Almost two years ago I moved to York from Suffolk, where I had lived for well over ten years. It was a wrench, as I knew I would miss a lot of things, but it had to be. One of the things I missed, and still do, is direct involvement with Suffolk Book League (SBL) which I joined in 2014 becoming a member of the committee the following year. For much of the last ten years I’ve been the administrator for the SBL Facebook Group page and have recently seen at a distance SBL grow f

Image Courtesy of Byron & The Bard How and why did you choose to become a bookseller? I think like most things in life, a series of happy accidents. Having moved here 25 years ago, I thought that it was a crying shame that they didn’t have a ‘new book’ bookshop. Lavenham was the sort of place that was just crying out for one.  It’s not necessarily the most practical bookshop in the world. It’s not on what people quaintly call Lavenham’s miracle mile. There’s the high street f

Reviewed by Keith Jones by Noreen Masud  (Hamish Hamilton: 2023)  When Noreen visits the Suffolk Book League in March, I for one will be...

It was an emotional few days for Andrew Marsh at the start of March when he celebrated the fifth anniversary of Dial Lane Books. He...

Ipswich’s newly minted Minster isn’t ‘new’ in anything but name. The first St-Mary-le-Tower church, probably built of wood and endowed...

‘Deben Holt’ was used as the pseudonym for two adult novels published in the late fifties: Circle of Shadows  (John Gifford: 1957) and...

In September, the fourth of our very successful and well received series of anthologies will be published. Suffolk Haunts: Original...

There have been many, many things that I’ve been proud of since starting my bookseller journey: things that I’ve done; people that I’ve...

My latest poetry collection, Latch, explores memory and the act of returning to the landscape of my childhood, to understand it anew. I...

Reviewed by Keith Jones (Random House: 2022) by Caroline Davison This book, chosen as the winner of the New Angle Prize awarded in 2023,...

Fast Fury by Freddie Truman, Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd. 1961 My schoolboy dream was to open the bowling for England .and I ‘went’ for my...

George Ewart Evans is regarded by many as one of the founding fathers of oral history. Originally from a mining village in Wales, he came...

Together with the county of Norfolk and parts of north-east Essex, Suffolk represents the core of ‘linguistic East Anglia’. Within this...

Reviewed by Andrew Burton The Swimmer  by Patrick Barkham (Hamish Hamilton: 2023) Photo: Gary Rowland If Roger Deakin had not existed,...

Thursday 7th March 2024 The East Anglian landscape strikes resonance in us all; we know and love it. So, when a novel draws upon that...

Tell us a little about Harris & Harris Books and your wonderful new bookshop. I opened Harris & Harris Books in Clare in August 2011, a...

At the end of Kate Worsley’s recent novel Foxash, which has been reviewed in this issue of BookTalk, the author briefly summarises the...

2024, the year I will not be popping up here, there and everywhere. At least not in the sense of a 3 month pop-up. Lesson learned and all...