Author: GRB

Back in the real world as an adult he tries to recapture his time in the Town by taking a job as a librarian in a remote location in Fukushima province, where he takes over the job from a ghost. When a boy, M, who visits the library every day, vanishes, the boundaries between spatial and temporal realities, and between individuals, seems to have been breached. A novel about the barriers, imaginary and real, that we put up between and within ourselves.

Someone – or something – seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczyslaw realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

If you would like to collect your copy in the shop, you are also very welcome just to drop us an email and ask us to place a pre-order for you.

We are at hello@gloucesterroadbooks.com or you can just reply to this email.

‘Clever, delicious, heartfelt and wholesome’ – Jamie Oliver

A brand new and essential book from award-winning and bestselling cook Anna Jones. Jones gives her golden rules for easy wins in the kitchen with super-simple recipes that are bursting with flavour and kind to the planet.

Anna takes 12 hero ingredients that are guaranteed to make your food taste great, with chapters on lemons, olive oil, mustard, tahini and more. She gives 125 all-new dishes that you will want to cook on repeat, like Double Lemon Pilaf with Buttery Almonds, Traybake Lemon Dhal, Miso Rarebit, and Cherry and Chocolate Peanut Butter Sundae. And there’s practical advice on how to season and flavour, plus plenty of ideas for invaluable vegetarian swaps.

EASY WINS will become your go-to for the most flavourful dishes that come together quickly and promise daily moments of triumph. ere.

We are absolutely flooded with excellent new paperbacks at the moment. Leah has winkled out a few she is most excited about.

A cult Japanese bestseller inspired by a true story. Manako Kajii is a gourmet cook convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen whom she seduces with her home cooking. A journalist intent on getting the steely Kajii to speak to the press hopes the subject of her cooking might work as a strategy to get her talking. The two begin exchanges over cooking demo, and the food takes effect on the journalist in unexpected ways.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, Western Lane is a subtly powerful novel on grief and the immigrant experience. A coming of age tale, eleven year-old Gopi plays squash and after the death of her mother is enlisted onto a demanding training regime by her father. The intensity of the training sees her grow apart from her sisters, forging her own identity and new relationships through the sport. Glowing reviews for this novel report a deeply moving and masterfully handled narrative.

We were very lucky to have Santanu speak with us when One Small Voice first came out, so it’s a delight to see it again in paperback. His much-acclaimed debut novel written with wonderfully rich and alive characters is set in modern India and tells the story of Shabby. It is a coming of age story set against the political unrest of Lucknow and Mumbai at the turn of the century.

This one is next on Leah’s to-be-read book-mountain. Spent Light follows a woman’s contemplation of certain objects in her home, tracing their lineage to both the violence of resource extraction and traditions of care and skill as well her own personal memory. It is published by the very interesting small press CB Editions.

Uncle shares his house with his niece and nephew who look after him and see him through his bouts of drinking, gorging, and occasional disappearances down to the toilet. This slim novel looks to be a unique take on the dynamics of care within a family, taking in both tender affection and grotesque excursions! Published by the excellent Peirene Press.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Intermezzo will be published in hardback on September 24th. We are now taking pre-orders to be collected in store or for home delivery. Click the link below, or just reply to this email to reserve your copy.

7pm Thursday 18th April

Ruth is an outdoor psychotherapist who uses movement and nature-based practices with her clients. She trained as a geologist and has a doctorate in Himalayan mountain-building.

In Weathering Ruth draws together insights from both fields to reflect on how engagement with the Earth can help us endure life’s storms. What might the natural processes of weathering of ancient natural landforms have to teach us about resilience and change? Ruth will discuss how a deeper understanding of the ground beneath our feet could better serve ourselves and the world about us. Hear how this different take on geology, deep time and ancient landscapes can help us navigate our own grief and experience of our lives during this time of profound environmental, climate and political changes.

As Ruth notes in Weathering: “As a species we are all, collectively, beyond the point of pristine, wilderness thinking. We are all in some proximity to wounded and depleted places, both outside and in. Where there are wounds, there is also richness, community, recovery… We need to love because of and not in spite of, which is the work of time, something that geology has plenty of, but we do not. It might be brief, but what else is time for, if not to love.”

