Join us tonight for this month's Weighty Tomes and Tasty Foams!
630-930pm, Birdhouse Brewery, Herne Hill
(and if you can't tonight, we're there roughly once a month)
SUNSHINE!
We are delighted to announce the opening of The Book Hotel in Ramsgate! The bookshop will open inside The Falstaff Hotel from early March, and we will celebrate the full launch of the new-look literary hotel with a week-long non-fiction festival.
Details to follow...
Happy New Year!
(2026? Hmm.)
Happy what-day-is-it, everyone!
We are here, except on New Years Day, and then back to normal from the 2nd January
And then... 2026 ???
x
Happy nearly-Christmas, everyone!
We're here today & tomorrow, then closed for 2 days, back on the 27th
Thank you to all our lovely customers, and hope everyone has a good festive time x
Treat yourself to some Autumn reading and you could win a £250 gift card! Every sale supports real independent bookshops, rather than one specific guy with a LOT of warehouses uk.bookshop.org/lists/win-a-...
I've seen some articles in the last few weeks about 'performative reading'
Seems to be a few journalists who have convinced themselves that (younger) people don't read, so they must be pretending to
NONSENSE
People are reading more fiction, and there's a real enthusiasm around - its a good thing!
Some very lovely reissues this week - Mermaids collection (Penguin) & Weird Girls (Vintage)
Thank you to whoever recommended I read THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore - yep, its great!
uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
'Paradise will be a kind of Library.' -Borges
* * *
The Library by Edouard Vuillard, 1911.
Hope everyone having a good day!
What are you reading?
I've just finished The Bee Sting by Paul Murray - been out a couple of years, but only just got to it
So good!
Up next - maybe something silly
We are beyond excited to be producing a special edition set of The Copper Cat trilogy by Jen Williams @sennydreadful.bsky.social in association with @headlinebooks.bsky.social 🐉😍
This beloved backlist series will be available in hardback for the first time! 🥳
The Sleepless is officially out in the UK today! 🐉🐉🐉
This book has been a wild ride, from writing the first draft in a loved up haze to celebrating its existence with lovely foreign publishers in Bologna 💖 It’s my twelfth published novel (can you believe??) and I’m feeling very proud today.
Bookish friends are great because you can be all "read this, it will absolutely crush your soul and tear your beating heart into a million little pieces and you will literally never recover from it" and they'll be like omg yaaaasssss
Writers: before you sign a contract with a publisher, make sure AI isn't replacing your illustrator, your translator, your editor, your jacket designer. Readers: if you're thinking of buying a book, do the same. Refuse. Resist. If AI garbage doesn't sell, people will stop making it.
Happy Wednesday, Clapham & world!
Hope everyone enjoying/hiding from the weather
We are disappointed but not surprised that Meta has used millions of pirated books to develop its AI systems.
As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rightsholders of all the works it has been exploiting.
But what can authors do? Read here:
societyofauthors.org/2025/03/21/t...
Children’s writer and author of the award-winning Crongton series, Alex Wheatle MBE, has died of prostate cancer at the age of 62. 👇 #BookSky
Happy International Women's Day!
Lots of great women represented in this collection - who are your favourites? (Fiction, non-fiction, new, old...)
#InternationalWomensDay
And that means I get to share the amazing US cover for The Sleepless too!
The light! The scales! The pink page edges! The SERPENT! 😍😍😍😍 The jacket was designed by Kerri Resnick, and Tom Roberts provided the amazing illustration. Out in the US September 30th 🐍🐉🐍 bit.ly/THESLEEPLESSGR
Writers, musicians, actors & other creators strongly oppose upending copyright law to favour AI companies, as suggested in the UK's AI Opportunities Action Plan.
As Kate Mosse says, seeking economic growth "cannot be on the basis of theft of our work".
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
tech bros: we built a machine that can tell you stuff loudly and confidently!
us: cool. is it right about stuff?
tech bros: we cannot stress enough how loud and confident it is!
Having said that, we might rebrand ourselves as ClaBksAI so that venture capitalists will throw money at us
AI is a big complicated subject, and obviously we’re not experts - but - we choose our stock very carefully, and we will always do it ourselves.
AI can do a lot of things - pattern recognition, plagiarism & fraud seem like the main ones
We will never stock anything we know to be AI-generated
Happy New Year, everyone! Thank you for all your support & tremendousness, and here's to an excellent 2025
Anyone know what day it is? Anyway, we are here!
Hope you're all having a good week and/or weekend
