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Dear Book Case customer or friend,
Hebden Bridge Arts
Festival is well under way - the Virginia Ironside event sold
out, and with lots still to come - see below for details.
On Sunday 5th July, Hebden Bridge Library is hosting
a Calderdale Writers Roadshow including Jill
Liddington and other well-known local authors - see below for
details.
We're also looking at the possibility of an event in late July at The
Hole in the Wall with Ian Carpenter, author of the humorous
book Guardianwork - we'll keep you informed.
We'll be stocking books from the new publishing house
Reportage Press, founded by ex-BBC World Service correspondent
Rosie Whitehouse. It specialises in books on foreign affairs and each of their
books has a charity, chosen by the author, to which a donation is made
from proceeds. Subjects include Iraq, South Sudan and India.
The Penguin mugs have been going nicely, and we're expecting
some Ladybird bike mugs soon.
Not sure whether to mention this, given that summer has only just
reached us, but we have next year's colourful We'moon
Diaries and calendars in already, as well as the attractive
Earth Pathways diary from Moonshare Cooperative.
Just in are the latest SageWoman and PanGaia
magazines from the States.
None of you are saying which books you're enjoying or otherwise on
our Comments board. I'm giving up on you.
If you do not wish to receive this monthly mailing, please click
on Reply and type CANCEL in the Subject
box.
THIS MONTH'S FEATURED
BOOKS
We highlight every month books we think are of
particular interest: from adult fiction and non-fiction, a children's book and
a CD.
Adult fiction: The Guernsey
Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
(£7.99). In 1946 author Julia Ashton receives a letter from a
Guernsey man and they begin a correspondence. A funny and
moving account of life in Guernsey under the German occupation. Sadly the
author died earlier this year.
Adult non-fiction: A Beginner's Guide to Acting English -
Shappi Kharsandi (£11.99). Has been compared to Gerald Durrell's
"My Family and Other Animals" or Nancy Mitford's "Pursuit of Love"
but featuring an eccentric Iranian family getting used to English
life in the 1980s. Shappi Kharsandi is appearing at the Festival.
Children: Fantastic Beasts and Where
to Find Them / Quidditch through the Ages - J.K Rowling (£4.99).
Two Harry Potter companion books. As fans will know, Fantastic Beasts and
Where To Find Them is a set text on the reading list for first year
Hogwarts students, and Quidditch Through The Ages was a favourite read
of Harry's in Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone. Age 8+
CD: This month, for those long car journeys,
we’re featuring a range of classic children’s audiobooks including
the Winnie the Poohs read by Alan Bennett, the Just So Stories read by
Johnny Morris and some of the Naxos audiobooks for
children.
NEWS
Local Interest
Yorkshire
Dales Textile Mills - George Ingle, £9.99
It's mostly
forgotten these days that there was a thriving textile industry in the
Yorkshire Dales from the late 18th century onwards. George Ingle, the author of
"Yorkshire Cotton", has located and describes over seventy
textile mills in the Dales, with many illustrations. George gave a talk to
Hebden Bridge Local History Society on the mills of the Dales earlier this
year. Published by Royd Press at The Book Case.
Mary Towneley Loop Guide, 2e
Full colour photos and relevant local
information within this comprehensive pocket-sized book of the Loop ensure it
is an appropriate guide for horse riders, cyclists and walkers alike. Second
edition has a couple of minor alterations.
Local
Authors
The Selfish
Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy - Fern Elsdon-Baker,
£12.99
Dawkins has used his position to publicly
attack 'unreason', in the form of organised religion, pseudo-science, or new
age folly. This polarised representation of science is potentially fuelling the
feud between Darwinism and Creationism. Hebden Bridge-based author Fern
Elsdon-Baker, a rational pro-science atheist and specialist in the history and
communication of evolutionary theory, finds Dawkins' influence distinctly
worrying. She argues that Dawkins is publicly misrepresenting science as a
whole and asks - is Dawkins really acting to popularise science or to
popularise Richard Dawkins?
