A favour

Can you help us test our new website?

Coming up at Backstory

• Free live music every Thursday evening, 6pm-8pm. This week: Jack Mac Funk

  No need to book, just turn up at our bar from 6pm on Thursday evenings

• Our first ever poetry open-mic night

  THIS FRIDAY, 25th August, 7pm

  

  Open mic, with headliner Peri Cimen, a Cypriot Turkish-British writer. We'll have a mic set up in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere for anyone to come and share their poetry or prose. Open mic-ers will sign up at the door and, once called up, will have five minutes (though no need to fill that all up!). Backstory is a bookshop and community space that will be a great environment to share your work - whether you're a pro open mic-er or a first-timer. Please also come to enjoy hearing some poetry and support your local writers! No tickets, just turn up

• Peter Foster - What Went Wrong With Brexit And What We Can Do About It

  Tuesday 19th September, 7.30pm

  Who better to guide us through the mess we find ourselves in than the public policy editor of the Financial Times? Foster considers the real costs of leaving the EU and shows what a better future for Britain might look like.

• Mick Brown - The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West

  Wednesday 27th September, 7.30pm

  Mick Brown is one of the journalist ex-colleagues Tom most admires. With characteristic insight and wit, he unearths the history of the West’s love affair with Indian spirituality, from the Orientalism of the Empire to counterculture.

• Ella Risbridger and Kate Young - The Dinner Table: 100 Writers on Food

  Wednesday 11th October, 7.30pm

  We’re so lucky to host these two dazzling writers for an exclusive launch event for their new anthology of food writing, from Nigella Lawson to Salman Rushdie.

• Kenny Imafidon in conversation with Stephen Bush - That Peckham Boy

  Wednesday 18th October, 7.30pm

  That Peckham Boy is an extraordinary book about what it means to be young, black and poor in London, by Kenny Imafidon who was wrongly accused of the murder of a 17-year-old boy. He’ll be talking to FT columnist Stephen Bush.

• Coming up at the Non-Fiction Book Club: Tim Marshall (The Power of Geography), Philippe Sands (The Last Colony), Caroline Knowles (Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London), Christina Lamb (Our Bodies, Their Battlefield)

• Coming up at the Fiction Book Club: Julia Armfield (Our Wives Under The Sea), Rebecca Wait (I’m Sorry You Feel That Way), Bobby Palmer (Isaac And The Egg)

• SOLD OUT: Poetry with Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen, 30th August, 7.30pm

I HAVE A FAVOUR TO ASK. And yes, I’m afraid it does come at a cost. But in return for some excellent books, I promise. (Or, actually, your choice of not-so-excellent ones, if you prefer.)

You might remember that back in April I was prompted to do some soul-searching (or at least Google searching) after discovering that another indie bookshop made half of its revenues online, compared with our 2% (but a very sprightly 2%!).

I sent round one of my not-very-scientific Google Forms which 125 of you very kindly clicked your way through. The results were sobering: most of you had never bought books from our website and many of you were unaware that we have one, despite my sometimes subtle and sometimes really not very subtle click-the-button-and-buy prompts in this newsletter every week.

The most useful feedback was that 69% of you reckoned that free delivery (rather than the £2.50 we were then charging) would make you more likely to buy from Backstory’s website. This was useful but not all that surprising: we’re so used to buying things with a simple click online that any extra costs become a big barrier. Far fewer of you were fussed about next-day delivery, which is helpful because while we can (just about) afford to swallow the cost of second-class postage, first class would have left us with very few pennies indeed.

Also useful were the comments many of you left about the lack of range on the website and that you wanted more of an indie vibe with recommendations like we have in the shop.

Well, feast your eyes on the new Backstory.London!

It’s still very much a work in progress: we are going to add lots more personal bookseller recommendations and lists. And we are doing our level best to sort out the shonky search.

But there are now thousands of books to browse (47,785 at the last count). And, better still, all are available for quick, free delivery, anywhere in the UK. (And, for a small fee, anywhere in the world.)

Of course, we understand that there are lots of other places - and, well, let’s be honest, one really big place - to buy books online. But I suppose this is our way of saying: Other Rivers Are Available. By increasing variety and removing barriers like postage costs, we hope to make it easier for you to think first of Backstory.London when you are shopping for books online - or at least to give us a try.

If, like many of you, you live near our shop, we’d still much rather see you in person, of course. But when you feel that urge to browse a certain site, perhaps you can train your fingers to hop onto ours instead. Better still, you could forward this to friends and family elsewhere in the UK and suggest they support an indie rooted in our local community next time they order their books online.

I’d love you to test it out and let me know how you get on with it. As a little incentive, we’d like to offer you £5 off when you spend £20 or more on an online order until 25th August (one use per customer). At checkout, just enter the discount code WEPAYTAX

You can use the discount on any combination of books and on our excellent book subscriptions, too. I’ve collated a few of our recent recommendations below to give you some inspiration.

Let me know how you get on. Thanks, as always, for your support,

Tom

Our recent books of the month

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

A gorgeous, sun-dappled novel about growing up, growing old and how the meaning and intensity of familial and romantic love changes throughout life. Without once mentioning covid, Patchett uses the unique circumstances of the pandemic to throw together all of a family’s grown-up daughters with their parents. With normal life suspended, they have the sort of deep conversations we all mean to get around to one day, but which life normally has a habit of conspiring against.

As they race to bring in the cherry harvest, the daughters cajole their mother into finally telling them the full story of the pivotal romances of her youth. It’s a gentle and humane story that unfolds like a lazy late summer’s day. It’s touching, and funny too.

Kala by Colin Walsh

A pacey but stylish page-turner about a group of friends growing up together in small-town Ireland. At the centre of this group - and everyone’s attention - is Kala, at least until she goes missing. Fifteen years on, the remaining friends are back in town when old secrets come out of hibernation and the truth about what became of Kala slowly emerges.

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

Two young men (boys, really) don’t realise they’re in love until it’s too late. By the time they come to their senses, their world has changed irrevocably with the outbreak of the First World War. Suddenly, they’re fighting in the trenches. War teaches them more about man’s inhumanity to man - but also about comradeship, love and even beauty - than the boarding school where they met ever could. One of the most beautiful and moving love stories I’ve ever read.

Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Set over a couple of intense, youthful summers in London, it feels like the novel we need right now. “Everyone’s younger in the summertime,” this novel insists.

Its south London setting will resonate with Backstory regulars, but this beautiful story about the “small worlds” we all inherit and those that we forge for ourselves has an appeal far beyond Peckham. For a relatively slender volume, it has a lot to say about love and about family, about music and about the healing power of a good dance (Azumah Nelson’s style is itself lyrical). The central character’s exploration of his Ghanaian heritage and the repercussions of his parents’ historic decision to upend their lives for an often grey, often unwelcoming Britain is particularly moving.