Epping Bookshop

We are very proud that The Epping Bookshop is celebrating 30 successful years trading this year.We are holding a number of events to mark the occasion. We have already had two very popular discount weekends and have hosted several author visits.

We have also recently set aside a small area of the bookshop for customers to enjoy a complimentary cup of coffee or tea whilst relaxing or browsing. We hope you will come along and try it soon.

Saturday 25th September 3.00 - 4.30 pm. We are hosting the launch of 'Epping Forest, A Walk in the Woods' with book signing, meet the author and refreshments.

Keen local photographer Glynn Wadeson has made a beautful photographic record with pictures he took in the forest over the course of a year. He says that he wanted to celebrate the forest as he saw it while on bike rides and walks."The idea is that the photos reflect the different seasons and colours.It's a mixture of close-ups of trees and animals I have seen while I've been in the forest."

To tie in with the day we are running a 30th Anniversary Fundraising Quiz, based on Epping Forest, with all proceeds going to St Clare Hospice. Pick up your copy of the quiz, price 50p, from the bookshop.

There will be four prizes of framed photographs of the forest, from the book. The winners will be presented with their prizes at the book launch.

Channel 4 TV Book Club

Great summer reads recommended by The Channel 4 Book Club..........................................................................................


Book 1.The Help by Kathryn Stockett £7.99 "The Help" is a deeply moving, timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we won't. Itis about how women, whether mothers or daughters, the help or the boss, relate to each other - and that terrible feeling that those who look after your children may understand them, even love them, better than you.	Book 2. The Man Who Disappeared by Clare Morrall £7.99 What would you do if, out of the blue, your husband disappeared and you found out he was a suspected criminal? When reliable, respectable Felix Kendall vanishes, his wife Kate is left reeling. As she and their children cope with the shocking impact on their comfortable lives, Kate realises that, if Felix is guilty, she never truly knew the man she loved.	Book 3. The Legacy by Katherine Webb £7.99 The story centres around sisters Erica and Beth Calcott who inherit the family seat, Storton Manor, from their cold, unloving grandmother Meredith. The plot combines contempoary and historical threads which intertwine beautifully and result in a thoroughly engrossing tale.	Book 4. The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse £7.99 When Kate meets a dark, enigmatic man in a Soho bar, she doesn't hesitate long before going home with him. There is something undeniably attractive about Richard - and irresistibly dangerous, too........ 'Gripping, believable and unnerving' Independent on Sunday

Book 5. Stone's Fall by Iain Pears £7.99 In his most dazzling and brilliant novel since "An Instance of the Fingerpost", Iain Pears tells the story of John Stone, financier and armaments manufacturer, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole countries and continents. A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart.	Book 6. Ellis Island by Kate Kerrigan Rural Irish girl Ellie loves living in New York, working as a lady's maid for a wealthy socialite. She tries to persuade her husband, John, to join her but he is embroiled in his affairs in Ireland, and caught up in the civil war. Nevertheless Ellie is extremely happy and fully embraces her sophisticated new life. When her father dies she must return home........	Book 7. Devil's Acre by Matthew Plampin £7.99 'A galloping good story' The Times 'Lust, avarice, envy, revenge all play their part in this brilliantly told, well-paced story, which also begs the question, so relevant today, of just how close to action journalists and recorders of war should be allowed' Daily Mail 'Plampin's historical research is impressive, as is his command of detail!.his true gift of descriptive power' Independent on Sunday	Book 8. The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauk £7.99 The story is spread over a sixteen hour period when two 7 year old girls both vanish from their houses on the same night, without a trace. Calli suffers from selective mutism and hasn't spoken since she was 4 years old, despite councelling and psychological help. Her best friend, Petra, understands Calli and acts as her mouthpiece to other friends and adults alike.

Costa Book Awards

The winners of the Costa Book of the Year Award shortlists have been announced. And the winners are.....................

The winner in the Fiction category is Brooklyn, the latest literary masterpiece from the brilliant Irish novelist, Colm Toibin. The First Novel category was won by Rapahel Selbourne's Beauty, the story of a naive young Bengali woman living in Wolverhampton, who finds herself ostracised by her family after a failed arranged marriage. The Strangest Man, a biography of French physicist, Paul Dirac, triumphed in the Biography category, and A Scattering by Christopher Reid, flies the flag for Poetry. Patrick Ness's The Ask and Answer, a tense, shocking and deeply moving novel of resistance under the most extreme pressure, was judged best children's book in the category.

Paperback £12.99

Paperback £7.99

Paperback £9.99

Paperback £7.99

Brooklyn is a tender story of great love and loss, and of the heartbreaking choice between personal freedom and duty. In the character of Eilis Lacey Colm Toibin has create a remarkable heroine and in Brooklyn a novel of great emotional power.

Beauty - in both name and appearance - is a twenty-year-old Bangladeshi, back in England having shocked her family by fleeing an abusive arranged marriage.

'Captures the raw humanity of inner city life with extraordinary authenticity.' Costa Judges

Paul Dirac was one of the leading pioneers in quantum mechanics .He was also the youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship. "The Strangest Man" is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.

Lucinda Gane, Christopher Reid's wife, died in October 2005. A Scattering is his tribute to her and consists of four poetic sequences, the first written during her illness, and the other three at intervals after her death. A Scattering is described by Adam Newey in The Guardian as 'A beautiful book... [that] performs the miracle of bringing the dead back to life.'

A harrowing book, highly recommended by reviwers for young adults. Adults have found it a very good read too.

The second in Chaos Walking trilogy

The Booker Prize		The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009 is Wolf Hall. See all the finalists below. Of special local interest is The Quickening Maze, set in Epping Forest.
	Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel £18.99 Our Price £16.99 England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is. ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.		The Children's Book By A S Byatt £18.99 Our Price: £16.99 Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, are already inscribed with mystery. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme.
	The Glass Room by Simon Mawer £16.99 High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child. But the house's story is far from over, and we follow it as it passes from hand to hand, until events come full-circle		The Little Stranger by Sarah Walters £16.99 In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.
	Summertime by J M Coetzee £17.99 A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. Sometimes heartbreaking often very funny, this novel shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with "Boyhood" and "Youth".		The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds £12.99 Based on real events in Epping Forest around 1840, "The Quickening Maze" centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beech and its various inmates- are brought vividly to life. Outside the walls is Nature, and Clare's paradise: the birds and animals, the gypsies living in the forest; his dream of home and of escape.