THIS MONTH'S NEWSLETTER

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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.

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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
 
The Festival website is at http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/festival/2009/
 
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
http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/leisure/libraries/readers/writers-roadshow/hebdenbridge-roadshow.html
 

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:
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

Links to previous Newsletters: this year

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001