I was offered a copy of this by the publisher, and the email said it was for fans of Black Cake, The Girl with the Louding Voice and My Name is Leon: I can understand this, as it’s a lovely coming of age story about a resilient teenager carving her own way in the world like all of those, but with its own differences.
Ishi Robinson – “Sweetness in the Skin”
(24 November 2023, NetGalley)
I feel the tiniest little stab somewhere in my side at the idea that my poverty is an adventure for her, but eventually I smile back. Maybe, I think, it won’t be so bad. Maybe she’ll see me for who I really am and I can stop pretentding. Maybe this will be a good thing.
Pumkin lives in a small house half way between the near-slums and the good areas in Kingston, Jamaica, able to go to a good school because her Aunt Sophie pays her school fees, but feeling like she has to hide that she lives in a tiny house with her grandmother, her mother who wants little to do with her and resents Sophie and her sophisticated aunt who’s also teaching her ways of hiding who you are, working at the French embassy and dreaming of moving to France.
When Sophie gets her dream, she promised to send for Pumkin, but Pumkin’s mum turns on her and refuses to let her take the exam she needs, no good at standing up for her when things go wrong at school. But Pumkin has a secret weapon: two, actually – her ability to make friends and her ability to bake. Surrounded by found family and adding people to it, notably a rather scary teacher at a French language school she needs to attend to get her exam, she bakes her way to having the requisite savings and gathers folk around her who can help her when the going gets tough. Will she make it to France, and does she need to?
I was worried this was going to be a simple bootstraps out of shameful poverty story – but it’s not, she sees the value in her roots, laughs at a posh friend who can’t cope visiting her and is not ashamed of herself – or that she’d find a White boyfriend to help her – again, no, just a variety of different Jamaican friends, including older women and a lovely guy who’s just a lovely guy and nothing else. There’s an underlying strong message about colourism and class, Pumkin’s mum having darker skin than Aunt Sophie and thus being less favoured, and class distinctions being harsh.
With some borderline distressing scenes (nothing as bad as in “The Girl with the Louding Voice”) this was on the whole a lovely, positive read which was also realistic in the hard work Pumkin put in and the sometimes strained relationships with her friends and family.
Thank you to Penguin Random House for offering me a copy of this book to read via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Sweetness in the Skin” was published on 11 April 2024.
I have been making an effort for the past few years to only do reading challenges using books already on my TBR. This has meant that in the Marches of most years I’ve either read a book for Reading Ireland Month or a book for Reading Wales. Well, this year I’ve already done my Reading Ireland Month book and I’d resigned myself to not having a Reading Wales one for Book Jotter’s challenge until the need to buy a Spanish phrasebook in a hurry led to a hasty purchase off my wishlist from an unmentionable retailer (sorry, Proper Bookshop!) and a read for Reading Wales. Of course, then I discovered that Horatio Clare counts anyway and I had one of his on my TBR but there you go. I took this one on holiday with me and had intended to start it on the plane home but got chatting to an interesting fellow-passenger instead, so it’s followed me around during the week after our holiday, and a very rewarding read it’s proved to be, too. Oh, and it’s published by the excellent indie publisher, Repeater Books.
Darren Chetty, Grug Muse, Hanan Issa, Iestyn Tyne (eds) – “Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales”
(8 March 2024)
… we found ourselves returning to questions of what we mean by Welshness, Welsh identities and Welsh culture. What do these phrases mean to a Cardiffian, or a West Walian; those living in Wales, the Welsh diaspora, those newly arrived in Wales; those with ties across the border, across the sea? What do they mean to the Muslim, agnositc, lapsed Catholic, just-there-for-the-singing nonconformist The Welsh speaker, Welsh learner, non-Welsh speaker? In order to explore these questions collectively we sought a diversity of perspectives for this book. (Editors’ Introduction, p. 3)
A wonderfully varied collection of pieces by writers of all types and backgrounds, some known to me, many not. There are essays, experimental pieces, complex sociological works, memoir, poetry and a choose-your-own adventure among the 19 works in the book. Cerys Hafana’s “A Tradition of Change” looks at Welsh music and folklore traditions through an outsider’s lens, picking out and unpicking flexibilities and inflexibilities, imposed binaries. Darren Chetty takes a good, hard look at his local “Black Boy” pub and its changing sign, interrogating other pubs with the same name. In Kandace Siobhan Waalker’s piece we see what it’s like to be Black in the Welsh countryside – “We transpose, we self-graft. The braider in our front room. Cookouts in the orchard, barely twenty degrees. Ackee under apple trees” (p. 65).
