These collections are a mix of fact, fiction, prose, poetry, adults’ and children’s books, with a reading for every day of the year.
Bedside Companion for Food Lovers.
Eating is a necessity for all of us but it is also bound up with the rituals of our lives. Everyday rituals such as breakfast, lunch and supper and rituals of celebration: weddings, birthdays, feasts and even fasts. This is not a comprehensive history of food writing, nor is it a balanced collection of extracts. The pieces are taken from books I like and I am obviously biased. So too are the writers; there is an abundance of writing on bread, breakfast and afternoon tea while some foods and meals barely get a mention. I have included very few recipes (most of which I would not recommend trying) as I wanted to create a book which would appeal to the imagination as much as whetting the appetite.
Batsford Autumn 2023
Bedside Companion for Book Lovers.
I grew up in a house full of books, have worked in bookshops for most of my adult life and now live in a house where the books regularly threaten to take over. This should have been the easiest anthology to compile but looking round my shelves when I started collecting pieces, I was slightly daunted. Three hundred and sixty-six pieces may seem a lot but I soon realised that I would have a problem when I compiled a ‘short’ list of over four hundred and eighty possibilities. I hope readers will enjoy my final selection.
2022 Batsford.
Bedside Companion for Gardeners.
Much of my adult life has been spent working in gardens, pottering in them or sitting in them, either reading or simply appreciating the outside space. Even when I didn’t have a garden I had window boxes and spent much of my spare time reading about gardens and making plans for when I finally had one of my own. I have deliberately mixed fact and fiction, practical advice and wildly impractical ideas. My intention was that there would be a balance of the different elements but I hunted down the pieces I liked with no real plan. A few wild flowers even crept in but most of these would happily grace any garden given the opportunity. I did a little pruning but decided that most pieces should stay. As a result the anthology is a little like a slightly unruly climbing rose, tethered to its framework and following a proscribed outline but every so often shooting off at a wild tangent.
2021 Batsford