Little Toller Books

02/10/2024

29/08/2024

We often share great news from the emerging writers on our Word Space talent development programme, including where you can find their latest work.

We're pleased to share that Estelle Phillips has had an essay published in Little Toller's The Clearing. The Clearing is an online journal published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in.

Visit https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/ to read 'Hardy's Knuckles' alongside other new writing.

We'll be celebrating more exciting achievements from our 2024-25 cohort of writers as they share their news with us.

Visit literatureworks.org.uk/word-space to read more about Word Space, including info on all our writers, mentors and partners for the three years of the programme so far.

19/08/2024

Here's a brilliant and insightful review of Going to Ground, in Yorkshire Times today. https://yorkshiretimes.co.uk/article/Dreamland-Going-To-Ground---An-Anthology-Of-Nature-And-Place-Edited-By-Jon-Woolc-

19/07/2024

Wild Twin is coming.

One morning in the late 1970s Jeff Young slips out of his parents' home with the intention of hitch-hiking to Paris. He is in search of a version of himself he calls the wild twin - a shadow boy, a feral drifter. Once across the channel he falls headlong into a fever dream of dive hotels, rough sleeping, getting lost, squats, violence, poverty, thieving, illness and madness. Journeying across Europe, from cathedral to doss-house, from Red Light district to deportation, finally Young returns to present-day Liverpool, caring for his dying father in the house he ran away from fifty years before, remembering a the past with a man who can no longer remember.

From the author of the Costa-shortlisted Ghost Town, Wild Twin is a hallucinatory dream book of loss and loneliness, a brilliantly funny and sad love song to cities.

Wild Twin, available to order now from our website, or from bookshops. 18th September 2024, hardback, £20. https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/wild-twin-by-jeff-young/

13/06/2024

So pleased to see Nick taking the helm!

Beaminster Books is open for business!

I am so grateful to Gracie, Adrian, Jon and Graham at Little Toller Books for all their help in making our transfer of ownership so painless - and for creating such a lovely bookshop in our town in the first place.

There are lots of new books on the shelves, and all the carefully curated titles from the previous shop are still here as well, including the full range of Little Tollers.

Please do come and say hello and have a browse, and remember you can also order any book we don't have in stock for collection in a day or two...

See you soon, happy reading,
Nick

08/06/2024

It's just under two weeks until the launch of the anthology Going to Ground, which I edited, on 21st June in Shaftesbury at the Grosvenor Arms, put together by the incredible FOLDE .

Some amazing writers reading at the launch: Tim Dee, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Mary Malyon, Susannah Walker, Raine Geoghegan, and a short folktale from Martin Maudsley. Just a few tickets left, link below or in my bio or from Folde's website.

After the event, head up the hill to Ashmore for tha annual Ashmore Filly Loo, a midsummer celebration around the pond, and join a semi-pagan ritual at dusk. It's all good stuff.

Alfred - News From Shaftesbury

https://www.foldedorset.com/going-to-ground

14/05/2024

SOME QUITE BIG NEWS! We've loved having our bookshop in Beaminster, but it's time for a change. Delighted to be handing it over to such a brilliant person. Full story here:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - MAY 14th 2024

Little Toller Books to hand their bookshop over to local bookseller.

The independent publisher Little Toller Books has announced a change in ownership of its bookshop in Beaminster, west Dorset, which it opened in November 2020. The new owner of the bookshop is Nick Robins, who has regularly worked in the shop since opening. Robins, who lives in Beaminster with his family, worked for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for more than 25 years, having run its museum and shop, and fundraised to complete the theatre. Later Robins became Head of Publications, producing the theatre programmes and editing a magazine about Shakespeare. He has also written books on Shakespeare’s London, John Donne and Robert Burton, and is the co-editor of the Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland.

Robins will take over the reins of the bookshop in mid-June and it will trade under the name Beaminster Books.

Gracie Cooper, co-owner of Little Toller Books said: ‘We’ve had such a happy time running the bookshop. We opened two days before the second Covid lockdown but have always been amazed at the support of the community here. Having enjoyed our experience enormously and learnt a great deal about the business of running a bookshop, we now feel it’s time to return to focusing solely on publishing. Our office, which is currently above the bookshop, will move to a new location, which is nearing completion. We’re delighted that our great friend Nick will be running the shop. He'll do a terrific job, keeping the bookshop at the heart of the community.

