New dates for our writing course & our favourite books of the year so far

Dive into the art of crafting compelling true stories, blending factual narrative with the creative flair of fiction. Whether you’re a seasoned writer or a beginner, you will be guided through techniques in a range of non-fiction writing including memoir, personal essays, literary journalism, biography, feature and review writing, as well as writing for Substack and other blogging platforms.

Taught in a small group workshop with a maximum of 10 participants, you will have the unique opportunity to share your writing each week in a supportive and friendly environment. Join a vibrant community of writers in the heart of Bristol’s Gloucester Road and embark on a journey to bring your true stories to life.

Lots more information is available on our website, where you can also book your place.

Libby

This is my first Clarice Lispector and boy do I feel so incredibly lucky that this is the case- what a wealth of reading has now been unlocked for me! Agua Viva is a slight novel but has more depth than those quadruple its length. A fair warning, it is experimental and intentionally pushes the limits of language and grammar. It may not make sense in a linear or logical fashion but this is precisely why it makes sense to me in a much truer way. It is also incredibly introspective as we are borderline trapped inside her head whilst she muses on the nature of time and the natural world and I would not have had it any other way.

Everyone should read this book (with the caveat that it’s a bit sexually graphic in parts so if that makes you uncomfy then maybe you are one of the few who should not read it). Saou Ichikawa is the first author with a physical disability to be awarded the Akutagawa prize and the mainstream success of this book is, in my opinion, a very exciting thing. Hunchback is about a woman born with a congenital muscle disorder and her desire for intimacy. Each second of her life is planned out in a painstaking manner but that does not mean her fantasies are in any way orderly. Probably one of my favourite character perspectives I’ve read from in the last year. Please read it and then talk to me about it!

A picture book about a little boy named Bobby who has ADHD and is pulled towards the clouds by his own thoughts. His friends and family try to ground him by physically tying him down but they soon realise that this means Bobby misses out on much of what makes his life so vivid. This picture book beautifully reframes neurodivergence as a superpower that helps him and others experience life in new and exciting ways. By the end, Bobby and his friends and family find a happy middle ground between the clouds and the ground.

A novel almost exclusively about communication with virtually no dialogue. In other words- an intensely queer book. Sharpland’s writing is beautiful and poetic and filled with all of the pain that you would expect from a novel written about a working class gay couple in 1980s south Wales. I found my heart aching in an all too familiar way at the descriptions of hyper vigilance and self policing. But I also found it soaring at the brief moments of sanctuary and relief that M and B find in one another.

I can’t quite believe it’s taken me this long to finally read such an iconic and seminal feminist text. In the vein of Camille Paglia, Despentes writes with rage, certainty and, honestly, a refreshing lack of nuance. Not always wholly relevant in its content, but completely relevant in tone- perhaps more so now than when it was published in the early 2000s. King Kong Theory exposes the cramped and ill fitting boxes that women are forced into and the clever ways in which the patriarchy naturalises such contortion of the spirit. Trigger warnings include sexual assault and rape, porn, sex work and much more– not necessarily graphic or lengthy descriptions of any of it but extremely candid discussion to say the least.

This was the first book of 2025 that really did that wonderful thing books can sometimes do, of making lights come on in bits of my brain that are otherwise dark and boarded up. I should state early on that this will categorically not be a book for everyone. It is wild and wilfully over the top. It is sometimes grotesque, and uncomfortable in various ways. It is, however, an extraordinary experience. As with much fiction that is in any way speculative in nature, we as readers have to accept the strangeness and roll with it, trusting the author is using it as a vehicle to take us somewhere worthwhile. Strap in and enjoy the ride.

On a remote island beyond Shetland lives Ivar, his blind horse and his cow. He is the last of his family to remain, in fact he is the last on the island at all and he is the last to speak his language, which sits somewhere between Scots, Shetlandic and Norwegian. His solitary, predictable existence is upended when a stranger washes up on his shore. In fact the stranger is there by design, John Ferguson is a young church minister, and an emissary from the landowner sent to tell Ivar, somehow, that the island is being cleared to make way for sheep and that he is no longer required or welcome. The unexpected bond formed by these two men is the heart of this beautiful novel that manages to do so much in such a short space; language, love, belonging are all explored deftly in one of my favourite books of the year so far.

