narrative vision, and her belief that – in spite of muddles and failures, setbacks and bad fortune, wickedness and greed – communities are capable of edging imperfectly and cautiously forward to improve the lives of individuals.

That’s what Winifred Holtby believed herself to be, a craftswoman. ‘I have no illusions about my work,’ she wrote. ‘I am primarily a useful, versatile, sensible and fairly careful artisan.’ Perhaps – but South Riding is an intelligent and absorbing novel, in its values, in its style, and in its conception. I loved it.

And it’s written in proper sentences!

South Riding is published by Virago.

RESERVOIR 13 by Jon McGregor, reviewed by Linda Newbery

A girl is missing. This trope has become altogether too familiar in recent years (and yes, I’ve used it myself, in Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon* - I’ll excuse myself by pointing out that I began it in 1997, rather than jumping on an already overloaded bandwagon). Jon McGregor’s novel begins with the disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl from a Peak District village on a winter’s afternoon, but it’s not the crime novel you might expect from this opening and especially not one of those whose plot hangs on a startling twist.

The girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. She was looked for, everywhere. She was staying with her family in a village holiday let, and after her disappearance the parents return, intermittently and separately, the father sometimes behaving oddly enough to be treated as a suspect. Reservoir 13 is unusual in structure and style, spanning thirteen years, a chapter for each. We follow the lives of residents of this small village, location unspecified though with enough references to the Kinder Scout trespass, the well-dressing tradition, villages drowned beneath reservoirs and a crashed Lancaster bomber for us to place it in Derbyshire near the start of the Pennine Way. It’s unsettling at first that the viewpoint never settles on one or more main characters but circles around a great many, the focus often shifting within a paragraph from one character or group to another; but you get used to this, along with the brisk progression through the years. The omniscient narrative concerns itself almost as much with the yearly cycles of badgers, foxes, buzzards and goldcrests as with the human residents: In the beech wood the foxes gave birth, earthed down in the dark and wet with pain, the blind cubs pressing against their mother for warmth. I like to think that I’m fairly knowledgeable about wildlife, but had to look up “springtails”, which make frequent appearances.

McGregor uses short, often simple sentences, and dialogue is rendered without speech marks. To give the flavour of this: Inlets are probably clogged again, he said. Everything else all right? Yes, yes. Fine. He took out a pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette. She looked as though she had more to say. He nodded up at a bank of clouds over the moor, thickening. Weather, he said, and walked on. Mr Jones, she called after him. Will you let me get someone in? He stopped. It’s a decent boiler, he said. I’ll sort it. A goldcrest moved through the tall firs at the far end of the playground, picking quickly at the insects feeding between the needles. From the hills behind the allotments a thick band of rain was moving in.

McGregor plays with the reader’s expectations of what's happened to the missing teenager.Various possibilities are aired by the locals: there are old mine-shafts, locked-up cottages, a closely guarded boiler-house, and of course the several reservoirs, where the title and the number 13, which corresponds to the number of chapters, seem to be leading us. When walkers stray from the paths, children explore mine tunnels and the water-levels in the reservoirs sink to drought level, we anticipate a discovery; and James Broad, one of the group of teenagers who hung around with Rebecca, knows more than he’s told the police. In another novel these would be either clues or red herrings. But in many such novels the denouement, however carefully the ground is prepared, proves disappointing – the rug-snatching moment not enough for the reader to suspend disbelief. You won’t find that here, with the focus on the ordinary lives of the villagers and the rhythms of the seasons and of community life. Though still remembered, the mystery is in the background.

A woman moves to the village to escape from her violent husband. Teenagers grow up, go to university, return. Allotment crops thrive or fail. Relationships end, new ones develop. Pantomimes are staged each winter (yes, in some ways it’s like Ambridge); the parish council meets; words were had when someone offends. Social media arrives; contacts are made on Facebook; lambs are born, ewes lost in snowdrifts; there’s minor and more serious crime; a dairy farmer is forced by supermarket milk prices to the point of giving up. Many or even most of the characters' stories are characterised by disappointment and loneliness, adaptations and compromises. As the years pass and the missing girl fades into legend, we're reminded how old she would be now and how she might look.

A Guardian feature earlier this year explains that McGregor ‘wrote the book out of sequence, getting down all the scenes about individual families, and then all the lines about blackbirds, foxes, reservoirs and so on, storing the sections in a ring binder. “Then I went back and cut it all up and rearranged it. There was a point when it was purely collage.”’ At any point, he says, he was concerned with just one line. Perhaps that explains the sense of freshness and immediacy that gives this book its distinctive quality. There's something quite mesmerising in the telling; something seductive in the rhythms that reminds me of Cormac McCarthy.

Reservoir 13 is published by 4th Estate.

*published in paperback as Missing Rose, 2016