Hallo, Hallo dear hearts!
We all love to read & we all find stories in different ways – some of us only purchase new books, others hound away at sleuthing out second hand shops, library sales &/or used book searches online; still others opt for the bargain bins or choose to listen to audiobooks (or ebooks) whilst some of us do a mixture of those things but also attempt to purchase books from Indies moreso than big box stores and we love supporting our local & regional libraries!
This brings me to my featured guest today – Mary Gibson – who is hear to talk about her latest release “The Bermondsey Bookshop” wherein this towne in the UK had a bookstore for awhile but then found itself without it. It is not just a store about a shop and the townespeople who live there but an echoing chamber of today’s commercial climate for publishing & the readers who are striving to take back their ability to choose how they want to purchase the books which interest them to read.
Why I wanted to host a Q&A for “The Bermondsey Bookshop”:
Stories which involve bookshoppes have the tendency of tipping the scales of my curiosity because there is something to be said about having grown up in a city where one large Indie bookshopped reigned supreme despite the insurgence of big box stores trying to steal their thunder and their sales. I have been an advocate for Indies and Libraries since before I was taller than the stack of books I used to carry out of public libraries! When it comes to Indie bookshoppes – the quirkier the better, I say! Those rambling stores where you need a bit of a map to gather the proper sense of order and alignment with their categories of shelves – where you can not only get lost finding stories but you get overwhelmed by all the plausible stories you can be reading just by spending time there!
Indies help communities as much as libraries and it is a rare honour to find stories in fiction which celebrate the beauty of why we need more advocacy and reader action to help #saveourlibraries and #KeepOurIndiesOPEN! ← randomly just created that tag!
When I read the description for this novel, I immediately felt pulled into the context of the story the author wanted us to feel swept inside. There is something to be said to have an anchouring in a community with a library and/or with an Indie book seller. Both equally deserve full respect and patrons because they each contribute to the greater whole of a community in general. I have loved wandering the stacks at libraries even before I knew what I wanted to research in the Non-Fiction sections whilst at Indies, there is this walkabout vibe about them, where you can simply feel absorbed into the background of the book shoppe and become part of the inertia of bookish joy which happily resides in its atmosphere. At least this was true of my own experiences.
Therefore when I was able to join the blog tour for this release and hear directly from the author how important Indie bookshoppes are and why they are viable assets which need not only protecting but the security of knowing that people are not going to abandon them – I knew this was going to be one of the blog tours I would love hosting!
On listening to the audiobook sampler:
A bit of good news! This audiobook is available via #Scribd!
It was hard to reconcile that the voice who is criticising Kate to the degree of cruelty is her own Aunt! She doesn’t give Kate enough credit nor does she seem motivated to encourage Kate’s own dreams for herself. If anything, I took it that this Aunt has a distinct path she thinks Kate must follow and any diversion therein is not going to sit well with her at all. Or even be approved – she seems that type – where she’d veto your plans before you can even break free of her rule!
You can tell Kate hasn’t had it easy in her life – her Aunt still holds over the choices of her Mum and makes direct accusations about Kate’s life through a vindictive assumption that ‘daughters will follow their Mums’ even if that doesn’t make any logical sense to anyone else – her Aunt wants to punish Kate for what Kate’s Mum choose to do with her own life.
She has to bolster herself against the tides of her life – of the routes her footsteps must take before she can brace for her truer independence. This felt immediately like a dramatic look into how one woman found a way to beat the odds and give back to a community in the process of finding her own freedom.
I very much look forward to listening to the rest of the story – as finding it was available on Scribd is a lifesaver! I try to request as many audiobooks as I can at the library but lately I am finding a lot are not available to be purchased – blessedly, Scribd has some of them and when I re-join in March I have a lovely listening list now to move through! If anyone wants to know more about Scribd kindly leave me a comment or DM me.
