May, She Will Stay – 29 April 2023

The banks may be taking various holidays over the course of May but we will be open and ready to help fill your days off with reading material. Whether you have taken the great decision not to mow your lawn and will instead use the time to read Why Women Grow or are spending time with your family and will inevitably have a healthy argument about capitalism or you’re coming to the end of a true crime podcast and need a book and a pet snail to keep you company, we have you covered.

We are in a delicious time for new non-fiction writing. To highlight just a few new titles:

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud – a love letter to the depth of flat places; from Orkney to the Cambridgeshire fens, Britain’s flatlands offer a place for Masud to explore her relationship with the country and with herself.
Migrants: The Story of Us All by Sam Miller – humans are the only land mammals that migrate in large numbers, permanently rather than seasonally. Miller’s new book is an engaging history of the reasons and ways we have done so, and the stories we tell ourselves about it.
A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe by Milan Kundera – in Kundera’s essays, he argues that Central Europe is defined by more than geography; it has also been the centre of European thought and values and Western Europe overlooks this at its peril.
The God Desire by David Baddiel – Baddiel would really like to believe in God but explains in this witty and moving essay why he does not and cannot.

Not to mention new books from Mikaela Loach, Tim Marshall, Tristan Gooley and Naoise Mac Sweeney.

And, for younger readers, Tim Harford’s The Truth Detective, a guide for making sense of dodgy data, bamboozling headlines and perplexing puzzles.

Not brand new but at the forefront of my mind in fiction are:

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie – the story of two women suffering intense visions of Christ, one of them Julian of Norwich, one Margery Kempe, and their epic meeting in 1413.
Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan – following three women, each with their own obsession with animals, the novel tells the story of their lives and a story of rural South Korea.

And all the titles on the Women’s Prize shortlist but particularly Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, a love story set amid the Troubles: a young Catholic woman begins an affair with a Protestant lawyer in Belfast; the simplicity of their feelings meets beautifully, tragically with the complexity of their surroundings and makes for a compelling and moving denouement.

For some slimmer reading, my current favourite picture book is The Suitcase by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros, a story of displacement and kindness. Meanwhile my nephews and nieces are currently obsessed, and rightly so, with The Diddle that Dummed by Kes Gray and Fred Blunt.

Events news

5pm, 13 May: Poetry in Herons
We will hear from the marvellous Mab Jones and the devastating Deborah Harvey. Come along for a pre-prandial poetry session and some drinks.

5pm, 20 May: Maid of the Haystack by Martin Powell
We, and all those interested in local history and conspiracy theories, are looking forward to hearing from Martin about his novel following the story of a woman who made her home in a haystack in Somerset in 1776…

5pm, 3 June: Soundings by Doreen Cunningham
We will be celebrating the paperback publication of this superb nature/memoir book about whales, climate change and indigenous communities.