Heron Books

Had you told me that I would find all that’s good in humanity at the racetracks in January in nineties County Durham, I may have been a little doubtful. But Louise Powell’s novel Underdogs offers just that. Admittedly there are a fair number of fights, dirty dealings and no small element of tragedy yet the story of this impoverished, rain-soaked world told by ten-year-old George shines as brightly as Goldie the greyhound’s gorgeous coat. Goldie will save George and his father Reg from homelessness and hunger. All they have to do is pretend that she is their dog and follow the instructions of her real owner, Bertie, when entering her…

Thanks for asking but no, I won’t be watching Christopher Nolan’s new film. Really I have nothing against Matt Damon running around shouting at other men, beset by irresistible women whose sole purpose is him, and occasionally mumbling something about his wife. But I’m reading Emily Wilson’s book about translating ancient literature (into English, rather than for IMAX) and it’s going to take more than a clammy Tom Holland* to drag me away. Wilson is known for her celebrated translations into iambic pentameter of The Odyssey and The Iliad. In Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, she asks ‘How can we imagine the ancients, in all their strangeness and all their strange…

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who stand before an active volcano and think, Blimey, a volcano and those who stand before an active volcano and think, I should move here. Helena Attlee is in the latter camp. After years of visiting Sicily, she decided to settle on the slopes of Etna for a season. The volcano had been erupting almost continuously for a year. The windows of her new home are a little rattly.   The Fire in the Mountain: Sicily, Etna and Her People is an exploration of the relationship between Etna and her inhabitants. (She is female though vulcano and Mongibello, one of…

Frank Cottrell-Boyce is an absurdly busy man. When he finds time and peace enough to write his excellent children’s books baffles me. He is constantly visiting schools, libraries, playgroups and young offender institutions, supporting charities and individuals in any way he can and researching children’s development, not to mention reading stories to his beloved grandchild. I am in awe of him but I thought I knew already what he had to say in A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now. Almost fifty per cent of children start school without ever having been read a bedtime story. Twenty-eight per cent arrive at school without knowing how to handle a book.…

A library so large its dimensions cannot be expressed in number. Countless books. Plenty of time to explore. Snacks supplied. This must be heaven, right? Wrong. Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell will ruin you. Soren is welcomed to hell by a charming Demon – yes, he quite understands that it is a shock that Soren, a good Mormon, finds himself here but Zoroastrianism is actually the true religion and no, Soren won’t be there forever: hell is for your edification. That edification requires him to find a particular book. It may take a while. A long while. But not eternity. In one hundred pages we cover infinity,…

There are a lot of rules at Villa Coco: it is not pesto if it is not from Genova; no cheese with fish – NEVER; you must go to Naples as soon as possible, you must be accompanied by a Neapolitan and you must have the sfogliatella in midafternoon. Our young man, the protagonist of Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco, nicknamed Giovedì by the Baronessa who has brought him here, is commanded to learn three things: to dress for dinner; to speak Italian – his American will not be tolerated, particularly in the car; to provide good conversation on history and culture at the dinner table. Decent instructions for life.…

Even more so than usual, it is play time here in The Heronry. Between Independent Bookshop Week shenanigans for the author Tom Cox, a picture book launch in honour of a mole, a persistent architect great in kindness and endeavour, and some concern about whether everyone else can see the young girl who has taken up residence in our window,* I have been at the theatre with Ana Kinsella, Lucy Caldwell, Conor McPherson, Chekhov, John Berger and Susan Sontag. Ana Kinsella’s debut novel Frida Slattery As Herself is fantastic. Five stars for dialogue, characters, set up and set design. Frida is an actor, wholly an actor even when she has…

Do you like ducks, hills, the sound of (funk) music, vinyl, church bells, folklore, post offices, onion bhajis, Morris Minors, clogs, bogs, mogs and the feel of the word ‘twazzock’? I thought so. Also knitting, cows, books and cemeteries? As if I needed to ask. Independent Bookshop Week begins tomorrow and we are celebrating all such things through the writing of Tom Cox. This has proved an excellent excuse to go hunting in charity shops for Hungarian folk singers, Steely Dan cassette tapes, creepy dolls and a robot. Some trips were more successful than others.* Do come and see the resulting window display tomorrow. Unless you’re afraid of invisible goblins.…

In Paris, Geoff Dyer reads on the grass in Le Jardin des Tuileries. Tourists photograph the garden’s statues. Joggers pass them without looking. A group of boys annoys everyone else by enjoying a kickabout. The sculptures are of mythical or biblical characters. The statues endure. They struggle. Impossibly perfect bodies radiate power even as they strain to the extreme. Dyer doesn’t have a guidebook or, how remiss, a copy of Ovid with him to lend context but writes that the statues’ concerns are clear: ‘punishment and suffering, agony and ecstasy.’ I’ve been thinking about football so I get what he means. Some of you may be very excited that the…

I write to you from the town and world of Middlemarch. Judging by this week’s conversations and sales, many of you are joining me, some returning, some making your first foray, thanks to that Guardian list or last week’s dispatch, whichever is the more influential. How I love being back here. George Eliot got it all in there didn’t she? Saints and rogues, real estate, religion, taxes, death, almost romances that never happen while the doomed marriages do, manners, gender roles, intricate architectural designs of both cottages and hair, political upheaval (so much discussion of ‘Reform’ unnerving today’s reader), characters who deserve the epic and instead get… a funereal, ‘old’…