Tender portraits make for an engaging read.
A bookseller’s diary.
Clapham, co-owner, with her mother (aka Business Mum), of a small, independent bookshop in the English town of Lytham St Annes, shares a lighthearted chronicle of one year—their 14th—in the precarious business of bookselling. She begins in January, typically a slow month, when nippy days require several cups of tea and her only visitors might be her grandmother (Retirement Gran) and daughter (Bookwormlet). Many entries recount the weather, which is usually awful: chilly, damp, rainy (from torrential to drizzle), with rare spells of sunshine. Books, puppets, bookmarks, postcards—the shop offers many delights, and yet so many people pass by. With the shop door open no matter what the weather, Clapham overhears some comments. “It’s…a bookshop,” one passerby remarks, aghast. “Oh, no!” “I just really do love bookshops,” another announces, but, Clapham notes, isn’t even tempted to come in. Trying to make a living selling books seems foolhardy: “[T]here’s no real reason why we shouldn’t be flooded with customers today,” she writes, “other than the death of the high street, the devaluation of books, the cost-of-living crisis and the town’s general ennui.” She hopes that the opening of Starbucks down the street will increase foot traffic, and, in August, when a fancy patisserie opens, she looks forward to collecting “some crumbs from the flocks of customers that will surely come.” Clapham creates warm, funny cameos of buyers and browsers: some with children, some with dogs, some with specific requests. One wants a book on how to use a smartphone; one has the wrong title and the wrong author. “I find it anyway,” she boasts. Despite the challenges, she loves selling books, each one “a promise of an experience.”
Tender portraits make for an engaging read.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9780063516625
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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