Gary Raymond’s “Being a Welsh Novelist: A Choose Your Destiny Adventure Game” really is just that, but cleverly with some paragraphs you can never reach by taking the pre-set routes, only by going off-piste (or knowing the right people) and Grug Muse’s “Datganoli / Devolution” shows communities undermining closures, with banks and schools stripped out of small towns being repurposed by committees as spaces for people. Two interesting pieces, Joe Dunthorne’s “We Bleed Red” and Andy Welch’s “Rhyl Talk” look at the diaspora: a non-Welsh-speaker who sounds English in a Welsh pub in London and a North Walian trying to explain that his accent is acceptably Welsh (I wonder if this one has changed with the popularity of “Welcome to Wrexham” on TV with its noticeable North Wales voices). Marvin Thompson’s “On Writing a Modern Welsh Horror” deconstructs the writing of his own poems about slavery and colonialism in a fascinating way.
Changing curricula, moving away to become more accepted as Welsh in Scotland, being a hijabi Welsh woman and failing to write an essay are more clever and deep approaches in the book, along with pieces about particular towns (Merthyr, Swansea) and just such a wide range of subjects, styles and experiences it’s impossible to cover in one review. I urge you to rush off and secure yourselves a copy (from an indie bookshop, bookshop.org or direct from the publisher, of course!).
I received this in one of Bookish Beck’s lovely book parcels in 2021 and of the eleven books I acquired in the month, I’ve discarded one and read and reviewed nine, which feels like progress. I have earlier acquired books than this on the TBR but I wanted something to take on holiday and it was the first paperback on there.
Anita Roy and Pippa Marland (eds) – “Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the 21st Century”
(11 December 2021, gift)
I’m not sure this is exactly an almanac in the traditional sense, but it is an enticing and enjoyable collection of essays on outdoors and nature by non-traditional (i.e. not White Straight Male) nature writers. There’s a Foreword by Bernardine Evaristo sharing her own experiences of open spaces and nature and then a range of fairly new voices, though all have been published elsewhere or, at the time of publication, had books on the go. For example, Michael Malay shares something that became part of his lovely book, “Late Light” and Luke Turner his “Men at War” (on the wishlist).
Alys Fowler’s there with a great piece on mud and tantalising glimpses of her work secretly reconstructing paths in a park that must be local to me, and unknown to me names whose work I greatly enjoyed, such as Jay Griffith’s piece on walking and its constraints by society and landowners, and Testament’s ruminations on a life outdoors in poetry and prose. There are links between the pieces – climate change and particularly the Covid lockdowns – but they are also nicely varied, with many looking at dual locations or experiences in other ways.
I must have requested this book after seeing it on a NetGalley email newsletter: I try to read about different communities ands the unhoused youth of America are people I haven’t really read about with the exception of bits and pieces in novels and memoirs.
Vicki Sokolik – “If You See Them: Young, Unhoused, and Alone in America”
(03 October 2023, NetGalley)
Although this is of necessity rooted in the US and indeed Florida, with different states having different laws and support systems, I’m sure a lot of the basic idea of this book – that there’s a huge number of young people out there who are invisibly homeless, sofa-surfing or living in unsafe and temporary accommodation who don’t get the sort-of-support you get within the fostering and care systems and need help – would hold true in the UK and elsewhere, too.
Sokolik has made it her life’s work to support these young people, given impetus by her son making a friend who was in a desperate situation. She has even changed laws in Florida, alongside the young people she’s supported. There are stories of various young people in their own voices interspersed with Sokolik’s narrative as she navigates supporting both them and her daughter who lives with epilepsy, ands although there are things which are hard to read – of course – the main message is of positivity.
Having been doing this for a couple of decades, she’s able to share longer-term outcomes, which helps, though with honesty that there is a lot more to be done, and in other states and countries, too. An inspiring and honest book I was glad to have read.
