Heron Books

Dear Reader, ‘All stories are true.Some would disagree.All narrators are Cretan liars.’ – My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss Last week I was mesmerised by finding Gwen John everywhere, building a portrait of a portrait artist from fiction, biography and poetry. The possibilities of writing shone. I thought about how so many of the books we have read in our book groups might be called biography or memoir and yet they are also history, science, natural history, philosophy, travel writing, fiction and more. Black Girl From Pyongyang, for example, is a personal story which becomes an examination of how thorough historical and political research ought to be conducted and…

I do not know if our recent Rainer Maria Rilke event, celebrating Martyn Crucefix’s translation of and decades of work committed to the poet, was the cause of my returning to God’s Little Artist by Sue Hubbard, a poetry collection about Gwen John. Rilke and John became friends in Paris in the early twentieth century. Both had close and complicated relationships with Rodin, noted in Crucefix’s Rilke and in Hubbard’s poetry. I do not know if the painting by Gwen John, The Convalescent, on the cover of Hubbard’s book led me to begin a novel which I have been meaning to read for a long time, The Life of Rebecca…

Permit me sentimentality this week – it is after all a bank holiday and sentimentality the bank holiday of cynicism* – for it was my father’s seventieth birthday a few days ago and, between libations, there has been a little time to grow misty-eyed about Mr Moss. To him, I owe my love of two-tone brogues, of fine blazers and Belstaff jackets, of Victoria Wood, of junk shops, of black coffee, ideally from the Monmouth Coffee Company at Seven Dials, of Campari, ideally from The Troubadour whilst complaining that it is not what it once was. To him, I owe the knowledge that one must never argue with a scaffolder…

The earth converses herewith the attentive heavens;memory overwhelms heramongst these noble mountains. Sometimes she seems surprisedthat we listen so well—then she reveals her whole lifeand has no more to tell. From The Valaisian Quatrains by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Martyn Crucefix. We will welcome Martyn to the shop this evening to hear him read from Change Your Life, his translation of Rilke’s poetry. The poems are filled with surprise and wonder, as well as with ripening fruit, people like trees and trees like people, green sunlight, joyous roses and glowing hearts – all will fill the Arcade this evening. They evoke change and attentiveness to it and invite the…

Jellyfish Have No Ears is a title it is hard to resist. My fingers had pressed the order button before I had processed what the novel may be about. When it arrived, I met a character in No Man’s Land, a woman whose lifelong deafness has grown suddenly worse but who is not deaf enough to be part of Deaf culture. “You’ve built a whole life as one of ‘them,’” a life-long profoundly deaf sign language teacher tells Louise, since she has verbal language and has taken extensive speech classes in order to sound ‘normal.’ With the deterioration of her hearing, Louise is asked whether she wants a cochlear implant.…

Dive in with Deborah Levy. Join John Cheever. Take a plunge At the Pond. It’s time to linger at the pool with David Hockney, to take to the sea, should Neptune allow it, to delve into the depths with Martin MacInnes or just roam By the River. No need to ask Emma Cline’s creation: The Guest will be there, uninvited. I wouldn’t leave your belongings unattended if she’s nearby though. Or your wits. We are going swimming.* Last week I wrote about Ralf Webb’s extraordinary book, Strange Relations, examining masculinity in the art and lives of Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin and John Cheever. It is a book which…

‘Have you ever seen tree roots bubbling up from beneath concrete, or flowers bursting through cracks in the pavement? The jolt of recognition, that beneath the drab mundanity of the everyday the organic is all around us, striving to break through, up from the earth and into the light? In its design, the first edition of Leaves of Grass creates a similar feeling. Everything about it indicates organicism, spontaneous and natural growth. Everything about it seems alive.’ Slow, careful reading is required for Strange Relations by Ralf Webb. Webb’s writing, rich in detail and style, asks that you afford it the same attention with which he has turned to his…

As I begin to write, the sun is glittering through the glass roof of The Clifton Arcade. Books with sunflower yellow covers must be moved inside for protection. By the time I send this, the forecast suggests we’ll be enjoying thundery showers. The national picture is warning of gales. Correction: warning of Gail’s. Gail’s Bakery can’t function thanks to the Microsoft/Crowdstrike kerfuffle. Remember where you were when Radio 4 accidentally failed to broadcast the Shipping Forecast? (30th May 2014, M’Lud.) Some think this is bigger. I suggest veering west: the independent bakeries and coffee shops of Clifton are operating at full force. Fortunately, reading is an all-weather activity. And physical…

As Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she has time to look about her and wonder what will happen next. She falls past cupboards and shelves, looks at maps and picks up a jar labelled ‘Orange Marmalade.’ The jar is empty, otherwise one imagines that she would have tested the truth of the label and tried its contents. She wonders what will happen if she falls right through the earth and comes out the other side. In The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner offered an answer to this question, though he is flummoxed, not unfairly, by trying to answer why a raven is like a writing desk. It was this scene…

I have been reading Passiontide by Monique Roffey. What starts as a detective story following the death of a young woman at a carnival on a Caribbean island becomes a rage-filled uprising against violence, patriarchy, police, political strictures, sexist media… There’s a vast cast of characters, including the voice of the murdered woman, an inspiring energy and a Lysistrata-esque protest, both funny and poignant. I’ll write a newsletter where I recommend what to read based on your voting preferences, I thought. Passiontide is for supporters of the Women’s Equality Party. No, hang on: it is more importantly for everyone else, everyone yet to support their cause. I toyed with the…