|
|
Book Subscription Round-Up
|
 |
| The year has basked on lazily past midsummer. Six months of 2025 are somehow already sitting on top of the sedimentary layer of 2024, eagerly decomposing. For some fortunate folk these months are also represented in the book stacks on their bedside tables.
Our monthly fiction subscribers receive a book every month. It’ll be a book that one of us really loves, and believes ought to be more widely read. It won’t be anything very obvious that you might choose for yourself (although last year we did select Orbital before it was longlisted for, then ultimately won, the Booker Prize). There are four of us involved in the selection process, and we read widely, so expect a variety of different kinds of book. They will all be fiction, but that is the only thing we guarantee they will have in common. It is a delight for an adventurous reader.
Subscriptions can be 3, 6 or 12 months in length, and can be bought for yourself or as a gift. Each month the book will be wrapped and will include an introduction from the bookseller who made the selection.
The first six selections of this year are below, along with excerpts from our introductions. More information about subscription options is available from our website, or we can chat it through with you in the shop. |
January
You Dreamed of Empires
by Alvaro Enrigue
|
| You Dreamed of Empires is a fictionalised account of a meeting between the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, and Moctezuma, leader of the Tenochca, or Aztec, empire in what is now Mexico City. There is a quote on the front cover likening it to an ‘Aztec West Wing’ which is hilariously apt, and at the same time wildly insufficient to describe the brilliance of the book. This is a book about understanding and not understanding, about others and empires. |
February
Glorious Exploits
by Ferdia Lennon
|
| Set in 5th century BC Syracuse in the aftermath of Athens’ ill-fated Sicilian Expedition, Ferdia Lennon’s unashamedly spirited debut novel is a bona fide revelation of a reading experience. It is no wonder that the novel has been collecting awards since it was published in hardback. The heady mix of wit, comedy, humanity, tragedy and suffering is conveyed with extraordinary energy and momentum. |
March
Perfection
by Vincenzo Latronico
|
| Vincenzo Latronico’s calmly blistering novel introduces Anna and Tom and their lives in uber-trendy Berlin. They fill their non-working hours with cafes, parties, art exhibitions, and fill the various flats they inhabit with many, many, many things, especially plants. All this they carefully mythologise on social media. What stands out in this thunderclap of a novel is how Latronico lays bare the hollowness of Anna and Tom’s manicured and staged existence. |
April
Tragic Magic
by Wesley Brown
|
| This 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. |
May
The Heart in Winter
by Kevin Barry
|
| The novel chronicles the wild, doomed affair between occasional poet and recreational narcotic fan, Tom Rourke, and mail order bride of the town’s mine owner, Polly Gillespie. The lovers plot their escape west to San Francisco, leaving a trail of arson and theft behind them. Barry proves to be the complete linguistic magician; he knows all the words, apparently, and how to make the most of them. In terms of stone-cold reading pleasure, it’s hard to imagine anything more satisfying. |
June
We Would Have Told Each Other Everything
by Judith Hermann
|
| We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, for me, is the perfect summer read. Not the snappy poolside kind, or the post walk pre-nap kind, but for those days when you can take everything a little bit more slowly and let her carefully crafted sentences percolate. This is not a tale of grand transformation or redemption. Rather, it’s about the slow turning over of a life. |
|
|
|