This contemporary French detective novel is full of convoluted schemes within schemes, nefarious intentions, wishful thinking and wild incompetence. It’s a scathing indictment of political ambition and the things people will do for even the most paltry scrap of power. It is also a wonderful example of a writer gleefully playing with the tropes and conventions of the crime genre like a musician playing around a well known tune. Our private detective, such as he is, could hardly be any less adept at ‘detecting’, and rather than being the hunter he ends up the most bumblingly oblivious quarry. This reads like a crime novel, but with a welcome layer of delicious farce. It’s very impressive and it’s great fun.

A little while ago, during a quiet moment in the bookshop, I picked up Tragic Magic and started reading in order to get a sense of the writing, the texture, to think about whether it might be what I wanted to read next. I hardly noticed customers that day (probably not a great idea for a bookshop owner in the long term) and before I realised what had happened, I’d read half of the book. It felt less like I’d been reading and more like drinking, or inhaling. The book is truly propulsive. Not in the way that a crime novel with a plot drawing the reader ever closer to the gravitational pull of the final reveal is propulsive, but rather with language so addictive that each end to a sentence/page/chapter is simply ignored, eyes moving greedily onto the next. This is a book of gorgeous language, and also a book about language. Brown is concerned with masculinity, with sexuality, moral and political beliefs, with America and its attitudes to race, and plenty more. But all of this is told via the fulcrum of language; that expression of ourselves, that tool that creates as well as describes. Jazz is the motif Brown uses often, serving as the apogee and the metaphor (via his own introduction) of the kind of fluid, improvised, included and excluded, linguistically lithe lives of his characters. I was absolutely transported.

I will soon be starting the official Bristol branch of the Helen Garner appreciation society. This is the second of her novels that I have read, and it affected me just as strongly as the first (The Children’s Bach). Her fascinations are broadly the same across both books – the relationships between people, how they are sustained and strained, how thin the boundary between solid connections and crumbling ones, and how suddenly new connections can form. There are some significant differences here though. Our narrator lives a bohemian existence in Melbourne, moving between communal homes and lovers, caring for her daughter and enjoying life. The elements are broadly in balance until Javo, with his intensely blue eyes, and his smack habit, begins to exert a gravitational pull that threatens to be destabilising. This is a book to abandon yourself to, just as Garner’s characters abandon themselves to their various loves.

I’ve tried to write a review of this book a few times, since reading it at the start of the year, and I’ve found I’ve struggled to summarise- I truly think it’s a book that needs to be experienced. It so captured for me the specific experience of being tied to a place, and longing for escape. The stifling claustrophobia of a stagnating life being the thing that creates the brutal, hurtling momentum. I could really feel the bond between the characters, lifelong friends despite the different directions they have taken. Everyone is broken and disappointed and doing their best, choosing a value to ascribe to their life (money, work, drugs, family) and leaning on that until it snaps. And, within all the action and chaos, there’s these tender pauses and reflections on beauty and meaning. I was moved to tears by this book.

Oh, the money you’d have to pay me to be eighteen again. Docherty writes about the familiar rite-of-passage of working out your sexuality by being in obsessive, possessive love with your straight best friend, of trying to quell loneliness and pain and confusion with overconsumption of everything. But she’s also writing about the experience of endometriosis, a chronic condition that is under-researched, debilitating, and often dismissed. I loved how the second-person narrative allowed me to immerse myself in the raw vulnerability of the protagonist. Still feeling compassion for her, whilst she was messy and selfish and naive, felt cathartic to my younger self.

