…to you, dear readers, for your ongoing support and custom — which cleared our virtual shelves at the end of last year, and has consequently kept the cogs turning into this.
Should you happen to be getting low on reading material again, the shop has now been replenished — and never has it looked so good, if we do say so ourselves. Canongate hit the ground running this week with the release of not one but TWO titles which will no doubt be appearing on Books of the Year lists eleven months from now — Salena Godden’s first novel Mrs Death Misses Death, and Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places, which chronicles the author’s upbringing in the midst of the Troubles (and is also our January Book of the Month).
In the coming months, we have some positively sparkling debuts to look forward to (Harry Sword’s Monolithic Undertow charts the musical history of the drone; Jennifer Lucy Allan’s The Foghorn’s Lament delves into the uniquely coastal sound of the foghorn; Jonathan Meiburg tracks down the world’s smartest bird of prey in A Most Remarkable Creature), alongside new titles from old favourites (Benjamin Myers delves into the fragility of the male psyche in his first short story collection Male Tears; Horatio Clare shares his personal journey through mania, psychosis, treatment and recovery in Heavy Light; Melissa Harrison makes her children’s debut with the Hidden Folk of By Ash, Oak and Thorn; Jackie Kay chronicles the life of the legendary blues singer in Bessie Smith). You could, of course, also just have a browse.
Elsewhere: the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the newsletter has reverted back to weekly, since we can’t use all that extra time on our hands to plan events. We hope you’ll agree that it’s a bit more digestible in its new format, and also that you’ll like the brand new Antidotes section, designed to deliver bite-sized recommendations of cool reads/watches/listens on a more regular basis.
Finally: in the last year, we’ve revived our previously defunct Instagram page, which now features plenty of quality standalone content. You can follow that here, if that kind of thing is your bag.