Monuments that haunt your mind: as they obviously haunted the minds of their originators.
Yes, follies. I like follies – those most idiosyncratic (and British) of monuments. Somerset abounds in follies and 80 of these have been collected by Jonathan Holt and published by Akeman Press. It’s a fascinating exploration.
Top of my visiting list is the [...]

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Drusilla Marland, one of Bristol’s foremost nature artists and a frequent contributor to the Bristol Review of Books, is the subject of the recently published Becoming Drusilla by Richard Beard. Consultant psychiatrist Harvey Rees offers a professional perspective.
In Becoming Drusilla Richard Beard explores the psychological complexities of transsexualism by writing a fascinating biography of his [...]

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This book should serve as inspiration to anybody who has a drawer, box, suitcase or other dusty receptacle crammed with old family documents and photographs which they intend to sift through one day with a view to publishing them.
The barely decipherable manuscript poems of Joseph Johnson Fairney (1869-1953) made their way over the course of [...]

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Somerset Pubs is the first in a new series of books called Postcards from the Past. With photographs of over 140 pubs in the late 19th and early 20th century, it takes the reader back to a past that in many ways has been destroyed by the onward march of time. Coaching inns, backstreet beer-houses, [...]

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Missing Nancy is the story of a fractured family, struggling to talk about and cope with the gap left in their lives following the death of Nancy, the beloved wife, grandmother and mother-in-law of the main protagonists.
The flame is put to the emotional touch paper when Nina, the floatyskirt, flip-flop-wearing, hapless mother takes her two [...]

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This is an offensive book – offensive to the suckers of the title, who come in two kinds: the consumers of ‘alternative medicine’, and the suckers who hang like leaches upon them, earning a livelihood at their expense in what has never been the quaint, kitchen-table operation of its cleverly marketed image, and is now [...]

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If I were to list the things that make me feel least comfortable, poetry and autobiography have got to be up there in the top ten. So it was with some reservations that I found myself reviewing the memoirs of a poet. However, when the book arrived (in a charming yellow cover with a picture [...]

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Jenni Mills is well-known as a producer of TV and Radio 4 programmes specialising particularly in the social issues of the bereaved and of young people on the fringes of society, as well as finely researched programmes on archaeology and history. She has now brought these themes together in Crow Stone, her first novel.
Crow Stone [...]

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Wrecking Ball Press (website slogan: ‘Strictly no flowers, just blunt hammered-home words’) is a Hull-based publisher subsidized by the Arts Council. Its founding editor has agonized about what a publisher should or should not inflict on the public: ‘What is good writing. What is bad writing.’ He is particularly fond of what he calls ‘WORDS’ [...]

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Shades of Grey by Bristol novelist Greg McGregor is the compelling love story of the relationship between Anne McCarthy, an innocent young English artist, and Jack Freedman, a worldly American black market art wheeler and dealer. Freedman is a lover of art and is well versed in the art of love. Anne is his pupil [...]

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