Thank you to Spiegel & Grau for selecting me to read this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “If You See Them” was published on 13 February 2024
I’ve been getting through my January and February NetGalley reads: I found it interesting that one claims it’s not the end of the world and we can turn things around, while the other two seem to demonstrate situations that can’t be changed. I’m putting Blessings first because it was the best of the three and you might not read to the end (they get shorter!) but do have a look at all of these!
Chukwuebuka Ibeh – “Blessings”
(NetGalley, 21 August 2023)
She considered him her other half – he was, in a sense, eternally tethered to her. And it broke her heat, even more than she despaired for her own life, to think of what the news would do to him.
This, indeed heart-breaking, book is set in Nigeria in 2007 to around 2016 and follows the coming of age of Obiefuna, oldest of two boys, who lives in Port Harcourt, loves his mum and is doing well at school. His dad catches him having a “moment” with his male apprentice and off Obiefuna is sent to a seminary, seemingly based on a conolial public school, where, with the help of two of his room-mates, he learns to navigate the system and tolerate the environment. Homosexuality is not tolerated but lives are carved out in the margins, often through oppression rather than consent, and the only openly and provocatively gay student is punished in an act Obiefuna is complicit in through fear.
This environment and fear of being “other” continues as he goes to university and meets the older Miebi. They have what seems like a lovely relationship, although tensions start to rise in the chosen family Miebi has gathered around him and the political and legal situation in Nigeria becomes more oppressive. People have to make choices, and they’re awful ones, but the consequences are, too. This book reminded me a bit of “Nervous Conditions” and with a shout-out coming to Buchi Emecheta, there’s a similarity there, too. The language is quite plain with not a lot of description and a clear Nigerian English voice comes through which hasn’t been edited out thank goodness.
Although the book is quite bleak and ends with Obiefuna back where he started, touring his old neighbourhood in something like despair, I’m glad I had the chance to read it and learn about the lives of LGBTQ people in modern Nigeria.
Thank you to Penguin for getting in touch to offer me this book to read via NetGalley. “Blessings” was published on 22 February 2024.
Ela Lee – “Jaded”
(NetGalley, 3 November 2023)
Omma and Baba were both raised in post-war eras in which their infant republics took their first, unstable stps into democracy. Omma was a student when she joined a protest againt military-backed dictatorship […] Baba was harvesting hazelnuts as soon as he could walk, under the type of sun that smouldered all below it. His living memory was one of constant, relentless labour.
A rather bleak book, for which I need to issue a strong trigger warning for rape. It’s mainly notable for its central character’s Korean-Turkish family background, which is explored in detail as Ceyda (Starbucks name: Jade) and her posh, White English partner Kit, interact with her parents. Ceyda works in a big law firm and puts everything into it while dealing with constant microaggressions from colleagues and Kit’s friendship group which are slowly revealed through the book. Thank goodness she has her best friends, Adele and Eve.
Jade holds everything in firm control and does it all right until, blind drunk, a collegue she previously liked coerces her ito a taxi and rapes her after a business event where even the big boss is pawing at her. The rest of the book explores her gradual realisation of what happened and the inevitable conclusions from this being done to a young woman of multiple heritage in a large, White, male law firm. The repercussions are strong, realistically, and “feminist”, “anti-racist” Kit shows his true colours.
The book explores consent, complicit racism and City company culture and it has power, but would be very triggering for many and I don’t think the book description of “sexual assault” really covers that.
Thank you to Harvill Secker for making this book available to me via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Jaded” was published on 8 February 2024.
Hannah Ritchie – “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet”
(NetGalley, 6 September 2023)
In Not the End of the World, I’ll explain why I think we can be the first to achieve sustainability […] Most chapters will open with a flashy – and damaging – headline that you might have seen before. I’ll explain why each of them is wrong […] I’ll pull out the big things that are really making a difference and which we should all focus on, and the things we should all stress less about.
In this provocative book, Ritchie takes all the negatives we think about – global warming, population growth, pollution, etc. – and shows how they’re not as bad as we think as long as we take action now. She is clear on that last point, but it’s overshadoweed a bit by the use of statistics (all heavily referenced) to prove her first points, and I do worry that it will give the casual reader the impression there’s nothing to be done or you can’t change things. Her central point is that fossil fuels and farming are the two big things that affect everything, so in fact not having a car and not eating beef (tick, tick: smug me) are the two things it’s beset for us to do, as well as lobbying governments and donating to worthwhile organisations once you’ve checked their credentials. Even going meat-free one day a week would help a lot, if everyone did it. Not using plastic straws, not so much, if you live in a Western nation that doesn’t promote waste going into the sea (although you should pick plastic up when on a British beach).
