Independent Bookshop Week & A Recommendation from Tom

Every year these presses account for an outsized proportion of our favourite books. They take the risks, jumping in with both feet where soft landings are most certainly not assured. They publish the books without precedent, make decisions on belief rather than bottom line, and really just massively enrich the experience of reading and bookselling.

Our Indie Presses section in the shop is year round, but for Indie Bookshop Week we’re also highlighting some of our personal favourites at the front of the shop. We’ve written introductions to the books to give you a sense of just why they are so exciting to us. Come and mooch through our favourites, or explore the rich pickings of indie press output throughout the shop.

As a little token of our appreciation for these small publishers, and the readers who keep them going, we have copies of this postcard to give away to anyone who buys a book published by an indie press from us during Indie Bookshop Week. The text and design are by Tom, and it was hand-set and letterpress printed by Nick at the wonderful Letterpress Collective on Leonard Lane.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Irene Solà (trans. Mara Faye Lethem)
Granta

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness follows sequential generations of women, inhabitants over the years of the same farmhouse. It shares much with Solà’s brilliant first novel. It has the same fierce attachment to place – the mountains of Catalonia are far more than just the setting for Solà’s novels, they are a major character, perhaps the major character. In Solà’s worlds, time behaves in particular ways; it is not strictly sealed into linearity – with characters long dead still present in the same place as characters living generations later. We as readers must navigate these overlappings just as we must navigate the way that animals, plants and spirits (or in this case, devils) play active roles in these stories. The responsibility given to us as readers is, for me, one of the great joys of reading Solà. Nothing is spoonfed. We are expected to cope with uncertainty in her text, with beliefs and relationships to the world that are fundamentally different to the ones that our neat and sterilized modern lives experience.

This, in particular, is a messy novel. It is full of bodily experiences that are bloody, painful, delicious, frightening, pleasurable, tedious and horrible from one moment to the next. It is not for the faint of heart. However, it does offer the reminder, the realisation, the sensation, that we are not separate from or better than the goats, the soil, the mountains, and our stories take no more precedence than theirs. This is something I find profoundly comforting. This book will certainly not be for everyone, but for those who find solace in rotting leaves, folk tales, strange creatures and porous time, this extraordinary novel may just be for you. And if you are one of the few people to whom I have not yet recommended When I Sing, Mountains Dance, well then I have a book to tell you about.