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I have been devoted to your podcast for over a year; it could be improved only by being more frequent. Every book I have ordered from you has been a delight; nothing disappoints. I receive your emails with pleasure, and that’s saying a lot. Slightly Foxed is a source of content . . . ’
K. Nichols, Washington, USA

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Waiting for the Rains

Waiting for the Rains

When I saw that When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) by Bessie Head had been included in ‘The Big Jubilee Read’, seventy books published during the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth, I was gratified; I’d read it and knew it deserved its place. I was also reminded of a disconcerting encounter with the author, many years ago. One of the best things in my career with the BBC World Service was talking to writers about their work. The interviews might prove to be enlightening, challenging, unexpected, tricky – and occasionally not as interesting as I’d hoped; but this one didn’t even get off the ground.
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An Antidote to Self-pity

An Antidote to Self-pity

‘Where am I?’ a soldier asks Pamela Bright in the first line of Life in Our Hands (1955). ‘In a field hospital,’ she replies, and moves on down the line of beds to the next patient. And that is all we know for the first ten pages of this book. It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’, and her ward is filled with wounded men. Some can be saved. Some, like Tom Malone, his liver ripped in two, cannot. He mumbles the Lord’s Prayer, cries out for his mother. Bright administers morphine, holds his hand, feels shame at the futility of her care.
Life in Our Hands | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Life in Our Hands | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’ as Pamela Bright describes it, and her ward is filled with wounded men. So overstretched is she that she barely knows where she is, but as her gut-wrenchingly vivid account progresses, we begin to understand that she is in a Casualty Clearing Station attached to the British Second Army in Normandy, which had landed a week after D-Day in June 1944. Pamela is one of the young nurses working heroically to tend to the wounded in impossible conditions a few miles from the front line.
Celtic Charm and Champagne | Empress of Ireland

Celtic Charm and Champagne | Empress of Ireland

‘The Empress of Ireland is not enjoyable because it does something cliched like “capturing a lost world”; it entertains wildly because the author, purely by chance, encountered a truly original character that even the finest novelist could not have invented.’ – Gustav Temple, The Chap The subtitle to this delicious book is ‘A Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship’, and it would indeed be difficult to imagine two more unlikely companions than its author and his subject, the 80-year-old gay Irish film-maker Brian Desmond Hurst.
The Empress of Ireland | Part III: London

The Empress of Ireland | Part III: London

I arrived at Kinnerton Street one morning to find an extremely tall man standing on his own in the front room warming himself in front of the fire. He did not introduce himself but launched into an incomprehensible monologue. ‘I had dinner with her again last night. At the Ritz. We had the most delicious lamb cutlets. Served pink. She loves them pink like that. And a bottle of Léoville-Poyferre 1961 – do you approve? A whole bottle – not a half.’
A Countryman’s Summer Notebook Extract | ‘The Simple Life’

A Countryman’s Summer Notebook Extract | ‘The Simple Life’

‘In practice it’s not so easy,’ somebody said, ‘to live simply.’ We were sitting in a little mill house among paddocks, having supper with the sun in our eyes: it shone straight through the open door. Copper pans on the west-facing wall blazed like some hero’s arms. The hay field outside had a rosy crest of sorrel, and the flowering grassheads glittered. Then the rook appeared, stalking up the path. It was a tame one, rescued after a farmers’ battue, found lying in the grass, its flight feathers shot away on one side. He stood peering in at the door. ‘Here I am.’ Meet Joe.
A Cab at the Door *Last 50!* | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

A Cab at the Door *Last 50!* | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we are gearing up for the arrival of the summer offerings from Tracey and the team at Smith Settle. Whilst floor-sweeping, shelf-shuffling and stock-checking, we noticed that we have just one box (50 copies) of our smart little Slightly Foxed paperback edition of V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door left in stock. We won’t be reprinting this title so if you are yet to add this classic memoir to your Slightly Foxed collection, please take this last opportunity to do so!
Supper with the sun in our eyes | A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

Supper with the sun in our eyes | A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we have already begun posting out pre-orders of Adrian Bell’s A Countryman’s Summer Notebook. In this, the third volume of our seasonal quartet, Bell takes us into the summer countryside, to smell the may blossom in hedges which ‘suddenly become cliffs of white’, to linger in quiet churches, wander through country towns, and hear the voices of the craftsmen and women, the farmers and farm labourers whose lives are rooted in the Suffolk soil.

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