‘We’d like to thank all our customers, and the many publishers, writers, illustrators and readers who have supported us. Our respect for booksellers knows no bounds - we learnt more about the business in these few years than in the 15 years of publishing before and we’ll miss the bookshop enormously. Who knows, in time, we may return to the shop floor.’

Nick Robins said: ‘I'm very happy to take on the mantle of bookselling in Beaminster. When Little Toller decided it was time to move premises this year, everyone agreed it would have been a great shame to let the town's small but perfectly formed bookshop go. I hope visitors to Beaminster Books will find the same great range of nature titles, contemporary fiction and children's books currently offered by Little Toller, along with (in due course) a carefully curated selection of non-fiction and literature old and new, growing in depth and range as space becomes available.’

The ownership of Little Toller’s publishing business is unaffected, and Little Toller will continue its publishing as before.

07/05/2024

'Summer pastures at seven am. I’m walking, booted and bare-armed, among a herd of cows. Dewdrops on the grass, the sun swells upwards and the chatter of birds fills my head. Behind me, up to the crest of the hill and beyond, there are woods of old plantings and new, where foxes bark at night and owls call to each other. Before me, the gentle rise and fall of farmland, the ancient patchwork of fields, hedges, ditches and copses, where you are likely, at almost any time of day, to see the white rump of a deer bounding back into the tree cover, the white rump of a hare skimming across a field.

After more than two decades of life in a European city, I have landed randomly on a farm in south-west England, to discover that this is what I needed. To quiet myself. To rinse myself of the press and urgency of other humans. In this year of being mostly alone, I turn to the cows for a form of connection; the farmer needs occasional help, and I remember being a small child who lit up around animals. I begin to watch them, take pleasure in being around them, and little by little they nudge their way into my thoughts and become a focal point. All kinds of questions and considerations, like the swarms of flies that follow the cattle, arise in my mind and buzz about my head. I can’t get enough of being near them, watching them doing their living, as if there were a mystery they might reveal if I paid enough attention. The steady pace of their lives, their unhurried ways. All the striving and anxiety – the thoughts that plague me – have no meaning for them. They appear to be blissfully free, occupying only the instinctual present moment, free from the tormenting knowledge of their own selves, their own lives and their own death. For their part, I am also an unanswered question, though they have accepted me among them, and that feels like a gift.'

In the start of a new series on The Clearing S V Morgan spends a year working with cows, and reflects on their sentience, cognition and our relationship with cattle.

Link in our bio and here: https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/a-year-of-cows-by-svmorgan-part-one/

16/04/2024

Edinburgh types: TOMORROW! Neil Ansell reading from and talking about Deer Island. Take a trip to 1980s London and the Isle of Jura at the new Waterstones, Gyle shopping centre. Details here: https://www.waterstones.com/events/neil-ansell-deer-island/edinburgh-gyle

18/03/2024

‘A personal and illuminating pilgrimage into the mysterious deep time of the medieval stonemason’s art.’ David Keenan

‘A story of deep knowledge, self-discovery, mark-making and deft articulation, King of Dust is a masonic portal through which Alex Woodcock explores humankind’s relationship with stone.’ Dan Richards

In May we'll publish the paperback edition of Alex Woodcock's highly acclaimed King of Dust, a craftsman’s personal journey through the landscapes of ancient sculpture which first inspired him to pick up tools. From the grandeur of Exeter cathedral to the strangeness of the font at Toller Fratrum, this journey through the Romanesque celebrates the lives of medieval carvers and contemporary stonemasons, interwoven with Alex’ own life as he slowly becomes a stonemason.

The book is available for preorder from bookshops (including our own!) or from our website. https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/new-books/king-of-dust-by-alex-woodcock-paperback/

Absolutely glorious cover, pretty much unchanged from the hardback, by Ed Kluz, who we love.

15/03/2024

In 2013 Little Toller Books set up The Clearing, an online journal for new writing about nature and place by both new and established writers. The aim was to create a dedicated space for writers to explore and celebrate landscapes, finding distinctive and sometimes startling visions of place: rural, urban, suburban, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical and natural.

Since then The Clearing has grown an international audience, garnered enthusiastic reviews, supported writing projects and has helped emerging writers at the beginning of their careers. In Going to Ground is some of the best and most distinctive writing from The Clearing’s archive of hundreds of essays and poetry. Its themes are natural, political, historical, archaeological, ecological, scientific, personal, urgent and true, from more than thirty extraordinary writers.