That’s my takeaways: there’s lots in here but I suggest you read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Thank you to Chatto & Windus for making this book available to me via NetGalley in return for an honest review. “Not the End of the World” was published on 11 January 2024.
I bought this book and had it signed at a super event run by the Heath Bookshop at a local school. I attended with my friend Julia, missed Gill entirely and saw a whole host of other people I knew. The queue for signing was so long but well-organised and it had to be done. I picked this one off for my 2024 TBR project and because I wanted to read the hardback before the paperback came out, and it was such a good read, I raced through it. Of the nine books I acquired in print in October 2023, I’ve read this one and read half of a review book I didn’t realise I’d had for so long …
Grace Dent – “Comfort Eating: What We Eat When Nobody’s Looking”
(04 October 2023, The Heath Bookshop – book event)
And although this moment in time is gone, and my parents are gone, and the dog is gone, and the family house is sold, and I’m now a grown adult who can have crisps any time I choose, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. In fact, every time someone puts crisps in a bowl to be fancy, well, I think about all of it. (p. 189)
Grace Dent has a Comfort Eating podcast in which she invites celebrities into her home to talk about the food they eat for comfort: they cook the food together and share it and talk about all sorts. This book arose from the podcast and also the loss of Dent’s mother; they were together sharing comfort food during her last weeks and her loss is woven through the book as well as that of Dent’s father earlier.
That’s not to say it’s a sad book – although there are poignant moments there are also surprises, memories for everyone (especially if you’re of the same vintage as Dent, as I am approximately), interesting points about class, and laugh-out-loud moments.
Perishable ingredients are allowed, but frowned upon, Almost everything in your recipe could survive a nuclear incident. Just cockroaches, acid rain and a jar of Dorito Dip.
All herbs must be dried and with long-ago sell-by dates, in tiny glass pots that have survived at least two house moves. No comfort food requires fresh tarragon. (p. 20)
After starting with the Golden Rules for comfort eating (see quotation above), we go through the six main (comfort) food groups are covered in the book (Cheese, Butter, Pasta, Bread, Potatoes and Sweet Treats) with each featuring one podcast guest’s food in detail and mentioning others as well as Dent’s experiences with the food group. There are aditional (hilarious) interludes: Comfort Eating Honours (Aunt Bessie and Mr Kipling get OBEs); Uncomfortable Eating (green peppers and quinoa feature); and Dent’s Dictionary Corner (see what she did there?).
School dinners and unashamed oddity are celebrated, and I saw Tottenham Cake mentioned just after seeing or hearing of it somewhere else (where?) as well as Chocolate Concrete, which I thought was just a Midlands thing but was apparently Cumbrian, too (what local school pudding did you have? I’m from Kent so “Gypsy” Tart was the thing-unknown-outside-the-county for us).
A super read, hard to put down and easy to read, highly recommended especially if you claim to eat seeded brown bread at every opportunity but then send your friend out for thick sliced white bread and strawberry jam when you have Covid. For example. Ahem.
I read this book in December but was sent it by the publisher to write a review for Shiny New Books, so had to submit that and wait for it to come out first. Here’s the different review I offer sometimes when I do that, with my more personal reaction to it emphasised. I have a background in studying sociolinguistics and then remaining interested in it, which gave me a slightly expert view on it, but I thought it was excellent and certainly learned a lot, too. My more professional (allegedly!), less personal, review on Shiny New Books is here.
Rob Drummond – “You’re All Talk: Why We Are What We Speak”
(November 2023, from the publisher)
This is a book about the relationship between how we speak and who we are. More precisely, it’s a book about the role of spoken language, specifically English, in creating all the different version of us that we employ in our day-to-day lives … The way we speak can provide a lot of clues about us – where we live or where we’re from, our social class, possibly even our jobs, and maybe more. (p. 4)
Rob Drummond is a professor of sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University and is particularly interested in accents and more generally the relationship between our selves and how we speak.
