Voice of the Books | September 2021

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“As we move effortlessly into Autumn there are some excellent titles coming into paperback that didn’t get a fair shake due to the stop-start 18 months we have just had, so I thought I would bring them to your attention again. William Boyd is one our best loved novelists, and has written a fascinating book set in the sixties. James Rebanks (barrister-turned-farmer) continues to write about the challenges of balancing modern farming and sustainable husbandry in the wild and beautiful Yorkshire countryside.” – Wayne

Trio by William Boyd – £8.99

A producer. A novelist. An actress. It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. There are riots in Paris and the Vietnam War is out of control. While the world is reeling our three characters are involved in making a Swingin’ Sixties movie in sunny Brighton. All are leading secret lives. Elfrida is drowning her writer’s block in vodka; Talbot, coping with the daily dysfunction of making a film, is hiding something in a secret apartment; and the glamorous Anny is wondering why the CIA is suddenly so interested in her. But the show must go on and, as it does, the trio’s private worlds begin to take over their public ones. Pressures build inexorably – someone’s going to crack. Or maybe they all will.

English Pastoral An Inheritance by James Rebanks £9.99

As a boy, James Rebanks’s grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. English Pastoral tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope. Of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.

Sherborne’s independent bookshop Winstone’s has won the ‘British Book Awards South West Bookseller of the Year’ four times and was winner of the ‘Independent Bookseller of the Year’ national award in 2016.
Owner Wayne Winstone is one of the three judges for this year’s Costa Prize for Fiction. This year Wayne was selected as one of the top 100 people in the Book Trade’s Most Influential Figures listing.

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