What Bristol Is Reading – June 29 to July 5

From unmentionable trash to award-winning literature, the readers who shop at Foyles in Cabot Circus like to be diverse. Mr Holmes looks like an exceptional read.

1. How To Be Both by Ali Smith

For the fourth week in a row and in four different bookstores around Bristol, the Bailey’s Prize Winner for Women’s Fiction is one of the top selling books. This split narrative over two periods of time has divided opinion and at the same time sold brilliantly.  

2. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

Shortlisted for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction is Waters’ sixth novel and her first one set in the Golden Age of the 1920s. Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances are forced to take in lodgers. The arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class”, means the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways.

3. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Mitchell keeps writing books and keeps getting long- and short-listed for the Booker Prize. He also fails to win. The Bone Clocks is peculiar, curious and fascinatingly English but I found its multiple-first person narrators a bit hard to love. Just when you get settled with someone’s story you start reading about someone else’s. Not for the light-hearted but certainly fascinating. 

4. Grey by E.L. James

If you don’t know about Grey then you are one of the lucky few. Here is something actually entertaining: EL James did a Q&A session on Twitter and it went terribly, terribly wrong. Maybe one of the reasons for that is that Grey includes the sentence: “His eyebrows widen with surprise” and as one Twitter user asks: “Are you aware that eyebrows can’t do that?”

5. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel

As Craig Murray once wrote, there is no question to which the answer is killing people but this is fiction. Here’s an apt short story called Wikihistory! about being unable to kill Hitler. If you didn’t read it, go back and read it. 

6. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize, All the Light We Cannot See is about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

7. How To Build A Girl by Caitlin Moran

Populist feminism-lite. If you actually want to find out what happens to women and the trillions of dollars and pounds that go into make up and fashion and redesigning our emotions and reactions so that they are better suited for companies who want to make money from them, one place to start is to read The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

8. H is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald

H is for Hawk is at once a misery memoir, as the author grapples with the grieving process, and a falconer’s diary about the hard-won trust between hawk and human. Winner of the Costa 2014 Book Award.

9. Us by David Nicholls

David Nichols’ Starter for Ten was said to be based around the University of Bristol where the author was an undergraduate. His latest publication is said to be a bittersweet novel about love and family, husbands and wives, parents and children. It’s one last family trip for a family that is disintegrating. Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2014, Nicholls doesn’t have the most lovable characters but his writing is primo: “these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.“

10. Mr Holmes by Mitch Cullin

Originally called A Slight Trick of The Mind and published in 2006, this novel by Cullin has now been turned into a major motion picture. It is 1947, and the long-retired Sherlock Holmes, now 93, lives in a remote Sussex farmhouse with his housekeeper and her young son. In the twilight of his life, as people continue to look to him for answers, Holmes revisits a case that may provide him with answers of his own to questions he didn’t even know he was asking–about life, about love, and about the limits of the mind’s ability to know.

Quakers Friars, Cabot Circus, Bristol, BS1 3BU, www.foyles.co.uk