Little Acts of Kindness

Recently, we have spotted these darling little notes in some of our books. We have no idea who the mystery sweetheart is, but it's just lovely to see, with all the negativity in the world, that someone is trying to put a smile on people's faces in a really simple and creative way. Several comments on this picture, when it appeared on the Facebook page Spotted Witney, prove that it's not just us who love this - but our customers as well.

It doesn't take much to make the world a little brighter, people! :)

Award-winning author Catherine Chanter at Witney Library!

Don't make plans for 23 March! At 7:30, at Witney Library, Catherine Chanter, an Oxfordshire author who won the Lucy Cavendish Prize 2013 for her debut "The Well", which is now being published by Simon & Schuster, will talk and answer questions about her new novel.

To take it from the experts, Jessie Burton, author of the glorious "The Miniaturist", is raving about "The Well":

"There was so much that impressed me… The boldness with which Catherine depicts her characters in their bravery and emotional squalor was incredible... whilst she showed how we manipulate each other, she also focused on the harder, hidden truths about how in turn we want, or need, to be manipulated ourselves.... Set against the natural beauty of the Well, Catherine also paints an exquisitely painful portrait of a marriage under threat - not just from an unnerving meteorology, but the tempests of the mind.... The Well asks us where do we seek refuge, and why? And perhaps it shows us that what is left after all is suffered, is love. Battered, weathered, at the end of the novel it comes cresting over the hill, a herald of relief. Bravo, that woman. I loved this book!"

Good, evocative writing is enough to get this here bookseller totally engrossed in a book. Just listen to this!

'One summer was all it took before our dream started to curl at the edges and

stain like picked primroses. One night is enough to swallow a lifetime of lives.'

But what is it about?

 

When Ruth Ardingly and her family first drive up from London in their grime-encrusted car and view The Well, they are enchanted by a jewel of a place, a farm that appears to offer everything the family are searching for. An opportunity for Ruth. An escape for Mark. A home for their grandson Lucien.

But The Well's unique glory comes at a terrible price, and quickly Ruth's paradise becomes a prison, Mark's dream a recurring nightmare, and Lucien's playground a grave.
With the pace of a thriller and the heart of a literary smash hit, The Well is a dark and devastating tale of obsession, motherhood and the complexity of female relationships, wrapped inside a gripping whodunit.

TICKETS ARE FREE, INCLUDE REFRESHMENTS AND CAN BE COLLECTED FROM WITNEY LIBRARY, WELCH WAY FROM THE COUNTER.

TICKETS ARE LIMITED AND WILL BE OFFERED ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS

Bookseller Vacancy

Bookseller Vacancy: Come and join the team at Waterstones

You love books? We love books…

Our customers love books too, and love buying books and gifts from us, thanks to the fantastic environment, choice and service provided by our knowledgeable, friendly and enthusiastic teams.

Our Booksellers are the hearts of our bookshops and what makes them so unique and enticing. They know what their customers want from their bookshop, and deliver it through their friendliness, enthusiasm, knowledge and love of books.

To be a great bookseller, you will provide excellent customer service, friendly and professional at all times. You will also help keep our bookshops vibrant and enticing; from creating inspiring displays to helping out at our special events, there will always be plenty of opportunity to use your initiative.

If all this sounds like you, you’re in luck as we have a vacancy for a Bookseller (part time including weekends). So if you’re friendly, flexible and enthusiastic*, come in for a quick chat and pick up an application form.

* and love books…

Paddington Story Time!!

If you are looking for something to do this half term, why not join us at Waterstones in Witney for a Paddington story time on Friday 20th February at 10.am. There might even be a marmalade sandwich or two!

And the winner of the Mother's Day Drawing Competition is.... *drumroll*

Some of you may remember that Waterstones held a Mother's Day drawing competition at the start of the year, asking children to submit a drawing of their mother to be used on our Mother's Day window and shop posters. Considering that Waterstones has over 300 shops country-wide, you can imagine that'd be a strapping heap of submissions. While there isn't just one winner - several submissions will be on the posters - it still chuffs us to bits that one of them comes from Witneyshiretown.

Little Edgar Varese's Mumsie will be gracing our Mother's Day poster - congratulations, Edgar!

