Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Bookshops I love: Palas Print in Caernarfon


Here's the latest stunning shop window display in Palas Print in Caernarfon - that's a real model boat in which those books are stacked. The display includes books on Patagonia where a Welsh community was established in the last part of the nineteenth century, and notice there in the front A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees by my writing colleague Clare Dudman, her beautifully researched and engrossing novel focusing on one of the settlers and his family. The book was published last summer, and I attended a very memorable launch which I wrote about here. The book's memorable too: the strong characters of the settlers, the scenes of hardship and fortitude and innovation and betrayal, the personality of the native American who watches and then befriends them, and are all still vividly with me.

Interesting to read back on that post in which I describe the launch. I also talk in it about finding a characterising word for one of my characters. Yet after my break to promote The Birth Machine, I went back in January and excised the section done in the voice of that character! Novel-writing, eh? Two steps forward and one back, quite often.

Palas Print is a really great community bookshop: John and I recently bought bikes and we've brought them to Wales with us this time. The other day I went into the shop looking for cycling maps, and the owner spent ages with me searching for the right one and discussing the whole subject. It's that really uniquely personalised sort of help you can get from an independent bookshop.

Both A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees and my novel Too Many Magpies can be bought online from Palas Print here and here.

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