Carl East of Winstone's Independent Books writes for the Herald

Carl East of Winstone's Independent Books writes for the Herald.

Carl East of Winstone's Independent Books writes for the Herald.

Carl East of Winstone's Independent Books writes for the Herald.

Carl East of Winstone's Independent Books writes for the Herald.

In our own small way, the bookshop would like to help the humanitarian effort for Ukraine by giving away – in exchange for a donation – some of the review copies of books we have at present. These are publishers' proof copies of new titles, printed exclusively for reviewers, booksellers and the like to read before publication. They represent a sneak preview at the bestsellers of the future and range from fiction, crime, non-fiction to young adult. Please pop into the shop from Friday, May 18, choose a book from the selection of 25 and leave a donation for the Red Cross – Disasters Emergency Committee. There are many books to help understand how the current conflict has erupted and many that have predicted the invasion of Ukraine, these are a few of our recent bestsellers:Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West by Catherine Belton

Ever since the huge success of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club publishers have been looking for the next big thing in crime books. New contenders are often signified with familiar-looking covers to reassure readers that they are making a good choice. Modern versions of Golden Age classic mysteries have become all the rage, here are some of this year’s new cases:A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle Hindle uses the closed world of an ocean liner as his location, The Endeavour is sailing to New York with a killer among its 2,000 passengers. When an elderly gentleman is found dead, ship's officer Timothy Birch sees it as an accidental fall. But passenger James Temple, who happens to be a Scotland Yard detective, thinks there is more to it than meets the eye. Birch agrees to investigate, and when a priceless painting of the Devon coastline is stolen the mystery deepens. With time running out before they reach New York, and Temple's purpose onboard the ship arousing its own suspicions, the search for the culprit is fraught with danger, will the killer strike again?The Maid by Nita Prose Prose’s debut takes its style from the golden age but is bang up to date. Molly Gray is a maid in the Regency Grand Hotel. To the high-class guests, she is invisible, but she sees all their secrets, often leaving their rooms filthy and behaving appallingly to her and other staff. When guest Mr Black is found dead in his room, she quickly becomes the main suspect in a modern spin on the locked room mystery. As narrator, Molly is seen by the reader to be neuro-divergent and able to pick up the clues others may miss but is at a loss to read the social cues that others live by. The Canadian author gives a somewhat curious English twang to her dialogue, which may be designed for US readers but it adds to the classic feel of the novel.The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett Hallet’s previous book, The Appeal, was a quirky hit last year, and published in a red, black and white cover it might indeed have looked familiar to readers of Richard Osman. The book was a modern-day epistolary novel; a murder mystery composed of text messages and emails, rather than letters. Now in The Twyford Code she presents a crime novel as audio transcripts, and gives an up to date twist to the familiar device of the unreliable narrator. 40 years ago ex-convict Steven Smith’s teacher Miss Iles vanished on a school trip, after becoming convinced that classic children’s author Edith Twyford’s books contained hidden codes. On his release, Steven sets out to solve this disappearance with the clues leading to unexpected places. Hallet’s invented children’s author Twyford owes much to Enid Blyton and there is a measure of spoofing old fashioned values as Smith revisits his childhood memories and locations.The Christie Affair by Nina De Gramont Agatha Christie’s disappearance for 11 days in 1926 has provided the basis for a number of books and dramas over the years, my favourite being the Dr Who episode the “Unicorn and The Wasp”. The Christie Affair takes a bold title and adds to this canon with a novel mixing mystery and romance, taking the unusual choice to have Christie’s adulterous husband’s lover as narrator. In parallel to the disappearance is a murder mystery that brings the two women together in unexpected ways. I find the delight in books such as these is being able to combine the nostalgia and wit of a genre which can be formulaic at times with our modern sensibility about the roles of class, mental health and women’s roles in society. They are a great intellectual game between author and reader, though I always fall for the red herrings.

It is traditional for bookshops to stock up on diet and fitness books after Christmas as their customers return after the festivities feeling the effects of overindulging.

Each year there is a must-have book capturing readers and gifters imagination, such as best-sellers, Lost Words or The Boy, The Mole The Fox and The Horse. This year it is hard to predict the national hit so I have decided to look at a few of my favourite big books of 2021.Nests by Susan Ogilvy A celebration of the ingenuity of birds and charting painter Ogilvy’s obsession with creating life-size records of abandoned nests. The portraits here are far from plain twiggy affairs, being made of natural material such as grasses, leaves, moss, hair and cobwebs, and less usually, mattress stuffing and bright pieces of string. These tiny constructions are not all from British birds but feature visitors from across Europe, and as far afield as Russia and North Africa. Possibly the first full book on birds nests since 1932, this is a perfect gift for bird lovers.

