Category: bookshops

bookshops

Books in the Wild: The Spicy Librarian

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Happy Saturday, I’ve got another bookshop this week from the Bristol Odyssey and this time it’s The Spicy Librarian, a relatively new romance specialist (and bar!) in Leamington Spa. And it’s even great timing because today is Romance Bookstore Day in the US so I’m vaguely timely for once.

Firstly, I want to say that it’s big! I know their instagram says it’s Europe’s biggest independent romance bookshop, but I was not prepared. And it’s got a lovely corner plot too so hopefully everyone going past gets a good eyeful!

And let us take a moment for how pretty this is! Look at the indoor tree! And the rug! And the seats and tables for you to have a drink and a sit down with a book.

And this is the table underneath it, which I think gives a good idea of the selection – which felt very carefully curated. There’s authors here that you will see in other stores – Tessa Bailey, Lila Sage, Josie Silver – and then Kayla Olson, whose first book didn’t get a paperback release over here, the second did and now the third is getting into more stoies and then some stuff I hadn’t seen anywhere else (r at least don’t remember seeing anywhere else!) like The Singer Sisters (actually two years old), Fallen Willow and Forsaking Midnight which was a very new release at the time.

I was expecting the store to be really heavy on the romantasy and also on the self-published, but actually it’s more balanced than that. It has got a big romantasy section but as well as the usual suspects there were some lesser spotted ones – or at least lesser spotted by me, admittedly not a romantasy reader or connoisseur.

But there was also a lot of other romance as well – this is part of the contemporary romance section – with quite a lot of sports romances but I promise there were other things there too. I could easily have bought more than I did. I’ve spent a lot of time in various romance sections of bookstores and there were plenty here that I hadn’t seen before – including a bunch of US imports that aren’t in Kindle in the UK.

And finally as well as the (licenced) bar, there is merch. I’m not meant to be acquiring any more tote bags and although I did acquire tote bags over the course of the weekend, on Friday afternoon my will power was in tact. It was also about 30 degrees so I managed to resist the hoodie, but whether I’d be as strong on a chilly day in the autumn who can tell.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Mr B’s Emporium

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After last weekend’s Conference book haul, this week we start on the bookshops that we visited around our weekend at conference. You’l have to wait and see what I bought from them though, so sorry about that

Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights is tucked around the corner from the Jane Austen centre near Queen Square in Central Bath. It’s been there 20 years and won a tonne of awards (including the UK’s best independent bookstore twice!) and I don’t know how I hadn’t been there before.

There were genuinely so many pictures from my visit that I could have chosen to illustrate this, but I’ve gone for this one because I think it does a good job of conveying how excellent the selection of books they have is. We were in there for ages – so often you go into a book shop and find the same books that you’ve seen everywhere else (or at least I do) but this is not that. Yes it’s got some of the “usual” stuff in there (like Meet the Newmans – now in paperback!), but it’s also got a whole load of books that I’d never come across before and suddenly wanted to read.

All the fiction is in together in alphabetical order but there are sections picking out highlights from particular genres too – this is a romance one, featuring the new Annabel Monaghan which you know I loved, the TJR I still need to read, the latest Ashley Poston and Alexandra Vasti and some other stuff I’ve seen before along with Rooting Interest which I totally hadn’t and Heart the Lover which has got a Booker Longlisting so I wouldn’t have normally thought at about.

It’s also got a beautiful children’s section, which I managed to catch looking like there’s no one in it (there was) because I do try not to put pictures of unsuspecting people’s children on the internet so you’ll have to trust me that it was busy because there’s a whole area behind that you can’t see with the picture books where the toddlers were hanging out. And it has friendly staff, in every section but particularly the children’s one, who will ask you if they can recommend you anything or find you anything or order you anything. We were in there late morning on a Monday it it was doing such a steady trade in customers that it was a delight to see.

I leave you with the Terry Pratchett hardback corner, which is basically all you would have needed to show me to demonstrate that this was a bookshop I would love. I have so much trouble resisting these beautiful hardbacks – I’m writing this looking up at my fancy bookshelf where I can see my copies of Guards! Guards, Monstrous Regiment, Going Postal, Making Money and Raising Steam all of which you can also see here – still sort of regretting that I didn’t buy another one to add to them. On the wall to the side just out of shot is also a poster guide to where to start and the interconnections of the series which is a really good touch because as I have said before, you don’t need to start these at the beginning and in fact unless you’re a regular fantasy reader you probably shouldn’t.

