Please tell us about your bookshop. What makes it special?
The bookshop is just off from the busyness of Portobello road market. It’s painted mostly white, and we have folded book-sculptures which hang from the ceiling and spin in a gentle breeze. In the summer, the back window is open so that the wind comes through the shop, often this makes the paperbacks on our centre tables flutter. There’s a white-painted, iron staircase which curves into the downstairs where our children’s, non-fiction, and, most importantly for Daunt Books, our travel sections sit. All this is to say that the bookshop harbours a stillness, it feels like a rest from the market, a quiet pause, and a place to find the book you need.
What first inspired you to become a bookseller?
Initially, I wanted to work with physical books. I liked the idea of being with books all day; I like both their silence and potential. For me, books in the object-form represent an unspeaking hopefulness. I’m a writer, too, and the idea of working in a space which reminded me of what can be achieved by writing every day felt romantic. It’s like an artist working in a gallery, it’s a place to draw from and to sink into. After working here a few months, I realised that being a bookseller is something quite different. People come into the shop from all stages of life, with different contexts and circumstances, and they turn to books in some hope that they will be able to provide an answer, a reprieve, a brief glimpse into something other than themselves.
Bookselling can feel like giving a prescription, I have had people come in after breakups, I have had people coming in for honeymoons, for illness, for a friend going through it, for travels, for weddings, for people in between jobs. Bookselling is special in that way. When I recommend a book, I often start by asking how people are feeling and what feeling they are looking for. Bookselling is about searching for a piece of art specifically for that person in that moment; there are few jobs which allow you to do that.
What are your all-time favourite reads and why?
One of my favourite reads is The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. It follows a scientist who transplants a human pituitary gland and testes into a stray dog. Over the course of the novella, the dog becomes both increasingly human and bad-tempered. Bulgakov is able to achieve so much in so little; it’s a wonderful defence of the novella. Another of my favourites is Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Primarily, it’s a story of female resistance in the context of Korean society. I particularly related to the narrator’s wish to become a tree, much to my loved ones’ confusion, I have often written about this desire. This leads to my final pick: Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott. Within which the poem ‘I Go Inside The Tree’ describes the experience of entering a tree and ‘tasting weather in the tree rings’. The desire to cross the human/more-than-human boundary is something that particularly resonates with me.
Who would be your dream bookshop party guests?
This is a hard one. I would love to meet Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley; they were quite the mother-daughter duo. I think having Sylvia Plath and Bob Dylan in a room together would be quite incredible; two great but vastly different poets. There’s too many to choose from: James Baldwin, Viriginia Woolf, George Eliot, Audre Lorde, Sayaka Murata, Zhuangzi, Franz Fanon. I started (emphasis on started) a PhD in Political Theory so I think meeting Zhuangzi and Franz Fanon would be particularly exciting for me. Wretched of the Earth is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, it’s one of those works which can be placed as a starting point for a different kind of thinking.
What is your favourite bookshop anecdote?
Last year, I found myself trawling the streets of Notting Hill asking builders for a hammer to dislodge a shelf. I ended up with a big stick which a local builder had been saving for his Sunday walk. You’ll be glad to know I both dislodged the shelf and returned the big stick for its Sunday outing.
What are your top picks for Autumn/Winter 2025?
My top three picks are: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, longlisted for the Booker Prize, Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi, and Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle. The shop is hosting a talk for the latter which will be chaired by Devorah Baum.
What is your favourite Slightly Foxed publication?
When reading the Summer 2025 issue, I enjoyed Sarah Perry’s essay on Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli. There is this assumption that fiction writers are not concerned with the rational or the scientific; ours is the world of the phantastical. This is an obvious falsity: one need only look to Lewis Carroll to see how mathematics and surrealism can be comfortable bedfellows. Here, again, Sarah Perry proves this. She notes how, as a young child, she was interested in physics but “felt it was altogether more appealing to wander about in a state of enchanted ignorance.” Upon finishing Rovelli’s pocket guide, though, she notes “the reader grasps that the study of theoretical physics is capable of arousing as much wonder and mystery as the study of art, or of religion.” It’s a touching essay and within the context of today an important one. As we focus more attention on, an apparently solidifying, gender split in reading choices, it implores us to re-examine whether subjects of rationality and phantasy are really so different. Book recommendations can do that, take us out of what we would usually read and challenge us to reexamine how our tastes are formed.
SAFFRON MORTER-LAING is a bookseller at Daunt Books Notting Hill and a writer. Her work has appeared in The London Magazine and The Kingfisher Magazine. She was recently longlisted for the Bricklane Short Story Prize. Currently, she is working on her first book.
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