Drummond starts the book with an explanation of accents and a short and accessible history of English. We then broadly look at accents and class / race / gender / sexuality; discrimination; and language change.
This is a book that is firmly underpinned by a call for social justice – of all kinds. There’s discussion of intersectionality, i.e. the joint effects that our race, class, gender, etc. will have had on societal expectations of us and the way we speak, and there is a whole chapter on prejudice and discrimination around accents. Drummond makes a very good point here on the somewhat famous g-dropping criticism around football commentator Alex Scott, criticised roundly for doing something that posh white men talking about huntin’, shootin’ and fishing’ have done happily for centuries. He’s also clear that when people complain about “not understanding” people’s accents whose English is a second or additional language, it’s “a listener issue rather than a speaker issue” and often a way of, as he puts it, “laundering other prejudices into a socially acceptable format” (p. 127).
As part of the discussion on style-shifting and code-switching, which is associated with the above points, there are a fascinating few paragraphs about how people who learn a second or additional language out of necessity (after moving countries) will retain particular pronunciations that are non-standard so indicate their background, consciously, rather than striving for an exact match to the new country’s language and accent, in order to demonstrate their first language identity and the identities that come with that. He also criticises official policy that demands all residents speak English while not providing language courses and acknowledging how hard it is to learn another language. Aboriginal and other Indigenous languages and their role in the countries that include Indigenous communities are also included in this chapter; I appreciated the wide range of the book in this respect.
I really liked the little personal and family anecdotes that are included in the book. I really enjoyed the discussion of covert prestige, which is where a less officially prestigious accent, such as Cockney, becomes a more appropriate accentual code than one’s own received pronunciation voice. It was very amusing to read that Drummond, like me and Matthew, resort to a Lahhhndun accent when conversing with people who mend things in our house, even while they usually have Bolton (in his case) or Birmingham (in ours) accents ourselves, to try to raise our acceptability and proximity to usefulness around the house!
There’s a suitably lively discussion of language change and the inevitable dire warnings about this. Drummond pleasingly discusses the gay slang language, Polari, referencing work done on the language by Paul Baker (who I have met and whose book on Polari I own!). Here he’s still careful to check for privilege, pointing out that the adoption of Black youth cultural language as having its own prestige by the majority group looking rather like cultural appropriation of language features marginalised groups have used to amplify their own voices: he shares another writer’s, Imani Benberry’s, advice that if you feel the need to adopt African American Vernacular English from time to time then you should also support Black lives and communities in “loud and consistent ways”. In the postscript he continues the social justice theme, asking readers to at least see how attitudes to language and accents can promote inequalities.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even though I knew (or knew of) a fair bit of the content already. I had a smile at a couple of in-jokes: I loved his question “How many conversations actually include a discussion of bread rolls, or sport shoes, or small alleyways between houses?” (p. 11) as those are key terms that allow people to be identified by region of origin, but of course that is also true.
Thank you to Scribe for sending me a copy of this book to review for Shiny New Books, which of course I also did.
In a vain bid to get my TBR moving along (but more on that in a few days), I finally picked this one off my print TBR, the oldest one. I bought it in November 2021 when I really shouldn’t have been buying books because it’s Christmas and Birthday season (ahem: still doing this!) and of the eight books I bought then, I’ve now read and reviewed five, but of the four social justice books I bought in Oxfam that day, this is the only one so far.
Nikesh Shukla and Sammy Jones (eds.) – “Rife: Twenty-One Stories from Britain’s Youth”
(23 November 2021, Oxfam Books)
We’re going to get to a point where the country has moved so far away from what yong people want they are playing catch-up, and the stress point will test the fabric of what we consider important. This book is about the cracks starting to form. (Shukla, Introduction, p. xii)
This is such a great idea, a set of essays commissioned by Shukla’s Bristol-based organisation Rife (and published through Unbound) about young people’s experiences of life, education, work, mental health and sex/relationships. The only problem now is that this book was published in 2019, pre-Covid pandemic, and so it does unfortunately feel quite out of date. There’s still useful content by a wide variety of voices of authors who’ve had a wide variety of experiences, but, for example, a piece on the “university myth” would be very different when written about a lockdown degree.