More on Weathering from publisher, Ebury Press:

Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet – gradually eroding, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also weathering: evolving and changing as we’re transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?

In a stunning exploration of our own connection to these enduring forms, outdoor psychotherapist and geologist Ruth Allen takes us on a journey through deep time and ancient landscapes, showing how geology – which has formed the bedrock of her own adult life and approach to therapy – can offer us a new way of thinking about our own grief, change and boundaries.

Ruth Allen PhD is a qualified psychotherapist, writer, and an experienced trainer and facilitator. Originally trained as a geologist, with a doctorate in Himalayan mountain-building, she now specialises in movement and nature-based practice, nature connection and relational embodiment. She is a supervisory director for ‘Rooted for Girls’, a unique woodland-based psycho-educational programme for teenage girls in the North of England, and is influential in the UK outdoor therapy field, offering training to new practitioners and trainees as well as offering expert consultation. In her spare time, she is a keen mountain adventurer. Her first book, the illustrated title Grounded, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim.

Jack Chadwick stumbled across Caliban Shrieks two years ago in Salford’s Working Class Movement Library. Originally published in 1935 and praised by luminaries such as George Orwell and W.H. Auden, Hilton’s semi-autobiographical novel captures the hardship and toil of the 20th Century’s turbulent, war-blighted times.

With new introductions by Andrew McMillan and Chadwick, the story of Caliban Shriek’s creation is every bit as extraordinary as the man whose life it tells. The same is true of its long overdue reappearance.

From a childhood of poverty, yet also of joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war, Caliban Shrieks’ narrator takes readers on a lyrical tour of the life of a young man born into the first days of the twentieth century.

A novel of men and women wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical debut remains a bold invitation to enter the whirlwind of an existence rarely seen in the literature of its era.

Lost to time, only to be rediscovered in the Salford Working Class Movement Library in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a working-class masterpiece of British fiction, that continues to speak as brashly and impassioned as it did on its first rave publication in 1935.

Jack Chadwick is a writer and journalist based in Colombia. Before writing, he was a barman in Manchester during which time he discovered the lost classic of English working-class literature, Caliban Shrieks. He is currently working to reveal another hidden masterpiece: the autobiography of a former member of a Colombian paramilitary organisation.

The event will take place on 7pm Tuesday March 19th in the shop.

Our Favourites So Far…

Who doesn’t love a novel written by a poet? This extraordinary debut is built from the kind of satisfyingly crunchy sentences that naturally slow down your reading pace to ensure they are fully savoured. Pester summons the spirit of the lodger, the renter, the itinerant, whose being is constantly in tense negotiation with the spaces around them. These precarious states of living are the circumstances our characters find themselves in, but more than that, they press onto their selfhood; their souls imprinted with cheap furniture and other people’s rules.

20 years ago I lived in a shared house in South London with the very same Holly Pester, so it is an absolute joy to see this brilliant book in print & to recommend it heartily. As the state of housing in the UK becomes more and more dire, particularly for younger generations, we need to understand the affects of this domestic precarity on the people experiencing it. This is an excellent place to start and a brilliant book in its own right.

An imagined meeting between Hernán Cortés – Spanish conquistador, and Moctezuma – Aztec emperor, forms the crux of this visceral and frequently hallucinogenic novel. The Spanish entourage, exhausted, filthy, wildly out of their depth yet still believing themselves inherently superior to their hosts, worry about the intentions of the Aztecs, for whom human sacrifice is an importance cultural and religious practice. Moctezuma, meanwhile, is at a moment of political vulnerability and increasingly obsessed with hallucinogenic visions.

This is one of the most visually striking books I have ever read. Its impression will remain seared onto my imagination for some time to come.

Diane Oliver had four short stories published during her very brief lifetime before she tragically died in a motorcycle crash in 1966 at the age of just 22. Two more stories were published posthumously. This new collection adds another eight previously unpublished works to a book that will hopefully start to gain Oliver the readership and profile her powerful and unforgettable writing deserves.

