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  • Land by Maggie O’Farrell

    Published: 2 June 2026 We are taking pre orders for Independent bookshop edition which includes a digital signature (not signed), bespoke endpapers and a letter from Maggie, written exclusively to Independent Bookshop readers Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land, the new novel from the author of Hamnet, is at once intimate and epic: a portrait of a family navigating a legacy of upheaval and loss with love and hope. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole […]

  • Loyalty Cards

    You can earn loyalty points from your first purchase. A £5 purchase gives you 1 point. Once you have accumulated 20 points, we give you a £5 voucher to spend at Red Lion Books. You will be pleased to know that we have tweaked the system to round numbers up in your favour; i.e. a £9.99 book purchase will trigger 2 points. It takes two minutes to set you up with your own card. You can pop in to see us to collect it.

  • Dave Rowntree from Blur visits the book club he knew as a child

    Click here for Ben Howard article

  • Seasonal Opening Hours

  • The Appetite Book Club Reading List

    Established in 2007, the Appetite Book Club continues to grow. There are evening and daytime options, meeting over supper twice a month or in the morning, on the last Thursday of the month, to discuss our book choice over a cuppa. We wonder how many of our book choices you have read and enjoyed? Or even better, not enjoyed! A book club would be boring if we all liked the same thing. Please find our previous reads here. year month title author 2026 MAR The Boy From The Sea Garrett Carr 2026 FEB Good Girl Aria Aber year month title author […]

  • Local Authors

    Your Books, Our Shelves We are proud of our history in supporting authors from the local area and have always carried a wide variety of self-published, small press and print-on-demand titles. Locally published books often feature amongst our best selling titles each year. However, we are unable to satisfy the recent and unprecedented increase in demand, by self-published authors, for our shelf space and have made the decision to only stock titles that suit the demand of our customer base: Non-fiction titles of local interest If you have published a non-fiction title with a strong local interest and would like to […]

  • Giving Children the Freedom to Choose Their Next Story

    Guest writer Brogan Tuxford, Primary School Teacher at St Mary’s School for Girls I was an avid reader as a child. I went to Narnia and to Hogwarts. I travelled back in time to solve mysteries and visited places far, far away (places that I now understand may not actually exist!). The pursuit of discovering the next adventure, story or world has never left me; it chased me into adulthood and still takes up huge swathes of my time. For me, there’s a childlike joy in being able to abandon reality and curl up within the pages of another world – […]

  • Christmas in Colchester: “Surprising Mrs B” – the story continues

    This is the conclusion to a story published in Christmas in Colchester 2025 magazine. If you would like to read the story from the beginning, click here. Otherwise the story continues here: ….After tea, Cally lay on her bed digesting and scrutinising Fleabags, who  was sitting beside her cleaning himself vigorously. He was a long-haired  muddy-brown moggy with one white foot and a white ear. Generally he  favoured a dragged-through-a-hedge-backwards approach to coiffure,  but he had – in fact – only had fleas once and was perfectly clean.  ’Have you always been able to talk?’ she asked.  Fleabags paused with his […]

  • How Did I Get Here

    Hello, I’m Lucy. This is the story of how I got to be holding a copy of my book, in Red Lion Bookshop It’s been a strange time, and while I might look calm on the outside, I can assure you that my insides look a lot more like this:  First, some background. I’m a librarian by profession, and while I’ve wanted to write since I was a child, I’ve only been writing in an organised way for the last five years. I’d written a few things before that, but I had only shared them with my family and close friends. […]

  • Wild Essex Imaginarium

    Wild Essex Imaginarium University of Essex – 27 September 2025 This event will appeal to academics, art practitioners, heritage workers, activists and policy makers. The Wild Essex Imaginarium aims to re-engage/re-enchant the relationship between the arts and conservation practice in Essex over the next five years of this ‘critical decade’. We begin by asking how arts and cultural practice and engagement can influence environmental policy (local/regional/national) and support diverse participation. With the recent publication of the Essex Local Nature Recovery Strategy, this has become an ever more important issue. BUY THE BOOKS HERE BOOK EVENT HERE