In regards to the narrator Anne Dover:
I recognised the accent and tone of the voice coming through my headphones but I singularly could not directly place whom the narrator was making me thing of as soon as I heard her narrating the story? It was one of those moments where you get your attention hooked from the first second you hear the narrator speak – and then, happily, its off to listening to the arc of the story the author’s left behind for you to find.
She switches between different ages very seamlessly – you could hear the innocence still in Kate’s voice whilst there is an older voiced character making her feel uneasy because they’d rather chide her than encourage her in her goals. Dover has the capacity to dimensionally resonate with the story as Gibson intended it to be absorbed because of how she’s articulating the story aloud. I love when narrators can do this – make the bridge into the author’s vision without any gaps for the reader to question. You are simply ‘removed into the story’ and it there you wish to reside until the end.
Did I grab your eye and attention?
Sound like the kind of bookish read you’ve been needing?
Be sure to brew your favourite cuppa and enjoy this delightful convo we shared!
The Bermondsey Bookshop
by Mary Gibson
Set in 1920s London, this is the inspiring story of Kate Goss's struggle against poverty, hunger and cruel family secrets. Her mother died in a fall, her father has vanished without trace, and now her aunt and cousins treat her viciously. In a freezing, vermin-infested garret, factory girl Kate has only her own brave spirit and dreams of finding her father to keep her going.
She has barely enough money to feed herself, or to pay the rent. The factory where she works begins to lay off people and it isn't long before she has fallen into the hands of the violent local money-lender. That is until an unexpected opportunity comes her way –a job cleaning a most unusual bookshop, where anyone, from factory workers to dockers, can learn to read and then buy books cheaply. A new world opens up, but with it come new dangers, too. Based on the true story of the Bermondsey Bookshop, this is the most inspiring and gripping novel Mary Gibson has yet written.
Places to find the book:
ISBN: 978-1788542654
Published by Head of Zeus
on 1st August, 2020
Published By: Head of Zeus (@HoZ_Books)
Available Formats:
Ebook & Audiobook releases 6th February, 2020!
Hardback and Trade Paperback releases 1st August, 2020!
Converse via: #TheBermondseyBookshop, #HistFic & #WomensFiction
As “The Bermondsey Bookshop” is rooted in real life lore of a bookshop which had such a positive effect on the community you’ve grown to love as a lifelong resident – how did you select what to highlight and showcase through your lead heroine’s own journey towards finding the truer path she was meant to walk? How did you want the reality of the bookshop’s legacy to shine through her story?
Gibson responds: THE BERMONDSEY BOOKSHOP was inspired by a real shop, founded in 1921 by an ex-actress called Ethel Gutman. She was warned off by the estate agent showing her around the premises when he found out what she planned to use it for. ‘Books in Bermondsey!’ It would never work, he explained, ‘Beer and boxing yes, but books? No!’ When I read that she ignored his sound business advice and insisted that the love of literature was alive in ‘mean streets as in Mayfair’! I gave a silent cheer. She ran the shop specifically to meet the desires of those who, like my young self, had grown up in Bermondsey without a bookshop.
Her stated aim was: ‘To bring books and the love of books into Bermondsey.’ Everything was designed to make the shop attractive and accessible to local working people. With evening opening hours, so that local factory or dock workers could visit after their shifts; free use of a cosy reading room as a refuge for those living in cramped or crowded homes; the offer of a sixpenny ‘installment plan’ for buying books; and numerous free lectures and classes.
I determined to include the story of The Bermondsey Bookshop in one of my novels. However, the time period had to be just right – the shop was only open for nine years and there never seemed to be the right opportunity. Either the novel I was writing was in the wrong decade, or the plot couldn’t be stretched to include it. So, when I decided that my new novel would feature Kate Goss, a tough girl, living in an over-priced garret, in thrall to money lenders after being laid off from her tin bashing job near Bermondsey Street, I realized she would be the last person to walk through the orange door and into Bermondsey Bookshop. So, of course, that’s what I made her do!
