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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Bristol-based Norwegian illustrator Oivind Hovland has produced this atmospheric tale of a fictional 19th century inventor called Jean Babtiste de Bomberaque and explores his search for the elusive secret of powered flight .
While the script is minimal, Oivind’s black and white illustrations, as if from another age, are memorably powerful. Oivind’s aeronautical tale of trial [...]

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Bristol author Daniel Start and Punk Publishing are to be congratulated for a rare collaboration between an author with a passion and a publisher who has transformed his vision into this superbly illustrated and clearly presented book.
Even three years ago, wild swimming enthusiasts were the guerilla warriors of the further reaches of Google. Swerving around [...]

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Tangent Books’ latest publication Where’s My Money? is the debut novel of Bristol-based writer Mike Manson. The story is set in the former dole offices in Nelson Street, Bristol, in the long hot summer of 1976. The author admits to having worked in the very same office himself for a brief spell in the ’70s, [...]

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When an unsolicited sales call interrupts Harry Brinkman’s suicide attempt the voice on the other end urges him to ‘only resist!’. This strikes a chord with Harry, and away go the ladder and noose. He makes a determined and somewhat chaotic pledge of resistance to outrageous fortune and begins a personal quest to improve the [...]

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Mark Steeds recalls the ‘other’ anti-slavery campaigner
The Seven Stars pub in St Thomas Lane, next to the Fleece and Firkin, is without doubt a remarkable pub. It has survived the Blitz, post and pre-war planners, new roads (such as Victoria Street) and all of the brewery ‘re-organisations’ and changes in fashion. Despite losing the community [...]

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