Hayley~ Bundles
This month we launched our new book bundles! Each bundle has been hand-picked by our booksellers and our selection includes a range of topics to choose from. Whether you are looking for a present or trying to find a few new reads for yourself, these bundles are a great place to start. Here are a few of my favourites that I think you will love.
Nature Bundle
Science writer and journalist Fred Pearce’s latest book A Trillion Trees How We Can Reforest Our World explores the history of humanity’s relationship with trees and how this relationship has developed over the years. While recently we have moved away from a more harmonious way of living to exploiting and damaging our natural resources, here Pearce explores how we can change our habits for the better. From improving the air around us to sustaining biodiversity, this book is a celebration of all that trees can offer us and our planet.
Bestselling author of Extraordinary Insects, Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s new title Tapestries of Life: Uncovering the Lifesaving Secrets of the Natural World explores the many strange and surprising connections that make up our environment, and how we as humans are able to benefit. The many systems found throughout the natural world support our lives in more ways than we know, from food, medicine, pollution control, erosion prevention, spiritual health, and more. Join Sverdrup-Thygeson as she explores the many amazing characteristics of the natural world that uphold our day-to-day lives.
Originally published in 1955, The Edge of the Sea is marine biologist Rachel Carson’s introduction to the other-worldly space where the tide meets the land. Here she explores teeming tide pools, inaccessible caves, and many more weird and wonderful encounters found at the brink of the coast. Her writing offers not only a critique of the ways we dismiss and exploit the natural world but implores us to observe and appreciate the beauty that we should be working to save.
Japanese Short Tales
The ten exquisite and critically-acclaimed stories featured in Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoto Nakajima explore the different ways that we can be haunted. A blend of the bizarre, beautiful, and mundane, the collection examines how fragmented memories, cultural pervasion and family traditions can all shape a person. Within these stories anything can happen. Here the life of a type-writer becomes a compelling and intimate journey through Japanese history. A woman’s belief that in a previous life she was a shiitake mushroom binds her husband closer to her. Each with an air of ghostliness, the stories ponder on what we can learn from our memories, both culturally and as individuals.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a wonderful ensemble tale that poses the question – if you could go back in time, would you? Even if it was only for a few minutes? In a quiet coffee shop in Japan, there is a seat that allows you to travel back in time, but you are not allowed to leave your chair and you must return before your coffee gets cold. This sweet and heart-felt novel follows a range of characters and the choices that have led them to seek out this infamous spot in the hope of returning to the past.
Set in one small town in Japan, things in People From My Neighbourhood are never quite what they seem. With each story starring a different member of the small community, these ‘palm-of-the-hand’ micro-stories all remind me of the outlandish and fantastical rumours we would whisper to each other as children about the neighbours. These tales are so tall they couldn’t possibly be true, could they?
Reading Art
The accompaniment to the 1972 TV series, Ways of Seeing is a pocket-sized classic that is a must-read for any art enthusiast. Through a selection of essays, some made up only of images, Berger breaks down the different ways we can understand and dissect visual images, and encourages us to go out and use this reading in the everyday world. From oil paintings to popular adverts, Berger cuts through any mystification and opens up the world of art to everyone.
Featuring a collection of interviews, letters, and profiles from art behemoths such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Freddie Mercury, Hilary Mantel, Georgia O'Keeffe, and David Bowie, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency makes an inspiring case for why art matters and what it offers us. Exploring the body, resistance, loneliness, love, and more, Olivia Laing makes a compelling argument for why we need art and how it can bring about new ways of living.
The Whole Picture The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it is a fascinating and accessible look at the stories and histories that have been left out of the art canon. Using selected pieces including propaganda from the East India Company, ‘art objects’ collected by Europeans, and work produced by contemporary artists today, Alice Proctor engages with colonial history to tackle widely accepted western narratives about art, whilst providing us with a new approach to how we can understand and engage with the institutions that display it.
See our full range of bundles here.