Though not initially as a seeker after truth or literature. The bookshop needs a cleaner and Kate needs to pay the rent. At her interview she declares to Ethel ‘I ain’t come to read, I’ve come to clean!’ But Kate Goss is an unusually curious girl, with an enquiring mind. And, for her, the orange door of The Bermondsey Bookshop becomes a portal to another world, where eventually she finds the key that unlocks both her past and her future. I think Ethel Gutman would have liked her.
Small townes are infamous for having a hidden under current of darkness percolating just out of sight – from the synopsis of your new story, it appears Bermondsey has its fair share of darker sorts – how did you want to offset the beauty of the bookshop’s missionagainst the growing tides of the unsavory sorts who populate themselves in the background of Kate’s journey?
Gibson responds: Bermondsey used to have a reputation for being a pretty rough place and during the period I write about the poverty there was extreme. Tuberculosis, scarlet fever and infant mortality rates were some of the highest in Britain. Wages were low, housing cruelly cramped and unsanitary. It would be strange if crime hadn’t proliferated. But things are not always what they seem – poverty and crime in an area are no indication of the intelligence or potential of the population.
The pioneering founder of The Bermondsey Bookshop recognized that and it only takes one visionary to open up a new world for people with no real choices in life. I wanted to show my heroine, Kate, and her friend Johnny ‘Rasher’ Bacon, finding new lives because of the bookshop. In fact, Johnny is inspired by a real Bermondsey man who took his chance to become an author after being published in several editions of the international quarterly ‘The Bermondsey Book’.
Literacy is a remarkable gift – libraries and book shoppes alike break down the barriers of class and economics– how did you want to reflect the needs of the community and the openness of these alternative learning centres to be vital to a community’s future? How do you think this reflects today’s crucial argument for saving libraries and independent bookshoppes?
Gibson responds: My own life story illustrates the relevance of your very interesting question. My lifelong attachment to books, my career in publishing and even my desire to write, came via the children’s section of the magnificent Spa Road Library in Bermondsey. After a few years of exhausting the children’s librarian with my demand for more books, I discovered that the local newsagent was stocking the Dean’s Children’s Classics – a small pile was temptingly placed just in front of the till! The exciting prospect of buying and owning my own books grabbed me. One shilling and sixpence represented a fair few weeks pocket money in those days – but soon I’d acquired Heidi, Little Women, Tom Sawyer, What Katy Did, Swiss Family Robinson and many more.
I eventually ran through the newsagent’s titles, and it occurred to me that there must be a real bookshop somewhere in Bermondsey. But there wasn’t. All through my childhood and teens, there was no bookshop in Bermondsey and by the time I received my university reading list there was still no bookshop in Bermondsey! I had to make the journey to Foyles in Charing Cross Road – which, in the seventies, was a bewildering maze with everything arranged by publisher and all the paperbacks housed in a completely separate building. I longed for a bookshop in Bermondsey. But it never arrived.
So, when years later, while researching my first novel, I uncovered the history of The Bermondsey Bookshop, and its brief, brilliant life, I was oddly envious of its patrons and then strangely delighted – Bermondsey had once had a bookshop, even if it had only lasted for nine years. As for the marvellous Bermondsey Library in Spa Road, it was sadly one of the many to have been closed down. The building however has a new incarnation as a Buddhist retreat centre. A suitable reminder of the Buddha’s teaching that all things arise and pass away, so best not get attached to anything! Not that I’m likely to learn that particular lesson when it comes to books – for my early attachment is as strong as it ever was.
What is your favourite part of living in Bermondsey and what do you love most about the community itself?
Gibson responds: Bermondsey is one of the two oldest parts of London – the other being the City of London on the north bank of the Thames. In its long life it has undergone countless changes. One of the reasons I set my novels in the small riverside borough during the early twentieth-century is because I wanted to capture the close-knit community of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations – the place I’d grown up in – before it had vanished completely.