October marks Black History Month. When the UK adopted the event in 1987 as part of African Jubilee Year there was a concerted effort to move away from its American origins to highlight how people of African and Caribbean heritage have been a part of British history for centuries, and how their stories have too often faded from general knowledge. With racist abuse of black English football players marring Euro 2020, the expansion of the Black Lives Matter campaign and organisations rolling out policies aimed at inclusivity, this seems a perfect time to highlight some good paperback reads to help make sense of the issues raised and some historical context.Black and British by David Olusoga In Black and British, historian, writer and broadcaster Olusuga reveals the long relationship between Britain and the people of Africa, from Roman times to the 20th Century. This unflinching read reveals that behind the economic boom and bust of the South Sea Bubble was Britain’s global slave-trading empire, African Legionaries were stationed in Roman Cumbria and Black Britons fought at the battle of Trafalgar and in the trenches of WWI. There is also an edition for school-age children; Black and British: A Short, Essential History. The paperback book based on Olusoga’s BBC series A House Through Time is also out now.The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon Published in 1956, Selvon’s award-winning book is a funny and iconic chronicle of post-war Caribbean migration to Britain. This slim but influential work encapsulates the romance and disenchantment of an imagined city that was both magnet and nightmare for its new colonial citizens, a promised land that turned out to be an illusion for these young idealists. Selvon deserves a place with the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the 1950s such as John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe as a chronicler of changing times.Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Miranda Kaufman The Tudor period is a favourite of historical fiction and costume dramas. Kaufman’s book tells the stories of 10 significant Africans less well known to us, tracing their tumultuous paths through society; uncovering a rich array of detail about their daily lives and how they were treated. This was a world where skin colour was less important than religion, class or talent; before the English became heavily involved in the slave trade, and founded the American colonies. These stories question the traditional narrative that racial slavery was inevitable and that it was imported to colonial Virginia from Tudor England.Windrush, A Ship Through Time by Paul Arnott The word Windrush has become associated with the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ but East Devon’s Paul Arnott tells the full story of the ship significant for the landing of the first members of the Windrush Generation at Tilbury in 1948 in a wonderfully readable book. It is an intensely political and revealing narrative, detailing how a ship built in a Jewish-owned shipyard in pre-Nazi Germany, later took Norwegian Jews towards their death in Auschwitz, ferried British soldiers from Indian partition and to combat Mau Mau freedom fighters in Kenya. Windrush is a fascinating look at 20th-Century history through the life of a single ship.Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo Despite being hailed as a breakthrough, Evaristo’s joint Booker-winning novel was, in fact, her 11th book. Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of 12 vivid characters on their personal journeys through society and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something; a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope. One of our book group favourites, Girl, Woman, Other is great for getting a discussion going and is an exuberant read. Evaristo’s memoir Manifesto: A Rallying Cry to Never Give Up is published on October 7.

Sidmouth readers love crime and mystery books. The pull of a ‘police procedural’ is powerful and they make terrific page-turners. Devon has played host to many crime writers in the past and provides an atmospheric backdrop to taut thrillers, with brooding moors and beautiful beaches that are great settings for a murder or two. A well-known crime writer once told me how his publishers were aghast that on moving from London to Devon he was going to start setting his novels locally. They changed their minds when he informed them that Devon (and Cornwall) was the largest police constabulary in the country, and had a huge coastline ripe for smuggling, body disposal and human trafficking, along with isolated locations and cities with urban issues to rival London.Katerina Diamond - The Heatwave A former Exeter resident, Katerina’s latest book features Sidmouth as a location. Using her experiences here as a teenager, the author adds a real thrill to the book with vivid local descriptions. One hot summer a stranger arrives in town and the community is soon rocked by the disappearance of a local girl. In the wake of the crime, protagonist Felicity flees and moves away, knowing more than she can let on. The killer is left and unknown unpunished. Sixteen years later as an adult, Felicity’s new life is shattered by the news that a second girl has gone missing in her old hometown. Now she must go back to face the truth about what happened all those years ago. The Heatwave is a gripping, realistic thriller, showing the underside of small-town life that we may not want to see - and you will want to read to the end.Laurence Anholt - Art of Death and Festival of Death In a writing career of over 30 years Laurence has produced more than 200 children’s books and has now turned his talents to adult crime fiction, his Mindful Detective series has been described as ‘Broadchurch meets Fargo’. It is startlingly original and funny, featuring a Buddhist detective, Vincent Caine, who often feels too much for his own good. Caine wants to be left to meditate in his secluded cabin on the Undercliff at Lyme Regis, but his colleague, wisecracking feminist and single mum DI Shanti Joyce, has other ideas. This unlikely duo become the go-to team for solving weird crimes with their symbiotic skill sets. The series has been sold for TV development – read them before they become a national hit.TP Fielden – Died and Gone to Devon Cosy Crime novels hark back to the golden age of mystery writing and simpler, mobile phone-free days, as epitomised by Agatha Christie. Whilst publishers such as The British Library are reprinting lost classics free from graphic violence, forensics and profanity, a new generation of authors are writing to fit this template too. TP Fielden is the fiction-writing name of acclaimed royal biographer and journalist Christopher Wilson, his Miss Dimont Mystery series features an amateur sleuth who happens to be reporter for the local paper, The Riviera Express. In his latest book, set in 1959, Devon's prettiest seaside resort, Temple Regis, is thrown into turmoil by the discovery of a body in the lighthouse. A few weeks earlier another corpse was found in the library. For ace reporter-turned-detective Judy Dimont there’s an added complication, a friend is begging her to re-investigate another mysterious death from many years before. To make matters worse, her position as chief reporter is under threat. Can she solve the mysteries (and protect her job) before the murderer strikes again? Sidmouth’s summer visitors love this sort of book as a beach read. Why not join them and escape with an exciting whodunnit set in Devon? You may never look at your home county the same way again.