I liked the class aspect, and its intersectionality in general, as you would expect with this editor, with a couple of writers being clear on gentrification of the area they grew up in or how university access courses only work so far. And although these pieces were written after Black Lives Matter started but before the big resurgence during lockdown, Ilyas Nagdee’s piece on education captures the start of the Why Is My Curriculum White? movement. Shona Cobb’s essay, “Exclusion” is a thought-provoking portrayal of living with a disability as a young person. The final piece in the book, Tom Greenslade’s “An Intergenerational Conversation” covers his work as a care worker for older adults and the way generations need to understand each other and not exist in bubbles.
So a worthwhile collection which is already becoming a historical document, and I’d like to see a pandemic or post-pandemic version
It’s been a few years since I sat with an annual to read on Christmas Day – probably back in my early teens with a Blue Peter or Pony Magazine one. But on Christmas Day 2023 I sat while Matthew cooked a good roast dinner and worked my way through a book of savagely satirical artworks by the very nice man, Christopher Spencer, aka Cold War Steve. I bought this at the event I went to this month hosted by The Heath Bookshop at the Kitchen Garden Cafe, with the excellent Kit de Waal interviewing Christopher: I didn’t really intend to buy the book but he was such a nice man, and his business such a cottage industry, that I did. And here it is, pictured somewhat incongruously with the jolly Christmas running leggings I’d worn to volunteer at parkrun in the morning.
“Cold War Steve Annual 2024”
(15 December 2023, The Heath Bookshop event)
A selection of 18 months’ worth of digital collages, allowing it to bring in a lot of his Covid-related pieces, including Partygate stuff, as well as more global themes, with some commentary from the artist, alongside essays by Kit de Waal, Stewart Lee and others, so decent value as there’s something to read and intricate images to pore over (and yes, as a prosopagnosic / face-blind person, there’s some irony in squinting at tiny images of faces added to grotesque bodies who you are trying to recognise, but I still enjoyed / appreciated the work).
The famous pieces are here – Tory politicians pissing on the Covid memorial wall (Spencer rather sweetly confided at the event that he checked with the Covid Relatives group before republishing that one), that image of the late Queen alone at Prince Phillip’s funeral contrasted with Tory partying on the opposite page … There are many more, some gross, some pushing right against the edges of decency: but as the artist says, whatever he portrays is a million times less indecent than the behaviour of our so-called leaders.
I think of this as a historical document to hang on to. You can find the Cold War Steve website, including the shop, here.
I’m nearly at the end of my 20 Books of Summer challenge (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) – well, in fact, I’ve now finished reading all my books and just have one more left to review. I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I acquired this one in April this year, profiting from the unused bit of a book token Matthew had been given. I’d previously read the Reykjavik volume (there are over 20 in Comma Press’ series).
Kavita Bhanot (ed.) –“The Book of Birmingham: A City in Short Fiction”
(02 April 2023, From Matthew, from The Heath Bookshop)
It was Chacha-Ji who’d told Bina’s father about the new boy at the factory. Her uncle said, ‘He has just arrived and is not in a good home. Maybe there’s room for him here?’ (p. 15; “Seep” by Sharon Duggal)
Ten short stories with an introduction and a set of short contributor bios. Some of the writers are well-known to me, others new, as is usually the case with such things. In an anthology specifically about a city, and then about a city that you know, the question arises as to whether it’s representative of that city. I’d say yes in this case: it covers a wide time range, some in a single story, as in “Amir Aziz” by Bobby Nayyar, which covers the life of a poor immigrant man made good – but at what cost? and others looking at a notable moment in time, in two cases two of the uprisings that happened in Handsworth.
The stories look at race and racism, at how people live in the city, at the loss of heavy industry and of the way young people find each other and defy their parents, whatever the era, whether that’s the young women in Sharon Duggal’s “Seep” in a boarding house in the 1960s or the one in Jendella Benson’s “The Kindling”, set in more contemporary times.
There are other themes as well as those of uprisings and the loss of industry: the constant redevelopment of Birmingham city centre being one of them. The introduction does a great job of setting the stories in context and the cover design by David Eckersall features iconic buildings of the city (and beyond, as the University’s clock tower is on the front): I started the book on a bus ride into town so took the opportunity to photograph it with the Selfridges building that’s on the cover behind it.
Adventures in reading, running and working from home 
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