A Hot Summer Newsletter
Game, Set and Mouse
Did you know that Wimbledon uses over 55,000 tennis balls?
And these are recycled as tiny homes for harvest mice?
The initiative with Wimbledon, and specifically the All England Lawn Tennis Club, began in the early 2000s in partnership with the Wildlife Trust in Avon, Glamorgan and Northumberland. The tennis balls are place on poles between 75 and 1.5 centimetres off the ground with a hole just big enough for a harvest mouse (about the size of a thumb) but inaccessible to birds of prey and weasels.
Game, Set and Match
Christine Truman Janes
Miss Truman to Serve: a Memoir
Paperback, £10.00
Hardback, £20.00
Now is the time to remind you of Aldeburgh's tennis royalty. In 1959 Christine was ranking of No.2 in the world, aged 18. She won the Grand Slam title in Paris at 18, the youngest Brit since the war. She still holds the record at 16 of being the youngest British semi finalist at Wimbledon since Lottie Dod in 1887.
This wonderful, engaging memoir of Christine's career in women's tennis in a very different era is the most delightful book. Christine is so modest about her astonishing achievements and her story is told with such humour. And some pathos: her father used to say to friends with dramatic understatement, 'Christine enjoys a game of tennis', and he refused to take a day off work so missed all four of her Wimbledon semi-finals. Her mother was very much in the no-nonsense camp of parenting: 'Just get on with it and don't make a fuss'.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Carrie Soto is Back
Paperback, £9.99
From the author of Daisy Jones and the Six.
Carrie Soto is the greatest player the world has ever seen. But six years after her last match, she watches a young British tennis player steal her world record - and Carrie knows she has to go back and reclaim her rightful place at the top. Sweat, glamour and rivalry.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Atmostphere
Hardback, £20.00
Taylor Jenkins Reid is dominating the bestseller list with her new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program. In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston’s Johnson Space Center.
Liane Moriarty
Apples Never Fall
Paperback, £9.99
This is a bit of a stretch as a tennis novel, but we do love this brilliant Australian writer's twisty novels.
Joy and Stan Delaney run a successful tennis academy. When Joy, now retired, disappears without trace the darker side of suburban Sydney is revealed.
David Gentleman
Lessons for Young Artists
Illustrated hardback, £20.00
A lifetime's learning from one of Britain's leading artists.
For over ninety years he has been drawing, painting, engraving and printing, rising to become one of Britain’s best-known and most loved artists. Sincere, practical and unpretentious, Gentleman’s insights are a breath of fresh air.
- Don't wait for inspiration to strike
- Keep your studio uncluttered
- Do it every day even on holiday
A Pinch of Salt Path
Raynor Winn
The Salt Path
Paperback, £10.99
The publishing world was rocked by the revelations on Sunday in The Observer that Raynor Winn, whose actual name is Sally Walker, was not entirely truthful about the circumstances in which they lost their house. As well as the accusations of fraud and embezzlement, it also transpires the Winn/Walkers own a property in France and even Moth, whose real name is Tim (Moth being the middle of Timothy) may not have been as ill as his claimed diagnosis.
The daughter of the victim of the fraud used to seek the book out in second hand shops and write the true version of events inside the front cover. We'd love to find one of those copies.
We have just heard today from Penguin that Raynor Winn's fourth book, On Winter Hill, has been postponed until next year.
Dry Gardening
Olivier Filippi
Planting Designs for Dry Gardens
Hardback, £40
A beautiful, inspirational book is a welcome addition to the challenge of gardening in these new and hotter circumstances. Watering is not an option. Listing 200 tough but beautiful dry garden plants. Filippi is also the author of The Dry Garden Handbook.
Summer of 1976 in Fiction
Maggie O'Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave
Paperback, £10.99
Any Maggie O'Farrell novel is a treat and this one from 2013 is no exception.
It's July 1976 and London is in the grip of a heatwave. It hasn't rained for months, the gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he's going round the corner to buy a newspaper.
He doesn't come back.
Summer of 1976 in Non-Fiction
John L. Williams
Heatwave: the Summer of 1976, Britain at Boiling Point
Hardback, £22.00
With scorching temperatures soaring to 35 degrees Centigrade, severe water shortages and a sunburned population queuing at the street standpipes, the summer of 1976 will always be remembered as Britain's hottest on record.
But the wave that hit the UK that year was also cultural and political with upheaval on the streets, in parliament, on the cricket pitch and on the radios and tv sets of a nation at a crossroads.
The Aldeburgh Bookshop Book Club
At The Aldeburgh Bookshop - Everyone welcome
Monday 14th July at 6 pm
Banu Mushtaq
Heart Lamp
Paperback, £13.99 (reduced from £14.99)
Winner of the International Booker Prize this year. Author and activist Banu Mushtaq's twelve short stories about everyday life in southern India.
Monday 11th August at 6 pm
Niall Williams
This is Happiness
Paperback, £8.99 (reduced from £9.99)
We thought we needed something cheery and heartwarming in these troubled times and this delightful novel published in 2019 is just the ticket.
