No More Soppy Stuff

It’s always cheering to turn over the first leaf of our calendar, and even more so this year after a funny old January here at Slightly Foxed. Thank you to everyone who wrote in about the closure of our Gloucester Road bookshop – we’ve been greatly heartened by your thoughtful messages and kind words. After a suitable break we’ll be thinking hard about ways to continue our bookselling activities but for now we’re holed up in our cosy Hoxton office, focusing on the quarterly, our book publishing, and all things Slightly Foxed.

On that happy subject, the delicious creamy pages of Slightly Foxed No. 49 will soon be rolling off the giant Heidelberg machines up at Smith Settle. We won’t give too much away but it promises to be a treat inside and out. Robert Macfarlane disappears into his dictionaries, Margaret Drabble follows James Joyce to Trieste, Jonathan Smith goes back to school with Brian Moore, Sue Gee meets Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncles, Peter Parker delves into a fascinating account of a very strange childhood in Diana Petre’s memoir, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley, we could go on and on . . .

But before we launch ourselves into spring, there’s the next few weeks of February and the inevitable talk of Saint Valentine’s Day to tackle. We’re not ones for overblown sentimentality here at SF but we thought we’d better give a little nod to love this month. In the following extract we join a young woman equally allergic to ‘soppy stuff’, Suzanne St Albans – author of Mango & Mimosa – as she experiences the confusions, embarrassments and misunderstandings of first love.

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