Greetings from No. 53 where spirits are high and book towers low as we await the coming quarter’s haul, which will land from Smith Settle next week. Our trusty driver Paul will trundle to a halt in Hoxton Square at an early hour and, with the dogs watching out for traffic wardens, box after box of the summer issue of Slightly Foxed, our 47th SF Edition, Eric Newby’s Love and War in the Apennines, and our new notebooks for summer (bound in elegant fawn cloth) are spirited up the stairs and neatly stacked by the bookshelves, the packing table – and sometimes in the kitchen and the bathroom too!
We’ll be in touch again next week to let you know when Episode 7 of the new podcast is released (on the subject of bookshops and bookselling, with a dash of romance too!) with special guests Brett from Daunt Books and Kathleen from Topping & Co. Bath, and then we’ll be swinging into the summer quarter.
Meantime we thought you might enjoy reading another piece from the archives. As regular readers know, each issue of the magazine itself ranges far and wide across all sorts of books and subjects – from non-fiction, fiction, poetry, biography, memoir, guides and even, once, a manual for operating a British Seagull Co. outboard motor but as our newsletters have been rather more non-fiction focused of late, we thought it was high time we shared a recommendation for fiction. So, in this selected article from the archives, we’re dancing back to Issue 35 (Autumn 2012) with Linda Leatherbarrow on the novels of Edna O’Brien. We hope you’ll enjoy it.