Bookish on Every Continent

In which Dame Sophie has a small adventure

I spent a week in London at the end of March with my sister, Sarah, which was an enormous privilege and treat. Best of all, Seb came up from school to see us! I got to see my baby in person for the first time in six whole months! After a few days of vibing and zipping around town a little, they went back to school, and counter to my expectations of spending that afternoon wallowing in gloom, I found myself keen for a small adventure, so I took a multi-train journey to Muswell Hill to visit longtime Damespals Rosie and Jessica Fletcher, plus their mother, Caroline, at Rosie’s fiber crafts shop, Slipstitch. We spent a happy couple of hours catching up, having tea and biscuits, and knitting (of course, we are who we are). I bought a knitting pattern and yarn and rode the bus back to the Tube with Rosie – it was as close to a perfect afternoon as I can think of, is what I’m saying.

The only problem is that I underestimated how much battery power the Citymapper app would need to get me from there to Marylebone High Street, where I was looking forward to a second (yes, a second¹) swing through Daunt Books. We’d been there earlier in the week with Seb, and I’d purchased two books, but there were parts of the store I hadn’t even looked at in detail and I had the nagging feeling that I’d regret not returning.

Once at the store, I texted Sarah about meeting up for dinner & let her know the state my battery was in, and then put the phone in Airplane Mode to go about my browsing business. Lucky me, the store was staying open a little bit late because they were holding a private event in their famous and very photogenic back room full of skylights and two stories of books organized geographically. I had scarcely run my index finger down the spine of a book in the Iceland section when they started chivvying us out so they could finish setting up. Fair enough! The store takes up two storefronts, so I wasn’t going to go without browsing options.

I didn’t think to ask what the private event was about or who it was in honor of, and I’m now of two minds about that. On the one hand, I wish I’d asked, because I’m nosy and like to know things, and I love a vivid detail, too. On the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t, because if I’d had so much as a whisper of an inkling as to who might be in attendance, who would walk right past me and Sarah scarcely an hour later, I’d have missed out on the pure surprise of it.

At a certain point, still anxiously nursing my sad little phone battery and texting Sarah that if it died, I’d just be standing outside the shop to meet up for dinner, I started actually working my way around to making decisions about my purchases. It was the end of a long, good day and I needed a clear decision framework! Some bold and easy-to-follow if this then that guidance!

I decided to go with prioritizing small presses, especially ones I hadn’t heard of before, and where possible, works in translation. This resulted in three measured selections and one impulse buy that worked out beautifully.

Now, you, a reasonable person and/or a person who has been to or lives in my house, may be thinking, “Sophie, did you really need to buy a bunch of books on vacation in London?” To which I can only answer with a question of my own, while begging the indulgence of the great Tina Turner: what’s need got to do with it? That’s the wrong question, and there might not be a right question other than “ok, what did you buy, then?”

It’s not not footage of me

Well, since you want to know (or at least, you have no objection to me telling you something that I would very much like to tell you):

Day One Selections (made before I put my small publishing house condition into action, with the result that both of these promising titles are published by Penguin. Which is fine! I just wanted to disclose this detail so as to get ahead of it lest it create a fracas of some kind):

• Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets, by Clair Wills – 19th & 20th century Irish history through the lens of one woman’s family experiences in Ireland and England. Might as well have a massive fluorescent sticker on the cover shouting “WRITTEN IN A LAB FOR SOPHIE!!!”

• The Cost of Living, by Deborah Levy – the second volume of what the blurb describes as her “memoir on writing, gender politics, and philosophy” (I added the Oxford comma), sign me directly up.

Day Two Selections:

• Reservoir Bitches, by Dahlia de la Cerda (translated by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches) – The title alone. The title, paired with the cover photo and hot pink / white / black colorblocked book cover. All of that and a new-to-me UK publishing house. How am I meant to leave this book in the store? Can’t be done!

• The Stirrings: Coming of Age in Northern Time, by Catherine Taylor – it’s a memoir set in the early 1980s in the North of England, featuring a cover photo of the author wearing a Smiths t-shirt. QED.

• Lost in the Garden, by Adam S. Leslie – I read the first chapter and it lived up to the promise of its description, being creepy, dreamlike, and unsettling. This is about as close to horror as I can tolerate, and the cover’s Midsommar aesthetic (the only thing I know about Midsommar) is very powerful. Plus! It was short-listed for the 2024 Nero Book Awards, and published by dead ink (styled in that all-lowercase e.e. cummings sort of way), two things that were previously unknown to me.

• The Carnation Revolution, by Alex Fernandes – this is the impulse purchase, and I think it’s going to be a winner, since it’s about the fall of Portugal’s fascist dictatorship in 1974. My husband loves to read about failing authoritarian regimes, I needed a gift for him: kismet! (It has indeed been well received.)

I haven’t actually settled into reading any of these books, as I’m still working on Matrix, by Lauren Groff, a book so squarely in my wheelhouse that I should have read it at least three times by now. But I’m fired up about all of them! I paid, in the process also selecting one of the store’s very reasonably priced, high quality large tote bags² (maroon, though the green was also a strong contender), and went outside to wait for Sarah.

She arrived shortly after that and kindly agreed to take a photo of the window display (so I could shop it later), and was just wrapping up that sisterly task when a very familiar profile sort of floated past her shoulder and at the exact same moment, our eyes locked, our eyebrows approached our hairlines, and we waited two seconds for that familiar profile to finish gliding into the store before scream-whispering to each other, “I THINK THAT WAS HUGH GRANT!!!!!” It was indeed Hugh Grant, and I’m happy to offer the reassuring, if perhaps unnecessary, clarification that his profile was attached to the rest of his body. A reminiscence about a disembodied face would be a totally different story, and not the kind of thing that I tend to write about, and most significantly, if Hugh Grant’s profile was just floating, unsupervised, through London, you might well have heard about it on the news by this point. Anyway, that’s why I’m 97% glad I didn’t ask for any further details about the private event!

1. I realize this kind of thing is generally considered as doing tourism wrong, but I often find when I’m in new-to-me places that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the interesting visual stimuli of being in a new-to-me place, so revisiting favorite sites within a trip is one of the best ways to appreciate and enjoy all of it.

2. Eagle-eyed readers with excellent recall may think to themselves, “huh, that Daunt Books tote looks an awful lot like the great Persephone Books tote that Dames Sophie & Margaret have raved about.” Those readers are more right than they know, because the two totes might as well be fraternal twins. Same design, same roomy proportions, same brilliant use of a gusset. And all for £15? A bargain!