The North Recommends: Plackitt & Booth
We’re Plackitt & Booth Booksellers Ltd – Lytham, Lancashire, a super successful indie running high profile author events and serving the good folk of Lytham for the last 18 years. We’re a husband and wife team (Alison Plackitt & Patrick Booth) and are both from a bookish background – Pat from Waterstones and Alison from Edinburgh Book Festival and Scottish independent John Smith & Sons.
Plackitt & Booth’s is filled with books which we have read and loved and are happy to recommend, as well as the latest fantastic reads from the best publishers. We have added more and more to the shop – with journals, cards, pens, music, jewellery and toys. We like to think of it as ‘small but perfectly stocked’!
Over the last few years we’ve moved our author events to a selection of Lytham’s vibrant restaurants and venues and now run a great programme of literary lunches (you can sign up to our newsletter on the website!). We’ve recommended some great reads from past, recent and forthcoming events.
Mary Paulson-Ellis shot into the bestseller charts with her debut novel, The Other Mrs Walker. This can be seen as a companion novel, dealing with fathers and sons, rather than mothers and daughters. Her new novel The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing is truly stunning – beautifully written with characters that leap off the page and a story you just can’t put down. Think a perfect mix of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. She’s been championed by Val McDermid and rightly so – this was one of our favourite books of the year so far.
A crumpled pawn ticket. Fifty thousand pounds sewn into the lining of a burial suit. The only clues to the truth…An old soldier dies alone in his Edinburgh nursing home. No known relatives, and no Will to enact. Just a fortune left unclaimed. Armed with only the deceased’s name and a crumpled pawn ticket, heir hunter Solomon Farthing, must find the dead man’s closest living relative if he is to get a cut of this much-needed cash. But in trawling through the deceased’s family tree, Solomon uncovers a mystery that will take him on a journey into the hidden secrets of the past…. back to 1918 and a group of eleven soldiers abandoned in a farmhouse billet in France.
Jenny Eclair is the Sunday Times top ten bestselling author of four critically acclaimed novels. One of the UK’s most popular writer/performers, she was the first woman to win the prestigious Perrier Award and has a huge list of TV and radio credits to her name. Raised in Lytham we’re delighted to be welcoming her back with her new novel for a Literary Lunch on Friday 4th October.
Jenny’s had rave reviews from Jojo Moyes, Clare Mackintosh, Jo Brand, and Claudia Winkelman to name just a few.
In deepest Cornwall, the mansion Kittiwake has seen many pass through its doors since it was bought by American heiress Peggy Carmichael seventy years ago. Over the decades, the keys have been handed down through the family, and now it belongs to Bel’s adoptive brother, Lance. It’s where he’ll be celebrating his 50th birthday, and Bel is invited.
But Bel barely feels like she’s holding it together as it is, and in going back to Kittiwake, she will be returning to the place where it all began – where, following the death of a child, a sequence of events was set in motion, the consequences of which are still rippling down through the generations . . .
Poignant, bittersweet and utterly compelling, this is a book about all we inherit from our families – and will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
The Lying Room by Nicci French
(Literary Lunch Lytham 16th Oct)
We are delighted to be welcoming to Lytham for the first time the bestselling writing team of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. The couple are married and live in Suffolk and together they have written 21 bestselling novels translated into 31 languages. The Lying Room is their first standalone novel in 10 years and it’s a corker – and has a guest appearance from probably the best guinea pig in fiction.
A trusted colleague and friend. A mother. A wife. Neve Connolly is all these things.
Neve has also made mistakes; some small, some unconsciously done, some large, some deliberate. She is only human after all.
But now one mistake is spiralling out of control. Without ever meaning to do so, Neve has brought those around her into immense danger.
She can’t tell the truth without risking her marriage. So just how far is she prepared to go to protect those she loves?
A liar. A cheat. A threat. Neve Connolly is all these things. Is she also a murderer?
Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
We devoured our advance copy of this book in one sitting!
We had an early indication that this was going to be good from Laura’s Dad – Sir Tony Robinson – and it didn’t disappoint. C J Sansom said ‘This is a world conveyed with convincing, terrible clarity’ and we agree.
June, 1781. An unidentified body hangs upon a hook at Deptford Dock – horribly tortured and branded with a slaver’s mark. Some days later, Captain Harry Corsham – a war hero embarking upon a promising parliamentary career – is visited by the sister of an old friend. Her brother, passionate abolitionist Tad Archer, had been about to expose a secret that he believed could cause irreparable damage to the British slaving industry. He’d said people were trying to kill him, and now he is missing . . .
To discover what happened to Tad, Harry is forced to pick up the threads of his friend’s investigation. His enquiries will threaten his political prospects, his family’s happiness, and force a reckoning with his past, risking the revelation of secrets that have the power to destroy him. And that is only if he can survive the mortal dangers awaiting him in Deptford.
We were delighted to host Ann recently for a third time in Lytham and her a new series and a new setting. Beloved as the creator of both the Shetland and Vera novels (and both with TV series adaptations) we heard that her new detective is also destined for TV screens soon.
In North Devon, where the rivers Taw and Torridge converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father’s funeral takes place. The day Matthew turned his back on the strict evangelical community in which he grew up, he lost his family too.
Now he’s back, not just to mourn his father at a distance, but to take charge of his first major case in the Two Rivers region; a complex place not quite as idyllic as tourists suppose. A body has been found on the beach near to Matthew’s new home: a man with the tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death. Finding the killer is Venn’s only focus, and his team’s investigation will take him straight back into the community he left behind, and the deadly secrets that lurk there.
A lovely paperback telling the story of the Lake District, England’s most dramatic landscape. Home to vistas of stunning beauty and a rich heritage it is an area of England that fascinates, inspires – and has bewitched David for a lifetime. With passion and an endless curiosity, he reveals how half a billion years of shifting ice, violent volcanoes and (of course) falling rain have shaped the lakes and fells that have fired the imaginations of the great sons and daughters of the area, the poets and the scientists.
He shows that Lakeland is a seamless web where lives and landscape weave together, where the ancient countryside has created a unique local history: of farming and mining, of tightknit communities, of a resilient and proud people. The Lake District is a place of rocks and rain, reason and romance, wonder and curiosity. And this book celebrates it all: the very character of Cumbria.