Special Note

Dear friends of Barter Books –

First, I want to say how much I appreciate your support of our talks series.

All I can say, at a personal level, is how much I like the talks, myself. Just for starters, it gives me a wonderful chance to hear and meet people I might never have heard or met otherwise – and that includes you.

One problem that we do have, however, is with Sell-Outs. That’s a happy problem to have in one sense – one that, by the very nature of things, we don’t always get but that we all devoutly want, including the speakers!

But it’s not happy when, on the night, you see empty seats that had been booked for an event that, on paper, had sold-out. Seats that could so easily have gone to someone else who really wanted to come - someone on the waiting list, or even someone who had just shown up on the night, - had the holders simply let us know, if at all possible, in advance.

What to do?

We decided simply to try to copy the solution of others who have the same problem. And that is to ask those who book in advance to pay in advance (note: we can take payment over the phone!), as well. And if they can’t come, to please let us know as much in advance as possible, and their money will be refunded.

This way, with any luck, any empty seats would be more likely to be empty because the event, itself, was simply geared to more specialised interests.

We do hope the new way of booking seats will make the same sense to you as it does to us. In addition, please know that, for most talks, booking isn’t essential. But as you can never tell when it might be, it is a safeguard. In any case, here’s hoping the new system works out better in future for all of us.

With best wishes and many thanks again for your support,

Mary

-------------------------------------------------------

One of the perks I value most about having a bookshop is that our talks series, such as it is (roughly a speaker a month between September – June) enables me to meet professionals in every field (the arts, sciences, even sports) who I would otherwise never have had the opportunity to meet. Some few are well-known to the public – hey! It´s a long way up here, the fee is risible, and the Old Waiting Room wherein the talks take place only holds 50 people tops (60 if they´re skinny).

Still, some serious names (serious names with big hearts) have been willing to make the perilous journey above Watford, eg, Joanna Trollope, David Aaronovitch, Richard Ingrams, Anne Stevenson, James Fleming, Tony Harrison, and the late (loved) (missed!) Miles Kington.

But forget famous; all our speakers are well-known within their field and have given some of the most spell-binding talks of all, enough to have created their very own fan club. (Just try dropping the name ‘Richard Lomas’ around these parts ­ Dick´s the Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Durham ­ and wait for the absolutely slavering response.) Anyway, all the talks begin at 7.30 and cost £5 (and that includes a glass of plonk no less.)

FORTHCOMING TALKS ...

________________________________________________________________

 

The most recent programme is shown below. If you require further information, please contact Roger Jermy on 01665 606168.

Meetings of the society are held in the Waiting Room, Alnwick Station at 7.00 pm for 7.30pm. They are open to members, their guests and visitors for a small donation towards costs. Refreshments will be available from 7.00 pm.

INDOOR MEETINGS PROGRAMME

Thursday 20th April 2017:

“An evening with Pat Murphy”. Pat is the AVR's Civil Engineer and a noted photographer. He switches from being an audience member to speaker this evening to entertain us with some of his railway pictures.

May 2017: (Date to be confirmed.)

The annual quiz evening when the Aln Valley Railway team competes against the team from Gunnerton Railway Circle for “The Flat Bottomed Trophy”.

 

The Barter Books Book Group meets once a month, 7-9, at the bookshop, and has actually grown into two groups, the Monday and Tuesday night groups, both of which read the same material.

Its year is divided into two sessions, the Autumn session (September to December) and the Spring session (January to the end of May), with the reading for both sessions ranging over a wide range of choices, both classic and modern, fiction and nonfiction. The specific books to be read within that range are chosen by the leader (with an ear to suggestions from the group) according to a theme.

The Book Club is led by Rosemary Hartill, a former BBC correspondent, who has reported from some thirty countries (including BBC World Service broadcasts). Among the radio series Rosemary has presented for the BBC are: Meridian Books (World Service books programme), Writers Revealed (fourteen interviews on Radio 4 with authors ranging from Iris Murdoch to Anthony Burgess), and Immortal Diamonds (a Radio 4 series about poets). The recipient of two honorary doctorates in literature, Rosemary has also written for the Guardian and the Times Educational Supplement and is the author of several books.

Two separate groups meet once a month in Barter Books, 7-9 pm – one group meets on a Monday, another on a Tuesday.

Cost: £36.

For more information about joining the Book Group, please contact: Dan Robinson

Book Group: Spring 2017

1: January 23 & 24: The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald  (Fourth Estate,320pp)

The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his father’s permission to announce his engagement to his heart’s desire: twelve-year-old Sophie. His astounded family and friends are amused and disturbed by his betrothal. What can he be thinking?
‘Her sense of time and place is marvellously deft, done in a few words. She knows how they all walked, eased their old joints. She knows the damp smell of decay of the ancient schlosses. In a bare little book she reveals a country and an age as lost as Tolstoy's Russia and which we seem somehow always to have known.’ Jane Gardam, Spectator.
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald’s last novel,  was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the 'Book of the Year'. It won America's National Book Critics' Circle Award.