The first major change in my lifetime came about due to the closure of the docks – largely due to containerisation. Dock work and industries fed by the river, such as food processing and leather factories gradually disappeared and people whose families had lived in Bermondsey for generations began to disperse.
I myself moved out of Bermondsey in 1996, since when it has undergone yet another transformation. Many of the old factory buildings and riverside wharves have been converted into trendy apartments and the old railway viaduct near where I used to live has become home to an artisan food market! Bermondsey Street especially is unrecognizable from the one I describe in THE BERMONDSEY BOOKSHOP. There are cool art galleries and chic restaurants where once there were printing firms, tanneries or even Boutles the tin bashers, where my heroine goes to work at thirteen. The demographic is different to the world I write about, but there’s definitely something about living in the geographic heart of London which lends a vibrancy to a community and I think the new Bermondsey still definitely has that!
When your not researching and writing your stories what uplifts your spirit the most?
Gibson responds: I find gardening one of those very absorbing activities where I can let my mind wander wherever it wants! I enjoy photography – capturing a beautiful flower, landscape, or piece of architecture can be very satisfying. I love to get out and walk in nature whenever I can – a great antidote for all those sedentary hours hunched over a laptop!
I oft wondered if gardening would be an activity I might enjoy – between the state of the land and the climate where I live – it was never an option to attempt because nothing grows well here. However I recently learnt loads about how growing lavender isn’t just good for your yard and home (as it is a natural preventive from keeping insects and deer away from you) but the benefits it gives as aromatherapy and how it is drought resistant and thrives on sunlight! I never know what I am going to find via QVC and that was a true delight of a segment!
I personally had the benefit of growing up with a Mum and grandfather (her father) who both appreciated and were passionately enjoying photography. I was a proper shutterbug from a young age and I grew into a self-directed self-learning wildlife and nature photographer. I can spend loads of hours just hiking and seeking wildlife and their habitats. There is a certain kind of serenity to that pursuit. Ooh my yes! Architecture was something else I inherited a love for from my grandfather… you can truly feel inspired by the awe of what is constructed!
Follow this Blog Tour:
Happily find out the backstory of the #WomensFiction #HistFic novel #TheBermondseyBookshop as it celebrates the love of #indiebookstore's! Click To TweetVisit the book blogger who preceded me on the tour:
Review @ Boon’s Bookcase | (see also her tweet)
NOTE: Similar to blog tours wherein I feature book reviews, book spotlights (with or without extracts), book announcements (or Cover Reveals) – I may elect to feature an author, editor, narrator, publisher or other creative person connected to the book, audiobook, Indie film project or otherwise creative publishing medium being featured wherein the supplemental content on my blog is never compensated monetarily nor am I ever obligated to feature this kind of content. I provide (98.5%) of all questions and guest topics regularly featured on Jorie Loves A Story. I receive direct responses back to those enquiries by publicists, literary agents, authors, blog tour companies, etc of whom I am working with to bring these supplemental features and showcases to my blog. I am naturally curious about the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of stories and the writers who pen them: I have a heap of joy bringing this content to my readers. Whenever there is a conflict of connection I do disclose those connections per post and disclose the connection as it applies.
{SOURCES: Book cover for “The Bermondsey Bookshop”, book synopsis, author photograph of Mary Gibson, author biography and the blog tour banners were all provided by Head of Zeus and used with permission. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets were embedded due to codes provided by Twitter. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: Conversations with the Bookish banner and the Comment Box Banner.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2020.
I’m a social reader | I tweet my reading life
.@joriestory?NEW Q&A with Mary Gibson
feat. #TheBermondseyBookshop as we discuss the benefits of why #indiebookstore's are a viable asset to their communities & the fuller history of #Bermondsey itself as a community
?https://t.co/34IWrLPnr2#HistFic #WomensFiction #blogtour pic.twitter.com/6wx6ktvjMQ
— Jorie, the Joyful Tweeter ?? (@joriestory) February 14, 2020
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