The Pitshanger Bookshop is open again!
Our opening hours are Tuesday to Friday 9:30 am to 5:30 pm and Saturday 9:30 am to 4:30 pm.
In order to comply with safety guidelines we ask that only three customers or family groups come into the shop at a time. We are providing hand sanitiser and gloves so that you can safely pick up books and other products.
If you are isolating and are unable to visit the shop, please contact us and we can arrange home delivery.
For any enquiries, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Thank you for your support
Book of the Week
Dear Life by Rachel Clarke
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Your Life in My Hands comes this vibrant, tender and deeply personal memoir that finds light and love in the darkest of places. As a specialist in palliative medicine, Dr Rachel Clarke chooses to inhabit a place many people would find too tragic to contemplate. Every day she tries to bring care and comfort to those reaching the end of their lives and to help make dying more bearable. Rachel's training was put to the test in 2017 when her beloved GP father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She learned that nothing - even the best palliative care - can sugar-coat the pain of losing someone you love. And yet, she argues, in a hospice there is more of what matters in life - more love, more strength, more kindness, more joy, more tenderness, more grace, more compassion - than you could ever imagine. For if there is a difference between people who know they are dying and the rest of us, it is simply this: that the terminally ill know their time is running out, while we live as though we have all the time in the world. Dear Life is a book about the vital importance of human connection, by the doctor we would all want by our sides at a time of crisis. It is a love letter - to a father, to a profession, to life itself.
Book at Bedtime
The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson
When twenty-two-year-old Gerty Freely travels to Russia to work as a governess in early 1914, she has no idea of the vast political upheavals ahead, nor how completely her fate will be shaped by them. Yet as her intimacy with the charismatic inventor, Nikita Slavkin, deepens, she's inspired by his belief in a future free of bourgeois clutter, alight with creativity and sleek as a machine. In 1917, revolution sweeps away the Moscow Gerty knew. The middle classes - and their governesses - are fleeing the country, but she stays, throwing herself into an experiment in communal living led by Slavkin. In the white-washed modernist rooms of the commune the members may be cold and hungry, but their overwhelming feeling is of exhilaration. They abolish private property and hand over everything, even their clothes, to the collective; they swear celibacy for the cause. Yet the chaos and violence of the outside world cannot be withstood for ever. Nikita Slavkin's sudden disappearance inspires the Soviet cult of the Vanishing Futurist, the scientist who sacrificed himself for the Communist ideal. Gerty, alone and vulnerable, must now discover where that ideal will ultimately lead.
These are the books that were most popular with our customers last week......
1. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
2. Dogman 9: Grime and Punishment by Dav Pilkey
3. Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
4. Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre
5. Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith
6. Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls
7. Wizards of Once: Never and Forever by Cressida Cowell
8. Dead Doubles by Trevor Barnes
9. V2 by Robert Harris
10. The Confession by Jessie Burton
If you would like to read any of these books, please send us a message from our contacts page, and we will reserve a copy for you.
Pitshanger Bookshop has been a feature on Pitshanger Lane for nearly 20 years. My name is Fiona Kennedy and I've owned the shop since August 2011.