Doomsday Kids 3: Amaranth's Return - A Review

With book 3 in the Doomsday Kids series, Folan has truly revved up the tension and the stakes.

I have previously reviewed Book 1 and Book 2, and it's safe to say that I've become absolutely hooked.
In fact, when I, after an agonising wait, got this instalment through, I tore through it in just a few hours. Who needs sleep anyway? This was just a few weeks ago, and already I have read it again. And even though I knew what was going to happen, it still gripped me as much as the first time around.

One thing I absolutely love in this series is how each book focuses on a different character and manages to refine them into multi-faceted beings that live and breathe and love and ache and fight and survive and fail in your head. Not that the other instalments don't characterise them enough, but in this format you really get the whole gist.

This time, the story is told from Amaranth’s point of view, the troubled, rebellious outcast with a dark past – and finally we learn where she came from, the demons she is fighting, her previous history with the other characters, and how it has shaped her into the person she is now, explaining all her erratic and angry behaviour. Yet there is no cliché to her at all.
 

           "Amaranth's Return" has some seriously dark undertones, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a new level of grit and maturity that will make this book perfect reading for adults as well, showing what humans on the edge of survival can be truly capable of. There is no whitewash, no light version of the post-apocalypse. There were a few times when I had to put the book down and catch my breath. And if I had had any doubts in book 1 whether a postnuclear world had been “adequately” described in terms of how horrific it will be, those doubts are gone. Amaranth and Rod, who has been reduced to a pitiful shadow of his former self by radiation sickness, are on their way to find out if Rod's mother has survived, facing a world which makes their mountain place look like a holiday camp. Outside the bubble of their well-prepped shelter, as inadequate as it may have seemed to them at first, the outer world has well and truly gone down the toilet. Humans have been reduced to feral creatures out of sheer need to survive. Even the more organised groups have lost all their humanity.
It’s an equally  horrific and heartbreaking world, impossible for a reader to abandon or forget. There is cannibalism, a sinister, cultish commune, and a climatic moment of true cosmic horror. But there is also bravery, despite the tensions tightening bonds between – of all people – Wasserman and Amaranth, an old character returning and a new character being introduced. By the end you will quite possibly be bawling, over someone you never thought you'd care so much about.            

           It’s rare that I have been so emotionally involved in something that is (misleadingly) classed as teen fiction. This is quite possibly some of the best self-published fiction I have ever read, along with Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy and Andy Weir’s The Martian. I have worked as a bookseller and reviewer for years and have seen much less deserving writing receive publishers’ attentions… in fact, I want to slap them silly for not headhunting Karyn Langhorne Folan.

All of it is written in such a fantastic descriptive way that the story unfolds like a film in your head… a film that will leave you quite possibly pumped with adrenaline and your nails bitten to the quick.

And again the story ends with a magnificent cliffhanger that makes you want to scream in frustration that you have to wait for the next instalment.

But at least it's coming. At least it's coming!

Not reading this is NOT an option!

 Lots of booky love,

 

Patty :)

 

The Bees by Laline Paull

Inexplicably, The Bees is a book I'd normally have never picked up. Just goes to show that one can be blinded by one's own literary rut, and looks can be deceiving. I should really know better, because The Miniaturist by Jesse Burton, which not just has been a Book of the Month for us, but is also in our first 2015 Bookclub AND our Book of the Year (and Specsavers', I might add!) was a completely unexpected surprise for me, and now I'm raving like a lunatic (a happy, safe one!) about it. But one digresses. Bees. We're here for the Bees.

 

 

Anyways, I started reading The Bees, and it made my jaw drop.

It's basically Watership Down meets Divergent meets The Handmaid's Tale meets 1984. With bees. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT FROM A BOOK??

 

Beautifully descriptive, it sucks you right into the bee life, like a strange Kafkaesque Honey-I-shrunk-the-kids-and-turned-them-into-bees experience - it does what a book should do, create a film in your head that involves your every sense.

Obviously I won't give anything away, but if this doesn't entice you, read what author Laline Paull writes about the inspiration of the book. I promise you if you're not hooked and intrigued then, then it's possibly because you have a bee-phobia.

 

In which case, I apologise.

 

 

Wholeheartedly from the hive-mind,

 

Patty :)