Author: GRB

We have re-emerged from our short winter hibernation, ready to delight you (we hope) with literary treats, our first event of the year, and some releases to look forward to as the year progresses.

We’re delighted to be welcoming Dizz Tate for our opening event of 2023

Tate was the winner of the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2018, and she will be in conversation with our own Joe Melia, who is the prize co-ordinator as well as the shop’s events organiser.

Brutes, one of the most anticipated debuts of the year, is a striking coming-of-age novel, and Tate’s debut:

In Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher’s daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they uncover will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the ‘we’ of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.

Tickets and more information are available here.

With the current state of the world outside (outside the walls, outside the pages of your book) we are delighted to be able to offer plenty of distraction.

First up is the winner of the Booker Prize for 2022, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

This was a fantastic year for the Booker Prize. I loved all the books I read from the list (The Trees and Treacle Walker both made it through to the shortlist, After Sappho sadly did not) and I’m hugely looking forward to reading this winner.

Firstly, a quick word of thanks to everyone who came out to hear Anil Seth discuss his book Being You on Wednesday last week. We were delighted with such a good turnout & hope everyone enjoyed the talk as much as we did. There are a few signed copies left in store if you couldn’t make the talk but would like a copy.

We have three fantastic events coming up in October, tickets & more info are here.

We are very much looking forward to our event with Anil Seth about Being You: A New Science of Consciousness tomorrow evening (Wednesday 21st Sept). Tickets are still available from our website here if you would like to attend.

Events already announced for October include Joanna Quinn in conversation about The Whalebone Theatre on Friday 7th and Adam Alexander discussing The Seed Detective on Tuesday 11th.

We are delighted to annouce that Anna Beer will be joining us at Sidney & Eden on Tuesday 18th October to talk about her book Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature with Professor Helen Taylor. Tickets & info can be found here.

Warned not to write – and certainly not to bite – these women put pen to paper anyway and wrote themselves into history. From the fourteenth century through to the present day, women who write have been understood as mad, undisciplined or dangerous. Female writers have always had to find ways to overcome or challenge these beliefs. Some were cautious and discreet, some didn’t give a damn, but all lived complex, eventful and often controversial lives. Eve Bites Back places the female contemporaries of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton centre stage in the history of literature in English, uncovering stories of dangerous liaisons and daring adventures. From Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet, to Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, these are the women who dared to write.

Anna Beer is a cultural historian and biographer. She is author of Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music and Patriot or Traitor: The Life and Death of Sir Walter Raleigh, as well as biographies of Bess Throckmorton, William Shakespeare and John Milton. She is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

This week sees the first major new release date of the autumn publishing season – ‘Super Thursday’! Including new releases from Raynor Winn, Richard Osman, Natalie Haynes, Philip Pullman, Rukmini Iyer, and a really exciting looking anthology of Black British Science Fiction, edited by Leone Ross (author of This One Sky Day).

There are lots of new children’s books coming through this week too – including new titles from Sam Usher and Cressida Cowell.

Sneaking out a few days before the crowd, Ian McEwan’s Lessons was published this morning. Bristol’s own Johanna Thomas-Corr rates it his best in 20 years in her review in the New Statesman.