Yelp! - Liz
Almond, £9.99
From the Hebden Bridge-based poet, a
collection of poems about regeneration, recuperation, reclamation and retreat,
in which the poet reflects on visits, both literal and virtual, to remote parts
of Greece, Andalucia and Southern India. Rituals of travel are at the heart of
Liz Almond's work; and travel, in her poems, can start anywhere: through a
computer screen offering access to a satellite view of continents, to a pencil
hovering like a bee at the start of a poem about a zoo for husbands. Departures
and arrivals, free exchanges of words at the border controls of language - all
these feed into poems that embody a rich and sensual sense of cultural
difference, an understanding of the scale and fragility of our planet.
They're All
Foreigners Abroad! - Stuart Wright, £7.99
From an ex-Halifax author, now resident in
Spain, a light-hearted inventory of Brits on holiday abroad. Let's be honest,
we Brits are not difficult to take the mickey out of whilst on our hard-earned
holidays!
Landscapes in
Watercolour - Paul Talbot-Greaves, £7.99
From the well-known local painter and
writer, the latest of his instruction books on watercolour painting. This
practical and inspirational guide, in a handy sketchbook format, is aimed at
the practised beginner. By working with just a few materials and focusing on
the key techniques it is possible to achieve successful, realistic landscape
paintings in no more than half an hour. And for those artists who already have
a little painting experience, learning to work more quickly enables them to
free up their style and paint more spontaneously.
Congratulations to local author and
publisher Kevin Duffy, whose humorous novel about hippies
moving into the upper Calder Valley in the 1960s, Anthills and Stars,
has been chosen by Exclusively Independent for their August book of
the month!
Local
Publishers
Stone Tree -
Gyrthir Eliasson, trans. Victoria Cribb, £7.95
Published by Mytholmroyd publishers Comma
Press, and translated from the Icelandic, a collection of stories set on the
shores or in the lava fields and mountains of Iceland, each one a study in
self-exile.
Hebden Bridge Arts Festival -
book-related events:
4 July
A puppet show for
small children, based on Polly Dunbar's Flyaway
Katie, at the Little Theatre
Katie Fforde and Eleanor
Moran - literary lunch at Moyle's and appearance at
Artsmill, 4.30-5.30pm
7 July
Carol Ann Duffy
& Jan Fortune-Wood at the Little Theatre - sold
out!
8
July
Shappi
Kharsandi at the Picture House, 8.30-10.30pm (her new book
Beginner's Guide to Acting English is just out)
10
July
Stage adaptation of Carol Ann Duffy's World’s
Wife at the Little Theatre, 7.45-9pm
11 July
A L
Kennedy at the Little Theatre, 8-9pm
12
July
Ian Marchant, 8pm at Moyle’s
Calderdale Writers Roadshow, Sunday 5th July,
Hebden Bridge Library
Whether you want to write history, autobiography, poetry, short
stories or romantic fiction, or just learn how the professionals do it,
well-established writers will be offering guidance, advice and workshops. On
hand will be Jill Liddington, John Siddique, Mark Illis, Anne Caldwell,
James Nash, Gaia Holmes, Gareth Durasow, Louise Armstrong, Glyn Hughes, Stephen
Wade, Kate Walker and John Baker. For gull details go to
Richard & Judy
Summer Reads 2009
The last one ever. Our bestseller by far of them
all was Dave Boling's Guernica.
JULY 1st: The Piano
Teacher - Janice Y.K. Lee (£6.99)
'Tenko' meets 'The Remains
of the Day'. In 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong,
falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful
Eurasian socialite. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of
the Japanese, with terrible consequences.
NEW
TITLES
July’s hardback fiction will include
works from Salley Vickers, Alexander McCall Smith and
Robert Twigger; and paperback fiction has
Alexander McCall Smith, Maeve Binchy, Irvine Welsh, Garrison Keillor,
Alan Drew, Sergei Lukyanenko, and crime and thrillers from
Patricia Cornwell, David Baldacci, Edward Marston and
Michael Dibdin. Reissues include books by
Franz Kafka, Hans Fallada, David Guterson, Robert Holdstock
(Mythago Wood), Maggie Gee and Nawal
el-Sadaawi.
