📚 🚶Our March Walker's Walk
Sarah B's "bookshelves walk" | A quick recap | Our April events
Dear walking book clubbers,
Thanks to those of you who joined our London edition of On Our Reading Radar on Friday, featuring Dr Matthew Green. You can have a look at it HERE to find some brilliant recommendations for books and films about or set in London, as well as our other cultural highlights from the month of March.
I loved sharing our views on The L-Shaped Room over this past month. The general consensus was that this is an incredibly powerful book that many of us really connected with, reminding us of our own time in a room that was special to us - be that in childhood, at university, or even today. We had a great conversation about female and domestic spaces, and even ventured into the world of psychoanalytic symbolism. We really admired Jane’s resilience and independence. We were all, however, terribly shocked by the offensive language of prejudice that was rife in the book, and while we could accept some of this as being symptomatic of the time, we couldn’t quite forgive Banks for her portrait of John, which did seem to conform to racial stereotypes.
Look out in your inbox next Monday for my introduction to our April book, Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, translated by Anne Born, and you can find booking links to all our April events at the end of this email.
For those of you, who are after some more fun things to do in April, please do come and say hello at The Persephone Festival, which is on 19-21 April in Bath. I’ve been helping to organise it and will be there for the duration. Some of the events have already totally sold out but there are still tickets left for others, including my two walking book clubs - on Dorothy Whipple’s Someone at a Distance, and on Noel Streatfeild’s Saplings - and my talk with Tracy Chevalier and Anne Sebba about our favourite Persephone books. Hope to see you there, and let me know if you’re planning on coming along!
Persephone Books is rather a neat tie in to this month’s walker’s walk from Sarah B, who discovered Emily’s Walking Book Club via Persephone Books, where she used to work. (She will be helping out at the Festival too…)
Sarah B’s walk
Sarah has been walking and talking books with us since 2020 and we have her to thank for bringing her beautiful old copy of The World my Wilderness to our Christmas bookswap event, which ended up with me, inspiring the choice for our walk last September!
I love Sarah's informative and evocative ‘bookshelves walk’ through the south of Islington - especially learning about ‘ghost lights’ - and it takes me back to my own Lockdown days of bleakly walking the children along the London pavements and peering into other people’s homes. We used to play a game of waving at anyone we saw inside and counting how many people waved back. This photo, which Sarah took on one of her walks makes me think thank goodness we’re not seeing this kind of thing this Easter!
During Lockdown I was living south of the Pentonville Road, just off Amwell Street for anyone that knows it, but an area that is impossible to describe to anyone that doesn't, being neither in Clerkenwell proper, nor Islington. During this period I trawled around much of Central London, as far as St James’s Park, down to the river and alleyways of the City, and often through the streets of Bloomsbury. As I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue, past the theatres advertising shows that were no longer playing, shows friends and I had been working on not so long ago, I thought of the ‘ghost lights’ that would have been left burning on each of the empty stages - whenever a theatre is left empty or ‘dark’ a single light is always left burning to keep the theatre ghost company, and this is called the ‘ghost light'. However, the only walk I could persuade my young daughter to go on was what I cheerfully called the ‘bookshelves walk’ as it passed a number of grand houses where if you went at the right time of day approaching dusk you could peer into these living rooms at the rows and rows of bookshelves, fireplaces, and other delights.
The walk starts in Claremont Square, a covered reservoir which is still in use today but is now more famous for being the home of ‘The Order of the Phoenix’. Carry on right down Amwell Street - a row of residential homes and independent shops built in the 1820s for the New River Company to house the workers looking after the supply of fresh water to the capital. You then turn left down River Street (some imaginative naming here) and find yourself in Myddleton Square, named after Hugh Myddleton who helped fund the construction of the New River. These are very grand houses with lots of bookshelf potential, and parts of the BBC adaptation of ‘Howard’s End ‘ were filmed here.
Keep going and you reach St John Street. If you were to turn left you would get to Spitalfields (another interesting walk) but we are going straight over towards the Goswell Road and then to Duncan Terrace and Colebrooke Row, which have a very nice park running through the middle of them, but if you want to see bookcases you need to stick to the outside. Boris Johnson used to live here, and on your right you will pass Noel Road (home of Joe Orton with a blue plaque commemorating this).
When you reach Islington Green (decent Waterstones, Everyman Cinema, statue of Hugh Myddleton from earlier), you can double back on yourself down Camden Passage (hundreds of coffee and cake shops) towards Angel. Obviously this was the option generally favoured by my daughter. Or you can cross over Upper Street and head towards the very grand Cloudesley Square. Alternatively, if you keep going along Essex Road you will find yourself in the churchyard and gardens of St Mary’s, where there are a number of beautiful houses and cottages and the Little Angel puppet theatre.
I am a big fan of the Little Angel theatre, where I used to go when I was a child and where I now love taking my children. I think of the ghost light that was burning there through those empty days and feel so glad that the puppet theatre pulled through. It’s an absolute haven for imagination and creativity - you can look at their programme HERE.
Thank you so much Sarah for sharing your walk with us.
Please do share your own walks with me if you’re able - you don’t need to write much if you’d rather not, just a couple of lines and a photo would be splendid.
April
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson translated by Anne Born
Sixty-seven-year-old Trond seeks solitude in a remote corner of Norway, only to find his idyll destroyed on happening upon a man from his past, who forces him to remember what he’d rather forget… Memories of a childhood tragedy and life in Occupied Norway rise to the surface in this painful and evocative masterpiece.
Why did I choose it? I always have an eye on helping readers discover more books in translation (in the UK, only 3.3% of fiction sales are translated - a shocking statistic that I would very much like to change!), and Scandi-lit is an area in which I’ve read alarmingly little. This book has been periodically recommended to me over the years, and I was immediately absorbed in its atmosphere and gripped by the story when I finally picked it up. Trigger warning: there is a deeply shocking moment near the beginning - if you are feeling a little vulnerable, especially about children, please take note.
The final couple of paragraphs of THIS joint review by Ian Thompson for the Guardian is a great, spoiler-free introduction.
In Regent’s Park: Friday 12th April, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-15
On Hampstead Heath: Sunday 14th April, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-15
On Zoom: Monday 15th April, 8-8.40pm, £1-10
On Our Reading Radar: Friday 26th April, 1.30-2pm: Solitude Join this month’s discussion thread to share your cultural highlights from the month, as well as your recommendations on the theme of SOLITUDE - Which books and films do you think explore the state of being alone?
Buy Out Stealing Horses from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in the group if you’re buying it in the shop.
Happy walking!
Emily