Author: GRB

On Tuesday I sent out a very excited email about our new book subscription offer. In my overeagerness I sent the message before the link was fully live, so if you tried it on Tuesday before about 5:30pm, it will not have worked. Gah!

The link is now fully live so you can explore our subscription offer here. We are also offering a little temptation for anyone who would like to purchase a subscription in time to receive our June book selection. We’ll put the names of everyone who subscribes between now and May 25th into a hat and draw one winner. That lucky soul will have the length of their subscription doubled.

It’s not exactly Willy Wonka level marketing, but we’re really excited to get some brilliant books into new hands & hope this will help get that mission on its way!

Happy reading all,

Tom

We write with some exciting new developments for the shop…

Book Club

After having threatened to do so for far too long, we are at last starting a translated literature book club!

Each month we’ll meet in the shop to discuss a book that has been translated into English. Mostly these will be novels, but we’ll mix it up occasionally with short stories or non-fiction. These meetings won’t be ticketed, but you’ll need to buy the book from us in order to attend.

We’re going to start with a list of 12 people and see how we get on (we’ll also keep a waiting list for anyone who doesn’t initially make it into that 12). We don’t expect everyone to make every single meeting, but it would be lovely to have a regular crew, so please only sign up if you think you’ll be able to make the majority of meetings.

The first meeting will be on Thursday 18th May, from 6.15–7.30 in the bookshop. Future meetings will be once a month, on Thursdays, at the same time.

We’re going to start with Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. Time Shelter is on the shortlist for the Booker International Prize 2023, and Olga Tokarczuk says it’s ‘The most exquisite kind of literature’ which isn’t a bad endorsement! For future meetings we (Gloucester Road Books) will choose a shortlist of titles and put them to the group for a vote, with the winner being read for next month’s meeting.

If you would like to join, or would like more info, drop us an email at hello@gloucesterroadbooks.com

We hope the extra hour of light has delivered its welcome annual boost of optimism. This always feels like an excellent time of year to be reading about the natural world, as it opens back up and welcomes us from our hibernations.

To that end, we are delighted to announce our talk with John Wright, for his new book The Observant Walker. Wright has been a firm favourite on the Nature Writing shelves since we opened nearly two years ago & we are excited to be welcoming him to Bristol on Wednesday 24th May, at Future Leap event space (at the bottom of Gloucester Road, by the arches). Tickets can be found on our website here & more info follows below.

The Observant Walker is a guide to the food, nature and history to be found all around us when we walk.

John Wright is an expert in the natural world and has been leading forays around Britain for decades. As an expert forager, he shows people how to identify the edible species that abound – but he also reveals the natural history, stories and science behind our surroundings. In The Observant Walker, he takes us with him on eight walks: from verdant forests to wild coastlines, via city pavements, fields and rolling hills, he illuminates what can be found on a walk across any British terrain, and how we might observe and truly understand them, for ourselves.

When we go for a walk, whether in the countryside or city, we pass through landscapes full of natural beauty and curiosities both visible and invisible – but though we might admire the view, or wonder idly about the name of a flower, we rarely have the knowledge to fully engage with what we see. When we do, our sense of place is expanded, our understanding deepened and we can discover richness in even the most everyday stroll.

Warm, wise and endlessly informative, with helpful illustrations and suggested routes, The Observant Walker will help you to see the world around you with new eyes: no walk will be the same again.

“John Wright writes as though he is talking directly to you, a good friend in the same room. His harvest of fascinating information is worn lightly, with funny, whimsical observations.” BBC Countryfile

“This illustrated survey (The Forager’s Calendar) is historically detailed, enriched by the author’s deep knowledge of British landscapes and natural history.” Guardian

John Wright is a naturalist and one of Great Britain’s leading experts on fungi. His most recent books include A Spotter’s Guide to the Countryside and The Forager’s Calendar. He lives in Dorset, where he regularly leads forays into nature and goes on long walks across all terrains. The Forager’s Calendar won the 2020 Guild of Food Writers Award and the 2020 Woodland Book of the Year

We are delighted to announce our first natural history themed event of the year. On Tuesday April 18th we will be welcoming Nick Acheson to the Gloucester Road, to talk about his new book The Meaning of Geese at Sidney & Eden.Tickets, which are priced £5, along with more info can be found here.

The Meaning of Geese is a beautiful tribute to the wild geese and their great athletic migrations – an expertly detailed account of how their sound and spectacle shape our winter landscape and what it might mean to lose them forever.

During a time when many of us faced the prospect of little work or human contact, renowned naturalist and conservationist Nick Acheson found a sense of peace and purpose in his pursuit of the wild geese that filled his beloved Norfolk skies, on their seasonal visits from Iceland and Siberia.
In The Meaning of Geese Nick recounts these adventures, starting with the dramatic arrival of the pinkfeet and brent geese as they land in the thousands in North Norfolk each autumn.

While following their flocks on his old red bicycle, Nick encounters rarer geese, including Russian white-fronts, barnacle geese and an extremely unusual grey-bellied brant, a bird he had dreamt of seeing since thumbing his mother’s copy of Peter Scott’s field guide as a child.

Over the course of seven months Nick keeps a diary of his sightings as well as the stories he discovered through the community of people, past and present, who loved them too. Over seven months he cycles 1,200 miles – the exact length of the pinkfeet’s migration to Iceland.

Yet, with the impacts of climate change the geese’s future migrations are no longer a given, and as spring arrives and Nick says goodbye to the last of the geese, the question of whether they will return the following seasons hangs in the air. He writes: ‘I meant to bid them fortune on their journey; to thank them for their winter company; to pray their tundra will persist a few years more, despite our ravaging of the climate.’

The Meaning of Geese is a book of thrilling encounters with wildlife, of tired legs, punctured tyres and inhospitable weather. Above all, it is the moving account of Nick Acheson’s love for Norfolk’s ancient landscape – the land the wild geese call home each winter.

As I write this we are very much looking forward to our first event of the year, with Dizz Tate, on Friday evening. It sold out in just a couple of weeks, so our thanks to everyone who has purchased tickets. We may have signed stock of Brutesavailable after the event. Anyone who couldn’t get a ticket (or just can’t make it on Friday) is welcome to drop us an email to reserve a signed copy & we’ll do our best to secure one for you!

We have another fantastic event to announce:

On Friday, March 10th, we welcome Santanu Bhattacharya to the shop to discuss his debut novel One Small Voice. The story sets the self-discovery of Shubhankar against the changing character of India in the nineties and into the new millenium. Tickets & more info are here. This is our second event this year featuring a debut writer and it is wonderful to be hosting these exciting new voices – we hope you’ll enjoy this event too.

Dazzling and deeply moving, One Small Voice is a novel of modern India: of violence and prejudice, friendship and loyalty, community and tradition, and of a young man coming of age in a country on fire.