Heron Books

On returning to Finsbury Park from postings with the RAF in Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus, a young man, short of cash, pawned his Rolleicord camera for £5. He had bought it with his life savings in Aden, Yemen, ‘one of those twin reflex cameras that you hold up to your chest and look down into’ with no knowledge of such a camera being used by the great photographers Bill Brandt and Brassaï. ‘What happened to that lovely camera?’ his mother asked. She immediately bought it back for him. Thus was Don McCullin armed when he came across his old acquaintances, The Guvnors, still hanging round in greasy-spoons, still strutting at…

The world has gone crooked and turned upside down. Perhaps so many times in history and in my lifetime that one wonders: how do we recognise the right way up? How does love endure? How does family? At the beginning of Crooked Cross, devoted brother and sister, Helmy and Lexa, decorate the Christmas tree with candles and an angel, itself a little crooked from years of use. Their young cousins are held back from bursting through the door by Lexa’s fiancé, Moritz. Finally, they are allowed in. There are songs and games. The families hold each other and laugh in the peaceful glow. Lexa’s brother Erich returns unexpectedly to complete…

Vernice and Annie are getting out. Vernice is bound for college in Atlanta – all very proper and with the approbation of the good people of Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Annie for Memphis, without a goodbye and as fast as her possibly-boyfriend’s erratic car will allow. Born in 1941 within days of each other, they have been tied together ever since. Vernice’s mother was killed when she was a few months old. Annie’s left. The former was raised by Aunt Irene, her own breakout thus curtailed, the latter by her grandmother, a woman never able to escape the maternal role as her own children leave behind theirs. They are getting out separately…

It has been a slick week in books. At Accidental Graphic Novel/Memoir Club we discussed Ducks, Kate Beaton’s depiction of two years in the Canadian oil sands. I have been reading Blood Will Flow, Alex Perry’s investigation into a vast oil and gas compound in Mozambique and the terrorist attack there in March 2021, as well as travelling to Patagonia with María Sonia Cristoff through her book, False Calm, which reports on the lives of those left behind after the oil boom in unromantic desolation. All have been fascinating, if dark. Please find antidotes below. In Ducks, Kate Beaton struggles with the knowledge that she must leave her home on…

Inspired by Natalia Shaloshvili’s Bear Worries, in which Bear, known to and beloved by us already from her previous book, Bear, (it’s about a bear) is enjoying a cookie until it occurs to him that it might be the last cookie, I had resolved to write this week of anxieties, concerns, the things that keep us up at night munching cookies whilst worrying about running out of cookies. I was going to write of: Work away days and team building trips: Daunt have just published two new editions of Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, with more planned, and The Bottle Factory Outing centres on the plans for the Italian men and the…

Dear Reader,* The hero of Elizabeth McCracken’s novel – it’s not a memoir, definitely not; she is clear and unfailingly witty about that; if you want to debate this it won’t be on her time – has very short and very wide feet. She is a twin, she is short, has demanding hair with great character, cannot spell or navigate or whistle and insists that things discovered in her fridge with a use-by date several years ago were bought just the other day. She liked to sing but could not (tunefully). She loved goats and they her. She was admired and loved by those she worked with and she delighted…

As someone who can get a cardigan caught on the smoothest surface and only needs to be in the same postcode as a glass of red wine to find a stain on my, once white, dress I read Claire Wilcox’s book in awe. She knows how to handle everything with care, from lace to centuries-old costumes to glass buttons to causes for nostalgia or grief. Patch Work is about Wilcox’s life as a curator at the V&A, the jobs that led her there, her study of art and photography, her children, her parents and many unnamed friends and loves who have stitched her together. The book is hard to describe…

Last week, Little Dorrit. This week, Little Dorrit. I am still going. It is still fantastic. I don’t want it to end. Notwithstanding the conversation I had with a gentleman yesterday who insisted that I read Our Mutual Friend immediately. I’m going to need reinforced bookshelves. And more hours in the day. This seems to be a year of epic, bicep-strengthening reads. Harry won’t stop talking about Shōgun, people keep entering on horseback raving about Lonesome Dove, I have it on good authority that one person in the Southwest has actually finished The Books of Jacob and the veneration of The Count of Monte Cristo (newsletters passim) continues apace. Mysteriously…

Armando Iannucci has ruined my reading plans. Twice in as many days I heard him speaking about Little Dorrit, on his programme Strong Message Here and then at an event at St George’s. I had not read it. I do not need telling three times. Sorry, piles of books downgraded from ‘opening imminently’ to ‘please await further notice’. Sorry, rickety bedside table, now supporting another tome. My new object of settling in with Dickens under a duvet was slightly derailed when I reached the end of page 100, began the next and struggled to grasp its sense. I read the same sentence several times, feeling silly. Then I realised that…

Mark Haddon grew up in 1960s Northampton, a time of ‘cardiganed grandmothers eating roadside picnics beside Morris Minors,’ Hillman Imps, Ford Capris, budgerigars, tins of Watneys Party Seven, sheets of Letraset and chocolate cigarettes. Images of such things may evoke a kind of longing but not a wish to go back or a real nostalgia, a word that contains within it an idea of homecoming. The household in which he grew up is not a place for which he yearns. His parents wanted the appearance of a ‘normal’ family but were largely uninterested in their children, devoid of love and sometimes cruel. Yet Leaving Home is a book full of…