The stories focus on the dehumanising terror of racism in 1960s America and the effects on families and individuals, particularly women. Her most well-known story, the titular Neighbors, presents the agonising turmoil a Black family face as their youngest child prepares to attend a desegregated school.

Full of indelible characters and with flashes of sharp humour, these stories are an extremely valuable introduction to a writer who was creating formidable work before her tragic, untimely death.

Near the beginning of this fascinating, in-depth look at coalition building for progressive, political change in a time of extremes, celebrated US journalist Anand Giridharadas writes, ‘This book is about (the) quest, in a time of great crises, for a politics fierce enough and unapologetic enough truly to change things and smart and expansive enough to change the minds to get there.’

Throughout the book Giridharadas doesn’t shy away from fundamental questions that arise from this quest: are progressive and just causes welcoming and inclusive? In this age of extreme polarisation is it possible to persuade people to change their minds, make them feel welcome to a cause and build coalitions? With far-reaching access to high-profile figures who have been active in coalition building and persuasion such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio and 2017 Women’s March key organiser, Linda Sarsour, Giridharadas provides ample evidence to back up the main thrust of his text.

The argument that no one changes their mind in this age of uncompromising stances has been replayed many times in the last decade or so, and it is welcome and rare to find a counter-argument that is presented with such force and comprehensive detail.

There is a magic to Sheila Heti sentences, they are always elegant, playful and philosophical, and in her new book we get to revel in her mastery as she whittled down ten years of diaries and ordered the sentences alphabetically. The result of the experiment makes for incredibly addictive reading, in addition to moments of surprising profundity by the removal of time as a narrative structure. And just like her novels, the voice maintains Heti’s knack of being totally unique and painfully relatable!

If you’re looking to get into a story with incredible cosmic scope without sacrificing the tenderness of human emotion then this book is for you! Leigh is a marine biologist studying rare forms of algae, her work takes her to remote islands, deep ocean exploration and, eventually, outer space. It is quietly astounding how McInnes weaves in Leigh’s research on early life forms and the poignancy it holds for her in relation to childhood experiences and the relationships in her life. The experience of reading this novel is both immersive and awe-inspiring.

This is a gloriously odd book. I frequently found myself wondering, as I read, whether certain aspects of it would instinctively make more sense if I was more familiar with Japan. It is a critique of Japanese work culture, body image and social rigidity, all rolled up into something of a murder mystery (kind of), all apparently based on a true story. Confused? Me too. That didn’t stop me enjoying the book though, in fact I think that is precisely why the book was enjoyable. A cult classic in Japan, the English translation by Bristol’s own Polly Barton is out on 29th February.

Earlier this week I went to see the wonderful American Fiction at the cinema (well worth going if you can). It is based on the Percival Everett novel, Erasure, and it made me look forward with even more expectation to the new Everett novel, released this April, James. The novel is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of the enslaved friend of Huck Finn, Jim.

There is surely no more fertile imagination in contemporary English language writing that Percival Everett. A new novel is a thing to be treasured.

We loved Leigh Hodgkinson’s Martha Maps it Out where we followed Martha home from her school to her apartment block, then to her bedroom, and then to a map of her mind and hopes for the future! In this second instalment we follow Martha as she maps out ancient timelines encountering dinosaurs, mammoths, and prehistoric sea creatures. Martha’s curiosity for the natural world and passion for map-making (via Hodgkinson’s fantastic illustrations) make a wonderful aid to helping preschoolers understand time and history. Published early April.

We are delighted to have been allocated three precious copies of a fine press collaboration between writer Max Porter and engraver Hilary Paynter. Fine press publications are strictly limited editions, rare and distinctly collectible. We will not have access to further copies, once ours have sold they are gone.

The Hill is a celebration of collaboration. Author & engraver, word & image, the hand & the machine combine on the page, encouraging the reader to view this place, or any hill, through the lens of both recent and ancient history.

This book is a work of art, and a unique opportunity to own a series of engravings and an original text that has been put together at every stage by two outstanding creative talents at the peak of their powers. The illustrations throughout are printed directly from Hilary’s lemonwood blocks onto Zerkall mould-made paper. The text has been set using Monotype Walbaum and is printed by letterpress on a Heidelberg Cylinder from lead type cast at Nomad Letterpress in an edition of 874 copies.

