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.

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.