Heron Books

In the works is a newsletter on Whistler, Eric Ravilious et al and David Hockney. I have been reading about Whistler’s apparently spontaneous strokes in his smoky London pictures which were in fact laborious – he would make a mark, decide it was wrong, paint over it and begin again rather than adjust it. Many layers lurk beneath the final creation of ‘freshness and movement.’ I have begun reading of Tirzah Garwood, wood-engraver, painter, writer (and wife of Eric Ravilious but let’s afford her her own space in sentence and in consideration) and the stunning work she produced in her few 42 years. I have read about Betty Freeman, a…

Last week’s newsletter closed with Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, which I had just started. I must now insist that you all read it, if you have not already. Vinnie, the fifty-four-year-old American academic in London to collect children’s playground rhymes, is one of my favourite characters in literature. Clear-eyed about many aspects of herself, her research and the perceptions of ageing women and of Americans, she is simultaneously deluded, seeing England through a rosy historical haze applicable neither in the past nor now and imagining that no one could fall in love with her. Enter Chuck Mumpson. An entirely inappropriate prospect. Not even a prospect since, ‘She certainly hadn’t…

When the spider the size of a fifty pence piece made her home above my bedside lamp, I felt revulsion. Her body has the gelatinous look of a Haribo sweet and as much to recommend it. One of us has to move, probably me, I thought. That glass and paper trick having gone awry too many times, I left her and her waving legs alone and prayed that she wouldn’t get cold and join me in bed. Now that I’ve shared the room with her for some time, I have grown more tolerant. Sometimes I wish her good night. She has quietly been performing on me an experiment to test…

I have been seized by illness. My fingers ache as though I have spent hours toiling over an embroidery or hitting refresh on the British Museum website. I suffer nightmares and wake in a cold sweat, strange images floating before my eyes of ships and arrows and dismembered limbs. At the edges shimmer foxes and crows, the stuff of Aesop’s Fables. People have become epithets: the postman, ‘The Deliverer’; Harry, after a battle with the printer, ‘The Conqueror’; I myself, ‘The Unsteady,’ following an encounter with some mead. Bayeux Tapestry fever is upon me. I have not yet secured a ticket to see this mighty comic strip but I am…

This is a huge week in publishing. In fact, between now and C*******s the schedule is relentless. There are hundreds of new releases jostling for our attention. Myriad more on the way. Many of them make compelling cases to be read urgently. Perhaps I can skip Rowdy Girl: Confessions of a Vegan Cattle Rancher and I may not try all the recipes from Marvel Studios: The Official Cookbook but how does one choose what to read first out of Stewart Lee’s Pea Green Boat, a diary of the owl from Edward Lear’s poem exposing just how ill-suited both Owl and Pussycat are for their adventure, Tom Cox’s new short story…

Travelling in the Rwandan countryside after the 2010 ‘election,’ the journalist Anjan Sundaram comes across a scene of devastation: huts with their roofs ripped off and burnt, more huts torn down – it looks like the aftermath of a war. Yet nearby are bunches of grass thatch which could be used to rebuild and the now homeless people do not seem to be the victims of violence, though many are suffering from malaria and malnutrition. What happened? The president, recently re-elected with 95% of the vote – miraculously the figure he predicted when the election was called – decided that grass roofs were primitive. Rwanda is modern now. The order…

Dear Reader/Diary, 14 August: pop into charity shop, just for a look, whilst waiting to meet someone. Catch myself alphabetising the poetry books. Emerge with armful of Virago paperbacks from a time when they could design covers and a hardback edition of T** W***** o* T***** (redacted in case I give it to Harry; note: find time to read it first. Query: is tendency to read presents before giving, for quality control, noble?) Since friend is three minutes late, presume plans are cancelled and go home to read The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield. 15 August: In heaven with Delafield. Victoria Wood plus Barbara Pym, before…

Let’s play: Poetry blurb or Sopranos episode?* ‘The life of a deeply flawed individual… The whole is a symbolic and panoramic commentary on the human condition.’‘Despairing, vengeful and destructive… unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded… works of great artistic purity…’‘Encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed, in that exhausted aftermath.’‘Urgent and unflinching, Killing Spree tests how the human spirit might endure under conditions set to undo it.’‘Fragrant lives, full of blood and perfume…’ Blurbs are really hard to write. Poetry blurbs especially. Collections are always by turns devastating and consolatory. Everything is about war, love, parenthood, bodies, rejecting binaries and exploring the (currently most…

You have twenty-eight days until you can read the book that I think you must read. You may need that long to prepare yourself mentally and physically, to clear your schedule of all distractions, to limber up and get your sturdier tote bag ready – at 640 pages it weighs 842 grams – and to ensure tea and biscuit supplies are stocked up because you won’t find a great deal of comfort within the pages of this superlative novel, The Disappearers by Marlon James. The blurb gives away too much. Here is what you need to know: it opens with a group of gay men gathered in response to an…

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…