You know the old saying ‘You wait for Gloucester Road Books to announce their first event of the year, and then three come along at once’?

We have two exciting new events scheduled for February & March, both for books published by outstanding small presses.

Tickets and more info are available in store or from our website here.

It’s 1907; three lads set off for Lublin, the market town of dreams.Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Ziv and Kiva aren’t so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of Girls (how disappointing); they may well stumble into Russian Town, rumoured to be a dangerous place for Jews (it is). As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya’s jokes nor Kiva’s prayers nor Ziv’s sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them.

Absurd, riveting, alarming, hilarious, the dialogue devastatingly sharp and the pacing extraordinary, Lublin is a journey to nowhere that changes everything it touches.

Manya Wilkinson is a Jewish New Yorker living in Newcastle, where she was senior lecturer in prose and scriptwriting at Newcastle University. She’s the author of a novel, Ocean Avenue, several short stories, and many plays and radio dramas which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Afternoon Play, Saturday Drama, Writing the Century and Woman’s Hour.

‘A true boy’s own adventure with a deep heart set against a backdrop of ferocious world events, Lublin will charm and devastate readers in equal measure with its compulsive, funny and moving prose. Manya Wilkinson has given us a fable-like story whose characters live and breathe through the ages to speak to us of childhood dreams and the inequities of war today.’ – Preti Taneja

‘Lublin has a truly individual flavour. Beautifully written, well-paced, rhythmical, sad, funny. It was a real pleasure to read it.’ – David Almond

‘Wilkinson is a superb comic writer. She’s also gifted in startling poetic compression, turning on a sixpence to move into moments of horror and prophecy. Reading Lublin, you have to laugh; you want to look away from what follows, but you can’t.’ – Sean O’Brien

‘Told against the engulfing dark of the 20th century, Lublin glitters with beauty, comedy and compassion. A glorious, ringing and resonating book by a master storyteller.’ – Jacob Polley

‘Mercurial, hilarious, terrifying, a sustained song to the lost, Lublin is a masterpiece. Prepare to be enchanted.’ – Sinéad Morrissey

Tickets and further info are available in store or from our website here.

Elisa’s debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, won the the Prix Robert Walser, the Prix Régine Desforges, the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature and was shortlisted for the 2021 Scott Moncreiff Prize. Her second novel, The Pachinko Parlour, was awarded the Swiss Literature Prize.

Elisa’s atmospheric style has garnered her a growing readership and rave reviews, and we’re thrilled to be welcoming her to the shop to hear more about her work.

Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of art college in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok winds down, the windy port city deserted as performers head home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion. Set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean, Vladivostok Circus explores collaboration, creativity and belonging, all the while immersing the reader in Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

Franco-Korean writer, Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul and Switzerland. Winter in Sokcho (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins), her first novel was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim and won numerous awards. It has been translated into six languages. Her second novel, The Pachinko Parlour (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins), won the Swiss Literature Prize. Elisa has also written for the theatre and currently lives in Switzerland.

‘Dusapin’s beautiful prose, with imagery both metallic and mineral, insinuates its way towards a delicate empathy between the generations, as well as examining the confusion that comes with dual nationality, and the lifetime loss that is exile.’ Irish Times

‘Atmospheric, exquisitely written and highly charged.’ Olivia Sudjic

‘Fragmentation, recurring imagery and a flair for evoking atmosphere so effective that lassitude seems to seep through the pages recalls Deborah Levy’s writing.’ Guardian

‘Narrated in an elegant, enigmatic voice that skilfully summons the tenderness and mutability of an inner life.’ Sharlene Teo

‘Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the page: her talent is a thrill to behold.’ Alexandra Kleeman

‘I haven’t encountered a voice like this since Duras – spellbinding.’ ELLE (France)

‘An exquisite, cinematic novel not afraid of subtlety. I looked forward to reading it at night, to spending time… in her pleasing sentences, which I can still hear in my mind.’ Amina Cain

‘full of delicacy and melancholy . . . sprinkled with meticulous touches.’ Le Monde