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Our Wonderful Book Subscription
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| Over the past couple of weeks we have sent you many a carefully crafted gift guide to peruse. We hope they have provided the intended inspiration! However, we would be remiss if we didn’t remind you of our Monthly Book Subscription. After all, what better gift for a book lover than multiple book-related surprises?
As one of our monthly fiction subscribers you’ll receive a book every month which you can either collect in the shop or have delivered to your door. We aim to choose something that you may not have already read, not only for your sake but also so that we can highlight a book we feel deserves more love! Above all else, it is always, always, something one of us has adored!
Subscriptions can be 3, 6 or 12 months in length, and can be bought for yourself or as a gift for someone else. Each month the book will be wrapped and will include an introduction from the bookseller who made the selection.
Below is a sample of the titles we’ve chosen over the last few months, along with excerpts from the introductions written for them. More information about our subscription options is available from our website. |
July
Highway Thirteen
by Fiona McFarlane
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| Highway Thirteen is a stunning example of what might be labelled a linked story collection. In it McFarlane chronicles the far-reaching aftershocks a serial killer’s hideous crimes have on many seemingly unconnected, disparate lives. The stories are set as far apart as Texas, Rome and Australia (Bristol even gets a mention), and they span almost 80 years. This is not typical crime/thriller/horror fayre, though. There are no gratuitous depictions of violence and the perpetrator is very much not centre-stage. That does not mean, however, there is a lack of tension or atmosphere. The mood McFarlane installs in the book, a hovering, just out-of-sight menace, is one of the major strengths of her storytelling; prepare to be gripped, immersed and drawn in to a cast of finely-wrought, very distinct characters and settings. |
August
The Course of the Heart
by M. John Harrison
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| This is a deeply uncomfortable, hypnotic novel, filled with Harrison’s trademark blend of the pedestrian mixing with the fantastical. The characters are plagued by visions, stalked by creatures who are the remnants of a seemingly unsuccessful magical ritual. Nothing is explained, and nothing can be escaped, but the feelings I was left with lift above the fog of the gnostic and metaphysical. Amongst all the ambiguity, strangeness, and unexpectedly humorous moments, Harrison manages to convey something so deeply human about love, grief, and our attempts at avoidance. |
September
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
by Claire-Louise Bennett
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| In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye we get to return to Bennett’s distinctive, ruminative voice. Her character is moving house, there is a past relationship with a much-older man, and a letter received out of the blue from her school English teacher. In Bennett’s novels, she typically has a few anchor points that preoccupy the protagonist, giving a loose set of coordinates around which she returns. And from these anchor points Bennett’s language swings wildly about, her passages sweep freely between everyday tedium and the existential. Her repetitive, meandering, and sensual language sits about as close as writing can to capturing an embodied consciousness. |
October
Art on Fire
by Yun Ko-eun
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| At the start of this novel we find our protagonist, An Yiji, an artist of previous promise, having not quite realised her potential. At 38, she’s scraping a living as a food delivery person, trapped by capitalism and inertia. Salvation comes in it’s most unlikely of forms, when she’s offered a four month residency by ‘The Robert Foundation’ in California. The catch? The titular Rober t is a small, arrogant, pretentious dog, and at the end of her residency, he will select one of her works to incinerate. |
November
The Dance and the Fire
by Daniel Saldaña París
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| Written and released during the pandemic, this subtle, contemplative character study follows three friends who have become somewhat separated from each other, and their own internal lives. The three of them were once in a teenage love triangle, but their capacity to love is stymied by their inability to be honest with each other and themselves. They’re all trapped still in arrested adolescence, whilst their ageing bodies and creeping mortalities remove many of the freedoms and opportunities they once used to move through the world. |
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