We're grateful for the many people who funded Going to Ground, which is published on 1st May. And of course to the writers and poets who made this collection so vivid and wild.

Contributors include: Tim Dee, Nancy Campbell, Tim Hannigan, Ann Lingard, Kathleen Jamie, Eleanor Anstruther, Kerri ni Dochartaigh, Nic Wilson, Louisa Adjoa Parker, JC Niala, Jack Thacker, The Byker Wall Poets, Alex Woodcock, and many others.

Available to pre-order now from our website or your local bookshop. https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/going-to-ground-an-anthology-of-nature-and-place/

12/03/2024

‘I devoured Davison’s book…a revealing document of social history.’ Ysenda Maxtone Graham, TLS

While working at the RHS Fiona Davison came across a cache of letters from a young gardener who was denied a fellowship because she was a woman. Appalled, and intrigued to discover what became of Olive, Fiona began researching the wider story of early female professional gardeners whose struggles changed forever the rights and opportunities for women gardeners.
Gardens are seen as a place to escape the troubles of the world but this book looks back to a period were an arena for radical and far-reaching experiments. An Almost Impossible Thing follows six convention-busting women gardeners in the years before the First World War, examining their lives in the context of suffragism, collectivism and Empire.

We published 'An Almost Impossible Thing' in a hardback edition in autumn last year and were delighted by the response from reviewers and readers. It seemed to us that this was a book that was long overdue. So we're delighted to announce the paperback edition, coming in April. The book is available to preorder now, from your local bookshop, or our website: https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/new-books/an-almost-impossible-thing-by-fiona-davison-paperback-edition/

11/03/2024

On 4th September 1939, the day after the outbreak of war, the writer Enid Barraud joined the Women's Land Army, joining thousands who for the first time, worked the land. Her memoir, Set My Hand Upon the Plough, was recently rediscovered by the writer Luke Turner, and we're proud to have published it in February, in our classics series.

In some ways it's an anti-Land Girl memoir, Barraud was honest about her experiences during the war, and was a gay woman, known to the locals as John. Luke wrote the introduction to Set My Hand and we hope to bring news of an event celebrating LGBT people and the land soon.

Available from bookshops, and our website: https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/new-books/set-my-hand-upon-the-plough-by-e-m-barraud/

11/03/2024

Over the next few posts we'll be revealing our books for this spring, some out now, some forthcoming. It's a varied and diverse list, and we're proud of every one.

We first published Neil Ansell 's Deer Island in hardback over a decade ago, and have only this spring published the paperback edition. In the early 1980s Neil was living in a community of rough-sleepers in London, but as the decade progressed he found himself increasingly unmoored, and finally left for the Isle of Jura, finding some solace in its remote wildness. Highly praised on publication we're delighted to have published this new edition, which seems even more relevant than ten years ago.

Incredible cover by Jonny Hannah.

Out now, from bookshops and our website: https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/deer-island-by-neil-ansell/

26/02/2024

Neil Ansell, author of Deer Island, on the legacy of his homelessness, for The Big Issue : Neil Ansell

Homelessness has been a constant for Neil Ansell. His latest book, Deer Island, details what made him spend five years in isolation.

22/01/2024

'Little Toller and The Clearing have become the guiding light for lovers of nature and place, providing new and emerging writers with a supportive platform for their works, and making space for new words and new voices that will resonate long after they have been published. They have tirelessly and unselfishly provided a home for writers whose work may otherwise have received little exposure, or possibly not have seen the light of day, and for this reason alone, I applaud them.' Baz Nichols, writer, poet and editor of Echtrai Journal.

We're delighted that our crowdfunder to allow us to publish a collection of some of our favourite work from The Clearing, our online journal, hit its target on Saturday evening.

A huge thank you to everyone who helped get it to this point - we'll now begin the work of publishing the book.

We're now 'stretch-funding' - this will allow us to reward the contributors, to print more copies of the book and to begin a prize for new writing for The Clearing. If you can help us out we'd be very grateful.

The Clearing anthology features work by new and established writers of nature and place, all of them offering distinctive visions of the landscapes we hold dear, including Baz, quoted above.

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/the-clearing-1