I have a small ritual that helps me steady the year: every season I assemble what I call a “discovery shelf”—a deliberately imperfect selection of books by overlooked regional women writers. The aim isn’t to make a canon or to be exhaustive; it’s to create a changing micro-library that...
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Interviews
I’ve always been fascinated by the choices that happen off the page: the tiny...
Reading Guides
There’s a special kind of excitement when you hold a restored, annotated...
Reading Guides
I once found a single pencil note in the margin of a twentieth-century novel...
Reading Guides
Charity shops are little laboratories of discovery. I’ve spent years rooting...
I once found a single pencil note in the margin of a twentieth-century novel that read, in a hurried hand: "see: women who don't speak are not silent—listen for the unpaid sentences". That tiny observation sent me on a six-book rediscovery route...
Charity shops are little laboratories of discovery. I’ve spent years rooting through their racks and shelves—sometimes finding nothing but dog-eared romances, other times coming away with a book that changes how I think about an era or a voice....
I still remember the first time a translator’s preface changed how I read a book. It was a slim volume of Portuguese short stories found in a secondhand shop, its cover faded and its English oddly idiomatic. The preface—two pages of warm, candid...
I found it once: a paperback tucked into the poetry shelf, its barcode worn, its author’s name faint. It had been misfiled—an accident, a whim, or the last reader’s secret—and that tiny error became the spark for a month-long reading route...
I used to sit in the back of bookshop events, watching authors answer polite questions and watchful readers applaud the carefully smoothed edges of a career. The same passages get rehearsed: the origin anecdote, the “in one sentence” pitch, the...
It started with a cramped spine, yellowing edges and a library stamp that suggested my copy had been shuffled into the wrong shelf decades ago. That misfiled mid-century novel—part domestic portrait, part social satire, written by a doubly...
I love tiny independent imprints in the way some people love flea markets: for the surprises, the mismatched treasures, the sense that something has been salvaged rather than manufactured. If you ask me which small press you should follow next, my...
I rarely approach a translation like a passive reader. When I find a neglected novel with two competing English versions, I treat the moment as a small literary excavation: which translation will unearth the author’s original rhythms, cultural...
I bought the book for a pound from a charity shop on a wet Tuesday afternoon. It was shelved among other paperbacks that had outlived their first readers—spines softened, dust jackets creased—until a laminated sticker from Oxfam suggested they...
I love the small archaeological thrills of secondhand bookshops: the smell of dust and glue, the cliff-like stacks, the thrill of a spine that hasn’t yet been discovered. But what really makes my heart quicken are the traces left by previous...