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain. But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish – the electricity is finally arriving. With it comes a lodger to Noel’s home, Christy McMahon.
Chapter I
It had stopped raining.
This is a tender, meandering look at a lost way of rural life, where time has -- literally -- a different meaning, storytelling is all important, and the joys and pains of first love are exquisitely described. It is also very funny. Faha is a sort of Irish Lake Woebegone.
Monday 8th September at 6 pm
Vincenzo Latronico
Perfection
Paperback £11.99 (reduced from £12.99)
Tori has selected this Fitzcarraldo book about the emptiness of contemporary existence.
Tom and Anna, an expat couple carefully curate their lives through plants and Radiohead LPs in this deliciously pessimistic chronicle of gentrifying Berlin.
Spotted on Film
Cambridge Imprint hardback notebooks
Assorted designs, £15.99
The one pictured here is Charleston Ripple.
Eagle-eyed we spotted these notebooks being sold in the village shop by the resourceful Amanda in the engaging film The Ballad of Wallis Island. She stocks them for the visiting writers.
Cambridge Imprint hardback notebooks are inspired by the slim patterned German Insel-Bücherei books of the inter-war period. (In the United Kingdom, King Penguins had a similar design, and later on Ladybird books shared the same format.) They have 80 pages of plain cream paper, sewn properly and bound into a slim, light hardback notebook, covered in our patterned paper, that opens completely flat.
Each notebook measures 18.5 cm tall by 12 cm wide. The front cover has a rectangular cream label.
Summer Cooking
Cathy Gaynor
Recipes from Le Rouzet: An English Cook in France
Hardback, £16.99
We have done astonishlngly well with Cathy's two brilliant, cookable recipe books and we've just replenished our stocks of her first one, cooking in France, as well as her latest, Recipes from a London Kitchen.
The books have raised heaps of money for Suffolk charities.
What a lovely book (Rick Stein)
A lovely book for a worthy cause, marrying the
very best of Britain and France (Alain Roux)
It is hard to beat French food when you want simple and delicious, and this cookbook will help you get there with sumptuous recipes AND photography(Thomasina Miers)
Eighty Years On
James Holland and Al Murray
Victory '45: The End of War in Eight Surrenders
Hardback, £22
Victory '45: The End of War in Eight Surrenders which has been published to coincide with the 0th Anniversary of the end of the Second World War is a fascinating study of exactly what happened.
The shock of the discovery of concentration camps, the sheer relief that it was all over, the many examples of the bravery of both men and women on and off the battlefield and the threat of Stalin in the background are themes that run through this outstanding book. The book shows the mechanics of how the fighting finished. It was not a done deal that the fighting would stop once Hitler had died or that a delusional Emperor of Japan would surrender after the atomic bomb was dropped. It is a story that is both gripping and brilliant.
Pre-orders
India Knight's Home
India Knight
Home: How to love it, live in it and find joy in it
Hardback, £22.00
Pre-order here
We are taking pre-orders for India Knight's forthcoming book which will be published on 16th October this year. India will be signing copies and has kindly agreed to do specific dedications so let us know if you would like a message from India in your signed copy.
India's hugely successful Substack column is the inspiration behind this new book. She has such a generous, warm and perceptive eye which is why her newsletters are beloved by so many. Do you remember the Delia-effect? Before the term influencer was coined, Delia Smith had only to mention a cooking pan and they sold in their thousands. Well, now we have the India-effect.
We follow India's reading selections closely so delighted to see that some of the books she is recommending as summer reads actually came from the Aldeburgh Bookshop. Many of these we've mentioned before, but here they are again:
Rebecca Stanley
Consider Yourself Kissed
Hardback, £16.99
Funny, smart love story set in London and a portrait of a marriage. For fans of One Day and Bridget Jones.
Anna Hope
Albion
Hardback, £16.99
This is one of our favourite new books of this summer, it is a clever new take on the English country house novel and a family drama revolving round re-wilding and asking questions about our heritage.
Noussaibah Younis
Fundamentally
Hardback, £16.99
Bridget Jones with Isis brides.
Rosanna Pike
A Little Trickerie
Paperback, £9.99
We've definitely mentioned this one before -- a gutsy, playful novel about a medieval con woman.
Lissa Evans
Small Bomb at Dimperley
Paperback, £9.99 (due 14th August)
Hardback, £18.99 available now
Another country house novel, this one about the challenges facing a family after the Second World War. Highly recommended.
Pre Orders continued
The Long-Awaited Third Volume of The Book of Dust
Philip Pullman
The Rose Field
Hardback, £25.00
Publication date 23rd October 2025
We will have some of the Exclusive Independent Editions. We are not sure how many we will be able to get and these will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.
Provisional Details:
Block sprayed edge
Chris Wormell mono art frontispiece
Custom end papers
Bespoke case design
‘Lyra: what will you do when you find this place in the desert, the opening to the world of the roses?’ ‘Defend it,’ Lyra said. ‘Die defending it.’ When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. Pantalaimon had run from her – part of himself – in search of her imagination, which he believed she had lost.