This exceptional quartet of stories covers a breadth of settings that are hugely diverse from each other, but share within them the complexity of gender identity and desire. All four worlds and protagonists feel deeply realised. The result feels like a Johari window of gender and sexual identities, from teens at a Quaker boarding school, to isolated lumberjacks in an illegal logging encampment; from the glitz of Las Vegas, to a dystopian near-future in the midst of a pandemic. Each story grapples with the arresting and at times confronting question of who we are to ourselves and each other.Peters’ invites us to think outside of the boxes we love to put ourselves and each other in- challenging ideas of traditional masculinity as well as how we police each other’s trans identities. None of her protagonists cut wholly sympathetic characters, and in so doing, feel entirely human.

Not enough has been written about the squatting ban, or the property guardianship schemes that started popping up, first all over Europe, and eventually in England. Property guardianship was ultimately a trap; it gave the illusion of security whilst affording less rights than renting, or even squatting, and in accepting these golden handcuffs, a political movement that was full of joy and momentum and chaos was curtailed. The relationship between writer and subject is an interesting one here; squatters often aren’t hugely keen on being scrutinised and written about by journalists, but Feldman’s account doesn’t feel exploitative, or cartoonish, but connective and connecting. Her prose is gorgeous, and I felt sick with nostalgia at points reading this.

What is our relationship to each other, and to the land? How do we make something separate when society itself feels sick? What does utopia look like? What is freedom, and how do we enforce our notions of freedom on each other? Are we doomed to create similar traps to the ones we are trying to escape? Colony explores the juxtaposition of society and community, and I enjoyed how insidious things felt, each character’s small choices building on something that is only unusual once you step outside of it; much like the system we ourselves live in.

It’s impossible to convey the power, humanity and importance of this work. Award-winning journalist and author, El Akkad, makes an utterly convincing case that Israel’s slaughter of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the annihilation of its infrastructure, enabled by the West and compounded by an often complete indifference, represents an end of something very significant. Or in his own words: “This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.” As acute and essential as it gets.

Reminiscent of Dave Eggers’ brilliant, prophetic 2013 novel, The Circle, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ account of her time working at Facebook/Meta from 2011 to 2018 and what it alleges is a chilling and disturbing read to say the least. A steady descent further into an amoral mire; growing narcissism and greed; an increasing lack of humanity; an exertion of power and influence over elections and governments; exploiting the vulnerable for commercial gain – Wynn-Williams idealistic belief in the company’s aim of ‘connecting the world’ undergoes a complete unravelling with severe personal cost.

Subtitled A Life Between Cultures, SJ Kim’s memoir/essay collection examines what working as a Korean-American woman of colour in British academia entails; the silences, the isolation, having your worth constantly questioned and sky high, unreasonable expectations placed on you. The book also movingly portrays a daughter seeking out a more complete bond with her Korean heritage and family. Written as a sequence of ‘letters’ to the various institutions that have marked her life thus far, this is an extremely memorable testament to survival and resilience.

An electically-charged explosion of a book that recounts contemporary failed relationships and what become extreme lurches for connection with an aplomb that is extremely rare. Tulathimutte is ruthless in depicting the desperation of his characters; it’s much more than a warts and all exposure of the excruciating depths to which they plumb. Assembled as overlapping short stories – highlights are Our Dope Future, Main Character and The Feminist – the reading experience is simultaneously to grimace and hide from the pages while also to be engulfed by magnificent, often hilarious storytelling.

“The world is not holding. The living systems that support all of our lives are sick. Staggering. Trembling. In need of our urgent care,” writes Naomi Klein towards the end of this stunning portrayal of these times. The collision of climate breakdown, MAGA, Covid, reckless power-mad tech giants, the ‘attention economy’, anti-vaxxers, extreme capitalism and more has created a ‘mirror world’, Klein suggests, where everyone is a brand, decades-earned expertise and knowledge are despised, narcissism is celebrated, the unwell and those in need are not just abandoned but vilified, seismic climate events are dismissed as irrelevant and multiple horrifying conflicts are enacted or ignored. Klein calls for the widespread adoption of a community approach to everything and a mass ‘unselfing’, quoting prison abolitionist, Mariame Kaba: ““Everything worthwhile is done with other people.”” Architecturally it’s a marvel, and Klein’s peripheral vision is so vast she’s able to seamlessly knit together the numerous elements making contemporary existence so fraught. Astounding.