2: February 27 & 28: The Blue Room, Georges Simenon  (1936) (Penguin 160pp)

For Tony and Andrée, there are no rules when they meet in the blue room at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. Their adulterous affair is intoxicating, passionate - and dangerous. Soon it turns into a nightmare from which there can be no escape. Simenon's stylish and sensual psychological thriller weaves a story of cruelty, reckless lust and relentless guilt. ‘A wondrous achievement, brief, inexorable, pared to, and agonisingly close to, the bone, and utterly compelling; in short, a true and luminous work of art.’John Banville, Irish Times. Georges Simenon is the most translated French speaking author of the 20th century and the second most translated author of all time in Italy after Shakespeare. 'A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal' P.D. James

3: March 27 & 28:  The Blue Afternoon,  William Boyd (Penguin 336pp) 

Los Angeles 1936. Kay Fischer, a young, ambitious architect, is shadowed by Salvador Carriscant, an enigmatic stranger claiming to be her father. Within weeks of their first meeting, Kay will join him for an extraordinary journey into the old man's past, initially in search of a murderer, but finally in celebration of a glorious, undying love. William Boyd was born in Ghana in 1952. He was brought up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of a number of acclaimed and hugely popular novels and three volumes of short stories, and the recipient of many prizes.

4: April 24 & 25: An Unquiet Mind:A memoir of moods and madness, Kay Redfield Jamison (Picador 260 pp)

(A different kind of blue…) Dr Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the foremost authorities onmanic-depressive illness. She has also experienced it first-hand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, she was affected by the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients. An Unquiet Mind is a memoir of enormous candour, courage, wit and wisdom, which examines manic depression from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and its cruel allure. First published fifteen years ago, it remains the definitive book on manic depression. 'It stands alone in the literature of manic depression for its bravery, brilliance and beauty' Oliver Sacks

(No dates in May)

5: June 5 & 6: TBA

Book Group Archive ... here

Barter Book Group – books read

We began Sept 03.

September – December 2003: Colliding Cultures:
Graham Greene, The Quiet American; Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia; Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

January-May 2004: War
Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen; Ivo Andric, The Bridge over the Drina; Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk; Homer, The Iliad; Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost>

Sept-December 2004 Theme - light and dark.
Nick Hornby: How to Be Good; Tolstoy: Resurrection; Philip Pulman: His Dark Materials; Gawain and the Green Knight

Jan – May 2005 Theme – five women’s books linked to experiences of childhood or adolescence
The Taxi-Driver’s daughter, Julia Darling; Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye; My Place – Sally Morgan; To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf; Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie

Sept – December 2005 – travel books
Travels through Bible Lands, H.V. Morton; The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux; Imperium, Ryszard Kapuscinski; Odyssey, Homer

Jan-May 06 - American literature
‘Huckleberry Finn’, Mark Twain; 'The Red Badge of Courage', Stephen Crane; ‘Sister Carrie’, Theodore Dreiser; Henry James: 'Selected short stories'; Chaim Potok, 'My Name is Asher Lev'

Sept-December 06 - The Arab World
Occupational Hazard – My Time governing in Iraq Rory Stewart; the Crusades through Arab Eyes, Amin Ma’alouf; 1001 Nights; A short history of Islam – Karen Armstrong.

Jan- May 07 Lucky Dip
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon; Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll; The Great World, David Malouf; The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa; Khalid Hosseini The Kite Runner

Sept-December 07 - Diaries/ memoirs
Simon Garfield 'Our Hidden Lives'; Boswell's life of Johnson; Isabella Bird: A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains; The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal

January – May 08 French literature
Marguerite Duras – the Lover; Proust Swann's Way (vol 1 of 'In Search of Lost Time'); St Exupery Le Vol de Nuit (Night Flight)  and Southern Mail;  Albert Camus The Stranger; Suite Francaise (French Suite) Irene Nemirovksy.

