Musings
A collection of stories, thoughts and news
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| NewsRed Lion Books receive a grant from Penguin Random House
Red Lion Books, Colchester ‘Bedtime with the Red Lion’ will invite parents and pre-school children to discover the joy of books together, by modelling relaxed, playful and exploratory approaches to shared reading. Delivered through free pop-up sessions in community hubs, the project will help parents overcome anxiety about reading aloud by emphasising interaction, storytelling, and connection rather than performance. Parents will be encouraged to follow their child’s lead by pointing to pictures, repeating phrases, asking questions, and enjoying the story in their own way and reframing reading as a creative exchange that strengthens bonds and builds early learning confidence for both parent
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Previous events
Previous Events At Red Lion Books We have had thousands of events over the years. Book clubs, craft clubs, writing clubs, poetry clubs and author events -including the late and great Terry Pratchett but it’s only in recent years that we have had a digital record. We hosted 96 book clubs last year alone. Here are some of the Author events we’ve hosted from the past year. These events are no longer available to book
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| News
Saturday Morning Surgery
Weekly half-hour round up. The Saturday Surgery is open! Check out this week’s new releasesFind out out about industry book awards, winners and shortlistsHave a cuppa with us (bring your own mug)Share your book recsTake our book advice if needed In the basement from 11am We’d love to see you here. If there is any thing in particular you would like us to research before hand please drop us an email us@redlionbooks.co.uk
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Staff picks
Non-Fiction Chosen by Jamie Jamie is our resident witch, yoga teacher and fantasy wizard with a deep love for Terry Pratchett. They read a lot of non-fiction and love giving recommendations, ranging from politics to science to history. They are also the perfect person to speak to if you are starting a pagan/witchcraft journey – always happy to share whereabouts to begin. Weird Fiction Chosen by Louise Louise will happily fuss any dog that comes in the shop! She is the brains behind our Blind Date with a Book and runs The Cocoa Book Club which has collaborated with the Women’s
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Meet the gang
Meet the gang Jo Fiction Jo loves people as much as she loves books, and bringing the two together is her favourite thing to do. To achieve this she lives on little sleep and BBQ flavoured hula hoops. She prefers make-believe to reality, reads mostly fiction, hosts Appetite Book Club, and can often be seen with her shopping trolley delivering books or teaching yoga. Jamie Non-Fiction Jamie is our resident witch, yoga teacher and fantasy wizard with a deep love for Terry Pratchett. They read a lot of non-fiction and love giving recommendations, ranging from politics to science to history. They
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Terms & Conditions
If your book is self-published fiction please click here If you have published a book with a strong local interest and would like to see your work on our shelves, here are our terms and conditions and initial guidelines. We have a standard approach to stocking self-published books by local authors which is a ‘sale or return’ arrangement and a normal stocking period of six months. We can take books at any time but they must be returned/collected by the next January or July (whichever is closest) Points to consider If you are not a regular customer of Red Lion Books,
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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
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Returns Policy
Overview We do not give refunds. If you have a valid reason for returning a book we can usually offer an exchange or credit note, providing you show your receipt and return the unread book in mint condition. Posted items. If a book has been sent via a tracked service, but doesn’t reach you, it is the responsibility of the Royal Mail and not Red Lion Books. We will provide you with the tracking reference to enable you to contact the Royal Mail. Our refund and returns policy lasts 30 days. If 30 days have passed since your purchase, we can’t
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Love letter to a book
Which book will you choose? Anyone submitting a letter will be entered into a prize draw for a FABER 2026 Diary (winner announced on 20th Feb) Handwritten letters are the best sent and the best received.
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Death Club
A press article in the Metro Newspaper featured our Death Club. Read more HERE
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| News
Bibliotherapy
The Power of the Page At Red Lion Books, we believe that every story has the potential to soothe, inspire, and transform. Discover the practice of bibliotherapy—the art of using literature to support your mental and emotional well-being. More than just a quiet pastime, reading serves as a powerful tool for self-discovery and healing. This is your chance to get a personalised prescription to fit your needs, or to send to a friend. Let us know how you would like to feel and we’ll do the rest! Use the contact form to provide us with information about what you like to
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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.
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Dave Rowntree from Blur visits the book club he knew as a child
Click here for Ben Howard article
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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
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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
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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 –
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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
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| Musings
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.
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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