Welcome to The Woodstock Bookshop

The shop opened in May 2008 and is on the main road in Woodstock, just next to the bus stop. We can supply most books to order by the next day and have several thousand books in stock: to order books ring or email the shop. We have a large selection of children's books and are happy to advise and recommend. We can also supply second-hand and out-of-print titles. We offer discounts for school orders and for book clubs and have a free local delivery service.

We were on the regional shortlist for Independent Bookshop of the Year in 2009, 2013 and 2017, and listed in the Independent's Top 50 UK Bookshops.

BOOK GROUPS
Two monthly book groups take place at the bookshop - a poetry group, initially formed to read collections submitted for the annual T S Eliot Prize and now following a slightly wider brief; and a book group focusing more on fiction. Both are open to everyone but occasionally space is limited - please contact us for details.

BOOKSHOP TALKS
We hold a series of informal talks and readings throughout the year. If you buy any book at the talk the cost of the ticket will be deducted. Please ring or email to book a place - early booking advisable.

WOODSTOCK POETRY FESTIVAL
This year (November 9-11) is the 7th Woodstock Poetry Festival - organised entirely by the bookshop. Full details below.

The Woodstock Literature Society also holds an excellent series of monthly talks - do visit their website for further details.

Twitter: @WoodstockBooks

Wednesday, 28 July 2010

Man Booker Prize Longlist 2010

Here, in alphabetical order, is the longlist, just announced -

Peter Carey - Parrot and Oliver in America
Emma Donoghue – Room
Helen Dunmore - The Betrayal
Damon Galgut - In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson - The Finkler Question*
Andrea Levy - The Long Song
Tom McCarthy - C
David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Lisa Moore - February*
Paul Murray - Skippy Dies*
Rose Tremain – Trespass
Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap*
Alan Warner - The Stars in the Bright Sky*

It is a good list. I have read about half of them and next on my list is Room (I started with the Rose Tremain, which I thought excellent). These prizes are a strange business, with books suddenly being yoked together, the barely comparable being compared. Books with asterisks are available in paperback.

Thursday, 22 July 2010

Edmund de Waal

The Hare with Amber Eyes is one of the best books I have read this year and I am delighted that Edmund de Waal will be talking about it for The Woodstock Bookshop as part of the Independent Woodstock Literature Festival on Saturday 18 September at 7pm in the Methodist Church. Ceramicist Edmund de Waal traces the history of his family through ownership of a collection of netsuke inherited from his great uncle: the story is fascinating and he writes as well as he throws pots.
Booking will open shortly and I urge you to book in advance. I am not alone in loving it - the book has had great reviews (it was described by Frances Wilson in the Sunday Times as 'a work of rare and sustained brilliance...nobody since Lorna Sage in Bad Blood has shown so well how a memoir can overflow with riches and yet remain light, fragile, compact. Like the netsuke themselves, this book is impossible to put down. You have in your hands a masterpiece.' The review in the Economist was equally ecstatic: 'From a hard and vast archival mass of journals, memoirs, newspaper clippings and art-history books, Mr de Waal has fashioned, stroke by minuscule stroke, a book as fresh with detail as if it had been written from life, and as full of beauty and whimsy as a netsuke from the hands of a master carver. Buy two copies of his book; keep one and give the other to your closest bookish friend'). I imagine tickets will sell out fast.

Wednesday, 14 July 2010

Jo Shapcott and Daljit Nagra

We are joining forces with Tower Poetry to host an evening of poetry at The Woodstock Arms on Wednesday August 25th at 8pm. Tickets £4, students free, MUST be booked in advance. More information soon!

Tuesday, 6 July 2010

Independent Woodstock Literature Festival 2010

After a very busy June (with visits by Alexandra Shulman and Robert Sackville-West) we are not holding talks in July and August but are hosting a poetry reading (see above) and will take part in the literature festival by hosting two authors. The festival will be held in Woodstock and Blenheim Palace from September 15-19 this year - details available here.
Our programme of talks resumes in October with Jane Gardam who is coming to speak on Tuesday 19 October, by which time her book The Man in the Wooden Hat will be available in paperback. It is the wonderful companion volume to Old Filth and tells the story of Elisabeth, Filth's wife. Do try and re-read Old Filth over the summer if you're planning to come to the talk, and get hold of The Man in the Wooden Hat when it comes out in September (anyone buying the book from me will be entitled to a free place at the talk). The books are entirely separate but The Man... tells Elisabeth's story in a way that makes you instantly want to re-read Old Filth.
Filth (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. He is sent to England from India as a child and finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese Internment Camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the Bar - the brash, forceful Veneering. Veneering has a Chinese wife and an adored son - and no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating his emotions ...How Elisabeth turns into Betty, and whether she remains loyal to stolid Filth or swept up by caddish Veneering, make for a page-turning plot, full of surprises, revelations and humour. Jane Gardam is one of our best novelists.
 
http://www.woodstockbookshop.co.uk/2010/07/
www.woodstockbookshop.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-51
112261
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MHU532Z2MHAGPVP3BXYQBFM2TW4UDTVN
<urn:uuid:6c76d8ee-65fa-4472-ac57-7f8217db2716>
2018-12-16T10:44:51Z
216.58.217.83
text/html
sha1:KT7T5XO6TFJ5OANQHBL7D7MTJ6A4X22Q
<urn:uuid:7dcd1bd8-afc2-490a-81ff-99741898ae9f>
http://www.woodstockbookshop.co.uk/2010/07/
response
<urn:uuid:fdf7bbe5-c93d-4833-8537-db11bbe74fc8>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-51
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-152-235-249.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/