Basically, if you’re in Bath don’t miss this one – I think between the three of us we came away with six books at least – and this the day after Book Conference at a point when we all had made resolutions not to buy too much stuff!

bookshops

Books in the Wild: South Kensington Books

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Remember in Books Incoming the other week, where I had a mad week with five books on the Tuesday and a sixth on the Wednesday? This is where the sixth book came from on my way to Rufus Wainwright. And apologies for the sign going right through the middle of the shop front – so inconsiderate of the council to put it there!

Here’s the front window – and as befits a bookshop smack bang in London’s Museum quarter, it’s a mix of fiction and books to appeal topeople coming fresh from the V&A.

Lets start just inside the door with the Bestsellers and New Fiction. Yesteryear is the top seller – which really isn’t a surprise because it’s ad so much buzz about it and there’s also the new Elizabeth Strout, which is everywhere too. In the new fiction shelves below there are a few that I’ve got on the pile too – like Births, Deaths and Marriages by Laura Barnett, The Wedding People, The Correspondent and some Christina Lauren too.

On the other side we’ve got Prisoners of Geography, which I’m sure I bought for some one at some point at the top but there’s quite a lot below that I’ve read – like Island Calling, Murder at World’s End and The Impossible Fortune – and stuff I’ve got on the pile like The Eights and Atmosphere.

As far as the rest of the shop goes, beyond the new books, they’ve got a huge selection of fiction and non fiction for £4.99. So if you’re not looking for something in particular and just want to browse for something to take a chance on without breaking the bank, this is a really good option – especially if you want non-fiction. My purchase was Constellation of Genius, as seen in last weekend’s Books Incoming, but I was very tempted by Tripped, having really enjoyed Blitzed nearly a decade (!) ago – however I have a lot of German history books already on the pile (Weimar Germany and Nazi Germany) and so I can’t really justify another one… yet.

Have a good weekend!

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Gay’s The Word

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Happy Saturday! Independent bookstore week starts today *and* it’s Pride Month, so I thought Books Incoming could wait another week so that I could write about Gay’s The Word instead.

Gay’s The Word opened in 1979 and says it’s the UK’s oldest LGTB+ bookshop. It’s on Marchmont Street – just down the road from Judd Books as you head towards the Brunswick Centre, which is home to Skoob and also Brunswick Bookshop, which makes for a very easy four bookshop afternoon should that sort of thing be your jam – we know that it is mine. It’s not a big store, but it’s got a deceptively large amount of books in there, many of which I haven’t ever spotted in an actual shop before which is always a delight.

I should say that I’m annoyed with myself because I didn’t take as many photos as I should have on my two visits in the last few weeks, but hey ho, I can’t be perfect all the time. I’m particularly that I didn’t take a photo of this shelf this week – because there were definitely more biographies on there this week and this one doesn’t actually have the book that I bought on it.

I’m not a big Young Adult reader, but I have friends who are who I will be dragging down here to have a look because this is big, varied and again had loads of stuff I hadn’t seen before, even though I feel llike the algorithm serves me a lot of YA.

This is also a few weeks old – this week it had Father Material on it as well as Star Shipped, and K J Charles‘s How To Fake It In Society (which is a hard back or I would have been tempted). I’ve got the Rose Dommu on the (virtual) shelf as well as Murder at the Hotel Orient. On the top shelf, International Relations – a m/m fake dating romance with a diplomat who needs a husband to get an ambasadorial post – looks right up my street and in the middle Show Stopper – about teens at a musical theatre competition is the one I’m going to be telling my YA reading friends about. On the non-fiction side, I’m waiting for A Queer Inheritance – which is about queer lives at properties that are now run by the national trust – to come out in paperback, and I also really want to read Queen James but it’s just as chunky in paperback as it was in Hardback.

