It’s a bank holiday weekend and the weather is meant to be glorious and coincidentally I have posts for you from my trip to Essex earlier this month when the weather was also glorious. Today I have a bookshop for you and tomorrow the show we saw in the evening. You’re welcome.
So some time ago, I used to live in Colchester and this was my regular indie bookshop. I was operating on a more limited budget in those days, but I do think the selection in here has improved – or at least expanded in the areas that are of specific interest to me since I was a local.
As I’m sure many (most?) of you know, Colchester was the capital of Roman Britain, so I very much appreciated the Roman and classical theme to the table display as well as the new releases.
I also really liked the selection of fiction by the till. I’ve got Atmosphere on the pile waiting to be read (I actually tried to read it during the moon mission but it made me too anxious about the astronauts safety!) but if All that’s Left of the World didn’t have dystopian in it’s description I would be very interested in it, and The Library of the Unwritten loos good too. Nestling down the bottom is Curtis Sittenfeld’s Show Don’t Tell which is now in paperback and also An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed which looked interesting.
Of course my primary interests in any bookshop are the crime section and the romance one. So here’s the cozy crime shelf – there were also thrillers and the like, but we all know that my taste in mystery is definitely classic and cozy. I’ve already read the new Anthony Horowitz (and I really need to get around to Magpie Murders 3, but it’s just too chunky to put in my work bag) and I read The Impossible Fortune on holiday just before it came out in paperback. There’s some Tom Hindle here ad the third Antique Hunter’s mystery (I read the first one and didn’t love it and keep meaning to try the second one because it’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment) but there’s als Ardal O’Hanlon’s mystery which I’m tempted by – but will likely wait for the paperback. There were a few others on here that I liked the look of – the Philippa Perry for one, the C J Wray and All At Sea, but as you know what I actually bought from here was Crime Rangoon because it’s so hard to get hold of the Noodle Shop books in the UK. The other purchase by the way was the annotated Eyre Affair, which you can’t spot in the photos I’m afraid.
And to finish, here’s the romance section, which veered a little bit too much to the new adult for me – but you’ve heard me on that subject before. You can see the new Alisha Rai down there and the Emily Henry collection – who by the way doesn’t appear to have a release this summer (maybe this year?) in case you were wondering. I did like the look of Anne Knows Everything though and possibly Ex Marks the Spot, but I have a chequered history with romances with treasure hunts in them! This was however where I started to notice some new sports creeping into the sports romance section – we’ve got a small rash of tennis romances coming through as well as polo, which is nicely timed for anyone who is watching series 2 of Rivals!
Have a great bank holiday weekend!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 