Sept-December 08 Contemporary world writing
Death and the Penguin,  Andrey Kurkov;    Say You're One of Them,   Uwem Akpan;
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li; Two  Caravans,  Marina Lewycka 

Party Jan 09 - Barter Books – trains (at Barter Books)
Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table, Nigel Slater; My Life in France, Julia Child; Heat, Bill Buford; My Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester; Bad Food Britain, Joanna Blythman

September-December 09 Mystery, or Deception
The Invisible Woman, Claire Tomalin; The Secret Agent, Conrad; John Banville, The Untouchables; Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead

January – May 10 Theme: The Italians
Tim Parks:  An Italian Education (1996, Guardian Books  2001); March 1, 2: Dante: The Divine Comedy: Hell; Carlo Levi: Christ did not stop at Eboli; Luigi Pirandello:  Six Characters in Search of an author;  Italo Calvino:  Invisible Cities  (1972)

September – December 10 Theme: Journeys of Discovery
Barack Obama: Dreams from my Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance; Salley Vickers: The Other Side of You;   R.K Narayan:   The English Teacher;   Sara Maitland:   A Book of Silence;

Jan – May 2011 Life and Work
Hard Times, Dickens; ‘Whoops!:Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay’,John Lanchester; ‘Major Barbara’: Bernard Shaw; ‘Hard Work’ Polly Toynbee; The Gospel according to St Matthew.

Sept – December 2011 Ways of Seeing
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah,Tim Mackintosh-Smith; Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin; Ways of Seeing, John Berger; A short history of nearly everything, Bill Bryson  

Jan-May 2012 COMING-OF-AGE (Bildungsroman) novels
Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley; Ice-Candy Man, Bapsie Sidhwa; North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell; The Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys; The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlof

Sept-December 2012 REVOLUTIONS
Middlemarch, George Eliot; The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov; Shah of Shahs, Ryszard Kapuściński; Wild Thorns, Sahar Khalifeh

January-May 2013 INDEPENDENCE: Who We Are … and What We Can Be?
Fitzroy Maclean (with Magnus Linklater), Scotland: a revised history; Kate Fox, Watching the English - the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Alan Watts, The book on the taboo against knowing who you are; Anne Tyler, Digging to America

September-December 2013 HEROES AND TRICKSTERS
The Mahabharata, a shortened  version by R.K. Narayan; and The Bhagavad Gita; West African Trickster Tales  by Martin Bennett; Tennyson’s Morte  d’Arthur (part); Paths to Glory by Anthony Price.

January-June 2014 China
‘River Town -  Two Years on the Yangtze’  by Peter Hessler; Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang.

September-December 2014 Russia
Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov; The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov; Babylon; Babylon by Victor Pelevin; Ukraine Diaries by Andrey Kurkov

January - May 2015 Old and New World Gold
Introduction to Spanish Poetry: A Dual-language Book editor: Eugenio Florit; 100 years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

September - December 2015 Rage against the Machine (Rebels with a Cause)
Plato: The Last Days of Socrates: Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida: Franz Kafka: The Castle: Loretta Napoleoni: The Islamist Phoenix

January - May 2016 Comings and Goings / Between Two Places
The Arrival by Shaun Tan: The Road Home by Rose Tremaine: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov: The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeer Sahota: TBA

 

Barter Books

invites you to a very special book launch

Herterton House and a New Country Garden

(The collaborative creation of Frank and Marjorie Lawley)

With a talk by the author:  Frank Lawley

and

A slideshow of Herterton photographs by the well-known garden photographer

Val Corbett

For all those who love gardens, Herterton Garden, created by Frank and Marjorie Lawley over a forty-year period on the Wallington estate near Cambo, is one of the truly outstanding gardens in England. Among many brilliant reviews, Robin Lane Fox, writing in the FT, called Herterton Garden quite simply “one of the most influential gardens to be created since the end of World War II”.

This book launch celebrates the new book, Herterton House and a New Country Garden, written by Frank Lawley and beautifully illustrated by Val Corbett. It recounts the story of two young artists who, virtually alone, slowly and meticulously restored over forty years what was basically a 16th century ruin of a house and embellished it with a garden worthy of it. The book is also a fascinating social history of a whole era on the Wallington estate (of which Marjorie Lawley’s father was the head gardener) along with fascinating asides on art and architecture. As important, maybe even more so, Frank and Marjorie did all this on no assurance, beyond the odd empty promise, that their garden would even survive.

For all this and more, the well-known garden writer, Susie White, counts the book as unique among garden books as the life it describes – and a modern classic.

Can you come to the book launch?

We can’t promise you that there will still be seats left in the old Waiting Room, but we can promise you that we will do our best to make up for it with seating outside the Waiting Room, speakers so you can hear all the proceedings, plenty of wine and nibbles, compare garden notes with half the audience (including Frank Lawley, himself!),  see a little exhibition of Frank’s artwork as a young art teacher, and even meet the author, photographer, book designer, as well as two representatives from the book’s publisher, the much-esteemed Pimpernel Press.

Most of all, and the whole point of the evening really, is just to have this chance to cheer on the lives of two people who have contributed so much to our own.

Place: Barter Books
Date & Time:  Monday, July 13th, 7:30pm
Entrance: No charge but any donations appreciated! Advance booking, however, is essential. If you’d like to be there on the night, please let us know so we can arrange the right amount of seating, wine and nibbles! (To book telephone 01665 604888 or call into the shop)