And that’s your lot for today. Go visit an indie for bookshop week, and for double points buy a book by an LGTBQ+ author. And if you’re in or around Sheffield this pride month, don’t forget Juno Books too.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Judd Books

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Happy Saturday everyone, it’s book shop post day again!

Exterior of Judd Books

So Judd Books is another one on my regular rounds of bookshops in Bloomsbury, but it’s a bit different to the rest of the round because you can never predict what you’re going to find in there. It has secondhand and bargain books and sort of specialises in books on the arts and social science but it also has some fiction in there too. It’s the sort of book you wander into to see if you can find a book you’d like to read rather than a bookshop you go into to find a specific book. So you might go in and discover they’ve got a book you’ve been looking for for ages, or find something completely new to you. I took this photo on my four book afternoon (that also saw me go to Word on the Water among others) and I bought the first in a crime series from the early 90s as well as a Dorothy Dunnett mystery to try out. I’ve been in again since but realised that I didn’t have time to browse properly because I had an appointment so some how came out empty handed! Anyway, if you’re wandering down towards central London from Kings Cross, it’s a good place to stop on your way. And it’s not the only bookshop on the route either but more on that anon…

Have a great weekend!

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Recent releases

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I’ve been in a lot of bookshops recently, so this Saturday I’ve got a quick round up of some of the new releases that I’ve spotted in the shops.

I’m starting with the new book from Maria Semple, because it’s been a long, long time since her last book came out and I’d almost forgotten about her. Which is a terrible thing to say, but it’s a decade since Today Will Be Different and 14 years since Where’d You Go Bernadette, so I don’t think that’s unfair. Accordig to the blurb, Go Gentle is about a midlife transformation of a divorcée complete with romance and globe trotting. I have a mixed record with Semple – I loved …Bernadette, hated This One is Mine and quite liked Today Will Be Different, so I’m sure I’ll read this at some point even if just to see if my assessment back in 2016 of when I like Semple’s books is right or not!

There’s another author back from a long hiatus in this shot of the bestsellers (in Waterstones Gower Street) too. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help was a huge hit when it came out in 2009 – it won a bunch of awards and was turned into a hit movie starring Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis (among many) in 2011. But it was also polarising and Stockett faced criticism for writing the story of black maids through the eyes of a white woman and the controversy over it has only increased over time. In fact in the run up to the publication of The Calamity Club, Stockett told The New York Times that her publishers cancelled her contract in 2020. So after such a big gap and so much controversy The Calamity Club – which is more than 600 pages long and once again set in Mississippi but this time in the 1930s – has had a relatively low key release. I’m fascinated to see how it does. Apart from that, you can also see the new Matt Haig, The Midnight Train, which is set in the same world as his mega hit The Midnight Library, the new Elizabeth Strout and also that Murder at Worlds End is now out in paperback.

On to some murder mysteries in hardback (some of which came out la little longer ago) and we’ve got the Sophie Hannah Poirot continuation that came out in the autumn, the latest Judy Murray cozy crime, and the Jennie Godfrey that I’ve seen everywhere. The House of Fallen Sisters was one I hadn’t come across before – set in Covent Garden and the underbelly of 18th century London and I’ve now seen various of Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries around so much that I think it might be a message for me to try one! Amin Ahmad’s A Killer in the Family sounds interesting – the blurb calls it “A caper, social satire, and propulsive thriller rolled into one” the first two of which are totally my thing – but as we know thrillers can go either way for me! And strangely this also has Elizabeth and Marilyn about the meeting between Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe in the summer of 1956 and which I didn’t have down as being a mystery but am even more interested in now that I’ve seen it in this selection!

I mentioned Emma Straub’s American Fantasy when it was released the other week, so it seems only fair to mention that I was right that I would spot it in the shops a lot (this wasn’t the only time I could have taken a picture of it in a store) and also that it’s blurbed by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Also in the now out in paperback is Andrew Lownie‘s Entitled – which as you can see from the cover has had more material added since the hardback edition. This makes me wonder whether if I had bought it on Kindle I would have got the new material added automatically, or whether I would have had to buy it again. As it is, I bought a physical copy at the airport (partly to escape any redactions that might later happen!) and so now I have to figure out how much I want to read Lownie’s take on everything that has happened to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor since Entitled first came out last summer when he was still known as Prince Andrew.

