I’d like to recommend the Shetland Islands. I know that’s cheating – Shetland is a place not a book or a film – but it is a place with book/filmic connections, most obviously as the setting for Anne Cleeves’ crime novels adapted for television and available on BBC i-player. I visited last month (a 12-hour boat trip from Aberdeen) and fell in love with the place – the remotest, most watery, most Nordic part of the British Isles. And possibly the most magical. I want to go back. And there’s much more to literary Shetland than Cleeves (who’s English anyway) – as this site reveals.
– Wendy Jones
I read the play “Blackout: The Concordia Computer Riots” by Tamara Brown, Kym Dominique-Ferguson, Lydie Dubuisson and Mathieu Murphy-Perron. It’s a stellar unflinching beautifully crafted narrative, which illustrates how whitewashed history is; grounds the work in African diasporic traditions; and speaks to a part of Canadian history that I was unfamiliar with, telling these stories with grace and care. I didn’t want to stop once I started reading, but work made me break it into chunks.
The players’ physicality; spoken word poetry; the use of chorus in the West African tradition with plenty of West African symbolism; projections on the stage; and the mix of French, Patois and English all contribute to a gripping tale. I’ve never seen a production of the play but could vividly see the scenes in my mind both on the stage and in my imagination. It’s a meditation on how little has changed since 1969 while simultaneously how much has changed due to its very existence.she employed, so I’m grateful she did her due diligence. I would highly recommend it!
– Mugabi Byenkya
Another England by Caroline Lucas. I had this book as a gift from my wife Clare. It grew out of Caroline Lucas’s response to the Brexit vote, her conversations reaching out to Leave voters. She looks at England’s history and literature, and finds much of England that isn’t sleepwalking in Fascism. An encouraging read, especially in its pointers to other reads.
– Aidan Baker
Rakesprogress is a beautiful magazine, or is it a coffee-table book? For me it’s been a deep well of inspiration. I discovered it in a cafe many years ago and subscribed on the spot. It’s just my thing and have collected it diligently ever since (maddeningly there’s one early Edition I haven’t got). In Edition 15 you can travel from spring blossom in London to an English garden in the fields of Normandy, a palm nursery in Morocco to the surprisingly fertile concrete undercroft of Spaghetti Junction! And for the writers in us there’s Scrapyard Haikus and an article on Christian Dior’s sister, Catherine, by Justine Picardie, and that’s just for starters.
It’s a sensory explosion delivered through the writing and photography. Every once in a while, they produce a fragrance edition – Rakes Sense, The Art of Fragrance. You can almost smell the scent through the writing and descriptions. It won’t overload you – there’s probably 2-3 Editions a year – but you’ll continually dip into it. I can’t do without it.
– Alastair Creamer
A slightly cheeky recommendation from me this month, but this has been a wonderfully full newsletter and I wanted to draw out a couple of things. Firstly, Kaye has written a beautiful talk-through of the Restore Nature Now day hosted by the Wildlife Trusts in London last month over in Reports from the Ground, and secondly, she encouraged me to find the incredible opening speech by Liz Bonnin, which I just wanted to flag here. It seems a perfect summary of all the themes of nature and connection that defined Wordstock last year and so much of 26’s recent output (and it’s pretty heartwarming to see 80,000 nature-lovers filling the streets of London and cheering for human connection!)
– Max Parfitt