Galleries

  • Here Comes The Fun

      We were delighted to welcome Ben Aitken to the woods this summer for our Words In The Woods day festival.   Ben is bestselling author of Here Comes The Fun: A Journey into the Serious Business of Having a Laugh (Icon, July 2024). Perhaps you have read The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple (2022), The Gran Tour: Travels with my Elders (2020), A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland (2019), or Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island (2015)?  He has also been published in The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The […]

  • How Small Changes Can Make A Big Difference to Teachers

    Blog post by author Michelle Auton In teaching there is always so much to do, so why do we want to be worrying about wellbeing as well? With over a fifth of teachers leaving the profession in the first two few years of their career and stress and workload being cited as the main reasons for leaving- a conversation about wellbeing is essential. I think the key to good wellbeing in education is not a huge change in routine but small considered changes that can build to make a big change. Lots of small steps can make a big difference. With […]

  • You will find kindness in the corners of a bookshop

    You will possibly find dust in those corners as well but that’s a different blog. There are many ways to purchase a book. Some people don’t feel the safety or the conviviality of a bookshop is for them. They may prefer the anonymity of clicking a button and that’s okay. There are different tribes of people.  In our experience there are still lots of people who enjoy visiting a bookshop to buy their books.This is a fortunate fact and it’s why we are still in business. HMV came, went and returned! Debenhams, Woolies and M&S were not able to stick around. […]

  • This is your shop

    We received the following message from a young customer who was recently won the ‘Top Young Reporter of the Year’ award.  Congratulations Rosie It’s Rosie, I’m not sure if you remember me but wrote an article about the shop last Autumn. I was lucky enough to win Top Young Reporter of the Year and also received awards for some of my articles, including my interview with you! I just wanted to say a huge thank you for being so helpful and inviting last year. Your article was by far the one I most enjoyed writing! Thank you again! Rosie Gray https://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/23134406.its-shop—rosie-gray-colchester-sixth-form/ (I’ve […]

  • Rivers, Bodies, Stars with award winning poets

    We are thrilled to have an event scheduled with award winning poets, Rebecca Goss, Emily Hasler and Joanna Ingham   Amongst other accolades, Rebecca is the winner of the Sylvia Plath award 2022,  Joanna won second place in the BBC Wildlife Poet Competition and Emily received an Eric Gregory Award.  Their new work is strongly focussed on place or person. Our event, Rivers, Bodies, Stars, on 1st June 2023 can be found on our Events page https://shorturl.at/hwRY6 Rebecca Goss Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published by Flambard Press in […]

  • Hunger Games comeback – is this the Dystopian Renaissance?

    By Regina Lopez Puerta When I opened my phone yesterday, I felt I was transported all the way back to 2013. Suddenly, I was back in my childhood bedroom, a mockingjay pin on my jacket, Katniss posters all over my wall, scrolling through billions of fan theories about this fascinating world; and it was all triggered by an important piece of news. The new Hunger Games film has released its teaser trailer and poster. Based on the prequel set 64 years before the original novels, A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows the story of a young Coriolanus Snow before he […]

  • Anna reviews This Family by Kate Sawyer

        This Family by Kate Sawyer It’s a new beginning. She should be happy. And she is. She is. But where there are beginnings, there are always endings too.’ I enjoyed Kate Sawyer’s first novel The Stranding, a powerful reimagining of the end of the world but I loved her most recent novel, This Family. Here she kicks back and settles into what she’s really good at – the nitty gritty of family life. We love our families but we often despair of them too, and it’s this nexus of joy and pain that Sawyer explores with warmth and humour, […]

  • Local poet, Ricci Read, preaches

    Being a poet is a lifestyle. It is a commitment to being your rebellious, authentic self. I preach that poetry shouldn’t follow any rules! I hope to inspire others to find and use their voice to tell their own stories. Of course, it can be fun to write a haiku or a sonnet. It can also be worthwhile playing with rhymes schemes and alliteration. But do not let academic ideals hold you back. You do not need to write certain stanzas in a certain order for it to be a poem. You need only to bare your soul. A poem to […]

  • Daisy Jones & The Six: It Could’ve Been Great

      For a book whose central conflict lies around being good vs being great, that emphasises the need to make history with one’s art,  the new series falls short of that. Don’t get me wrong, the screen adaptation is perfectly good, and that is exactly why it fails. Because it could’ve been great.  I did not want to write a “the book is better than the movie” review, because I really hoped the adaptation would ace it, but unfortunately it did not.  Taylor Jenkins Reid has become a powerhouse when it comes to writing books that appeal to the new generation […]

  • When authors recommend other authors

    Blog note:  Author Kate Worsley has kindly provided Red Lion Books with a list of books that inspired her latest novel ‘Foxash‘, from ‘Fenwomen‘, a feminist Akenfield, to ‘Love on the Dole”s 1930s Salford.  Foxash is published on 27th April and will be launched in Manningtree that evening. Book here     FOXASH Kate’s recommended reading list Adrian Bell’s Corduroy 1930 trilogy (Faber and Faber, 2011): the arch example of urban middle-class longing for the countryside: a full-throated threnody for vanishing rural ways. (blog note: this title is no longer available but we suggest Men & The Fields as an alternative) […]