And finally for today we have Katja Hoyer’s Weimar, which is one of the anticipated history books of the year – examining the town that gave its name to the government of Germany from the end of World War one until the Nazi regime took power. It was also a key location in the rise of the Nazi party as well as the home of the Bauhaus movement. Hoyer is looking at the town and it’s people from 1919 until 1939 charting how it all happened. I’ve got a stack of books about German twentieth century history waiting on the various to-read piles but I’m still really tempted by this – as depressing as I suspect it may be.

And sorry to end on that miserable note, but there we are, that’s the way it goes sometimes. Enjoy your weekend everyone – I hope the weather is good where you are.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Red Lion Books

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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!

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Word on the Water

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Happy Saturday everyone and I’ve been wandering London’s bookshops again. I don’t think I’ve been to Word on the Water since before the pandemic so it was lovely to go back there.

Word on the Water is a barge on Regent’s Canal, just behind Kings Cross and you can really feel it moving with the water. It’s just lovely.

It has a stove. And lots of comfy spots to sit and peruse the books, or just think about the gentle rocking as the ducks float by outside the window.

I would describe the selection as carefully curated and eclectic. I go to a lot of bookshops and found a lot things in there that I hadn’t seen before to look and and chose from.

There’s a lovely children’s and YA section too and don’t panic there is a section at the front with some of the new release hardbacks as well and some boxes of books on the roof outside too.

It’s a little bit of a trek out of my usual stomping grounds but it was definitely worth the trip.

Have a lovely weekend.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Birmingham Airport Spring 2026

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If you weren’t expecting this today, you should have been. When have I ever been able to go through an airport without a) buying books and b) taking photos of the options. And it’s been six whole months since the last time I was in an airport so the choices have changed somewhat!

I’m starting with the non-fiction because when I was thinking about what I might buy at the airport ahead of the holiday, it was the non-fiction selection I was most excited to look at – and then the most disappointed in when I got there. Most times I go to the airport there is either a non-ficiton hardback I’m looking for or I stumble across something I hadn’t heard about that turns out to be good. But this time I already have the Liza, and I read Entitled last holiday. There are a couple of books that I’m sort of interested in, but I already have other books by the same author on the shelf waiting to be read and I’m trying to be better about that.

On the airport (hardback) fiction front it was also a bit of a disappointment. The Impossible Fortune wasn’t out last holiday so that was on the list although as the (normal) paperback is out this week coming I wasn’t averse to waiting for that if there were better choices. But I’ve already read Meet the Newmans, I have at least two Tom Hindles in the backlog, the Dan Brown is insanely long and this format of paperback is unwieldy enough without that! I was tempted by The Ending Writes Itself and Yesteryear but that was about it.

This isn’t the best photo, but it illustrates my problem – the things that I’m interested in like Atmosphere, Heated Rivalry I already own and the rest is Not For Verity. And to be honest, that’s about it. I have other photos, but there is a lot of duplication in them and not a lot of books that I’m interested in. There was more stuff that I have read already – like Happy Place and Before the Coffee Gets Cold – but I was hoping for better from the new book selection. Hey ho, better luck next holiday.

Happy Saturday everyone!

bookshops

Books in the Wild: (American) Independent Bookshop Day

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Happy Saturday everyone! It’s independent bookshop day in the US today – in the UK ours is in October – but really any excuse to go and visit a bookstore is a good one. As you know I’m always wandering around book shops and then writing about them on here. I’ve currently got a list going of ones that I want to visit when I get a chance and because I’ve been to some of the buzzy ones it meant that when I read this article about the new TikTok bestseller list this morning I recognised the top image (and the second bottom one) as being taken in Saucy Books in Notting Hill!

If you’re in the US lots of them are throwing special events and have promotions or competitions on: click here for a searchable map of participating stores and also a list of bookstore crawls you can do and click here for a list of events at bookstores across the US (remember control/command + f will bring up the find box so you can search the list without having to scroll).

If you’re not in the US – just go and visit your local book store anyway – or go to bookshop.org, choose a bookshop (top right) to benefit and buy something on there!

Have a great Saturday everyone!

(my picture today is from Old Hall Bookshop)