And in
Audio, there are
all the Jane
Austens abridged onto 12 CDs and read by
Joanna Lumley et
al, and
Martin Jarvis reading
Wodehouse. Click
here for the full
list
.
July's Non-fiction
includes:
- British buildings, drawing musical instruments and
geometric colouring books in Art, Design and Architecture
- Dawn French, Julie Walters, Sheila Hancock and
Shappi Kharsandi in Biography
- Jam, preserves & chutneys, Rosie Lovell and
students cooking in Food
- Guardian crosswords and
Sudoku in Games
& Hobbies
- Pompeii, the year 1000, America, John Murray, the building of
Ribblehead Viaduct, Priestley’s 1934 journey through England, living
history as it was and the
Sixties in History
- Danny Wallace’s old
friends in Humour
- Arabic in Languages
- Babies with Toddlers and a modern
mystic in MBS
- Ducks winning lotteries and other faulty logic and
Nietzsche being extreme in Philosophy
- Liz Almond and Christopher Reid mourning his
wife in Poetry
- Dawkins as fraud and
over-achievers in Science
- Bikes in Sport & Outdoor
Activities
- and lots of road atlases, the Dales, the Lakes, Sicily,
Poland and travel with children inTravel and Outdoor Activities
For a fuller listing, click here:
http://www.bookcase.co.uk/new_title_bc.htm
E-mail, phone or fax us to reserve any of these new titles.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
What you've been buying: JUNE's bestsellers at The Book
Case
The new Hardcastle Crags DVD and the start of Hebden Bridge
Festival both made their mark on The Book Case’s bestsellers in June. Also
selling well were two local history books, a novel and a book of poems by
Hebden Bridge authors, and two other novels.
1. Hardcastle Crags Past and Present (DVD) - Ray
Riches and Peter Thornton, £12.99
The lovely new 90-minute
DVD about our local beauty spot takes us all round the Crags and investigates
their history.
2. No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club - Virginia
Ironside, £6.99
Virginia Ironside spoke to a sell-out
Festival audience at Little Theatre about the joys and trials of old age. This
novel is a fictional diary about growing old disgracefully.
3. Tender - Mark Illis, £8.99
This new
novel from Hebden Bridge author Mark Illis tells the story of an ordinary
family trying to cope with life and each other. Mark will be taking part in the
Hebden Bridge Library event on Sunday 5th July.
4. What’s Going On? - Mark Steel,
£7.99
Undeservedly, since he’s cancelled his Festival appearance
at short notice!
5. The Mixenden Treasure - John Billingsley,
£6.00
A true story of a motley crew of priests, commoners, a
"cunning-man" and gentlemen who set out on a nasty February night to claim the
Mixenden Treasure from its daemon.
6. Hebden Bridge: a short history of the area - Peter
Thomas, £5.99
From the early struggle for survival on the
bleak hilltops through the growth of the woollen industry and move down to the
valley bottoms and Fustianopolis, up to the area's decline and revival. Peter
Thomas is a well-known local author.
7. Home - Marilynne Robinson, £7.99
The
Orange Prize winner. An almost sequel to Gilead - the story of a
prodigal son who has come home to make peace with his preacher father.
8. Rapture - Carol Ann Duffy, £8.99
A
book-length love-poem from the new Poet Laureate who will soon be visiting
Hebden Bridge for the Festival.
9. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society -
Mary Ann Shaffer, £7.99
Enjoyable novel about cultural
survival during the German wartime Occupation of Guernsey as a fictitious club
gets together.
10. Recital - John Siddique, £12.99.
A
new book of verse on love, loss and hope from the Hebden Bridge-based poet, now
returned from LA. John will be taking part in the Hebden Bridge Library event
on Sunday 5th July.
Best wishes from
your local independent bookshop,
The Book Case
29 Market Street,
Hebden Bridge HX7 6EU
Telephone 01422-845353
Fax 01422-844295
email:
bookcase@btinternet.com
url: www.bookcase.co.uk
"Reading's a
quiet, private pleasure. At best literature reimagines the world, lets you
understand your life from beyond your own life. The power of story and the
pleasure of language are two of the best things about being
human."
- Peter Florence,
founder of Hay Literary Festival in Amnesty Magazine May-June
2009