bookshops

Books in the Wild: Autumn 2024 Airport Edition

Happy Saturday everyone! I’ve been on holiday – and so I’ve been at the airport bookshop again. And please note, these were not taken this week – so they’re pre-Richard Osman release, which I’m expecting to be dominating from this week on.

But let’s start with the “biggest books” of the week which continue to be Coleen Hoover, Frieda McFadden and Sarah J Maas with a spattering of other books in silimar ends of their genres like Elsie Silver and Rebecca Yarros.

Lots of familiar names here too – last year’s Osman now in small paperback, Liane Moriarty, Lisa Jewell, Jojo Moyes, Harlan Coben but I’m really pleased to see how often Bob Mortimer is popping up in these displays now. I don’t think he’s my thing but I will give one a go at some point because I’ve heard good things about them being smart and funny. And we need more smart and funny.

I was a bit disappointed with the non-fiction paperbacks – I was hoping for more stuff I hadn’t seen or at least more stuff that wasn’t self help or podcast tie-in books. I’ve picked up some interesting stuff from this very bookshop before (Going Infinite for example) that was a bit different.

And now on to the airport exclusives aka the stuff that’s only in hardback everywhere else. And we have some more of the same names from the biggest books display but also the latest Emily Henry, the very new R F Kuang, and the new Adam Kay (as in This is Going to Hurt) murder mystery. But surprisingly not Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

And it should be noted that I clearly missed a display somewhere because one of my airport purchases was Entitled, the new Andrew Lownie about the Duke and Duchess of York and I cannot find it in any of my pictures, but the other was Fast Money – seen on the bottoms row here about the finances of Formula One.

And finally because I can hear you wondering about Dan Brown and yes, they did have the new Robert Langdon but and this is a big bit – only in hardback, not as the large format paperback which I found really interesting – and not many of them which given the big ad they had for it may well mean they had sold a fair few copies!

Have a great weekend!

book related, books, bookshops

Books in the Wild: Heathrow Terminal 5

You all knew this was coming once you saw I’d been to Lagos didn’t you? I don’t go to Heathrow very often – it’s not the most convenient airport for us for where we live if we’re sorting our own holiday out, and package holidays don’t tend to leave from there if we’re doing that. So I was excited to get a look at what Heathrow had to offer. And then it turned out that what Terminal 5 had to offer was disappointing. At least at the end of the terminal we were at before we had to hustle off down to our gate.

So in the interests of completeness, these are the new book options they had – everything else was backlist or magazines, and we all know that’s not what I’m there for. So this is the paperback selection – where you can see that a lot of the last year’s big hardback releases – including stuff I liked like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and the fourth Thursday Murder Club – are not out in paperback and near the top of the charts.

That theme continues on the second paperback case – with last year’s Emily Henry, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy and Monica Heiny in there, along with the tie-in edition of Romancing Mr Bridgerton and This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune, which I would have bought if I hadn’t already just bought the Kindle edition because it was on offer.

On to the airport exclusives, and you will see that I am already doing pretty well on the, – and a lot of the stuff that I would have bought, I already have. Like this year’s Emily Henry and the new Anthony Horowitz. This was the point where I started panicking that I wasn’t going to find anything I wanted, and I hadn’t brought a paperback with me. Not that it would turn out to matter, as I didn’t have a lot of reading time, and the time I did have I spent on the Kindle. But I didn’t know that at that point!

And this photo is awful, but there wasn’t a very wide aisle and I was crammed in and this is the best I could do. But this is the point where I heaved a sigh of relief, because The Ministry of Time was the book I was hoping to find at the airport – it’s the buzzy book of this summer and I think it has the potential to be this year’s equivalent of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow if you know what I mean. So I snaffled that, and then had to figure out what else. And I did find another one for the offer – but I’m going to tease you and make you wait until the next Books Incoming to see what!

Have a great weekend everyone – enjoy the bank holiday if you have one where you are.