heather thomas

westwood books, sedbergh

For this week’s Bookshop Spotlight we caught up with family-run indie Westwood Books located in the small market town of Sedbergh, Cumbria, England's Official Book Town.

​Co-owner Heather Thomas talked us through the shop’s unique history and how they, alongside husband and fellow bookseller-in-arms Paul, found their way into the mad plate-spinning world of bookselling. 

---

I found it fascinating just from the cultural differences and I think it’s a really lovely book... it sounded like something we should all be aspiring to as a way of life. ​I think it’s a brilliant read... I’ll definitely be shouting about that one.

JR: First off, did you have a good Christmas? 

HT: Yeah, it was okay. We had a good month. November was a lot quieter than we’ve had in the past. We’ve only had the bookshop since Covid, since 2020, so haven’t had a normal year yet. So I don’t really know what normal is. But yeah, November was super quiet for what we’ve had over the last few years, so that was a bit concerning. But December was better. January, not so much. But we’re only a week in.

JR: Yeah, do you find, in your experience, there’s that usual lull after the festive chaos? ​

HT: Yeah. I mean, we’re rural. We’re very much tourist-driven, so summer is definitely our better time. I know that previously before we had the bookshop, the bookshop’s been here for somewhere like eighteen years now, and I know for the previous owners it was very much about summer. Christmas wasn’t a thing for them at all and we’ve tried to drive that a bit more. So, I guess we’re doing better than maybe they’ve done before. That’s a positive, definitely. Like I said, we haven’t had a normal year yet so it’s been hard to tell. We know January is quieter but it’s hard to know how quiet. This has been quieter than last year, in the same period, so who knows?

JR: I guess you just have to keep turning up and doing the work.

HT: Yeah, it’s very tough.

JR: In my experience, every year has been different, you know. Over the last few years especially, there doesn’t seem to be a trend. ​

HT: No, that’s the thing. Even from week to week, the old thinking of, ‘Oh, the weekends are busier’, but that isn’t always the case. People are so much more flexible now. People are working from home. We can have mad days in the middle of the week that you’re not expecting and then you can have a completely dead weekend. You just can’t predict, which is crazy. 
We’re trying to look at trends. I just started in the last couple of months, I’ve spreadsheeted the monthly sales from various places in-store, online, that kind of thing, to try and see what the pattern is. Because you look at it on a daily basis, and you go, ‘Oh, today is really quiet’, or, ‘Yesterday was really busy’, or whatever. And it’s too close to figure out any kind of pattern necessarily. I’ve tried to zoom out a bit and go, ‘Well, what happened last year?’ And you kind of see that there is a rough pattern that follows. It might be a couple of days out but weirdly it still follows vaguely the same trends.

JR: OK, that’s interesting. I mean, I don’t think we ever tried to set ourselves targets or anything like that before. But I’ve been through the hospitality world and they can get quite strict on their targets and their yearly estimations. I don’t think that works in the book world. ​

HT: No. Though, I’ve heard that some Waterstones staff have targets. How does that even work? How can you enforce that?

JR: Yeah, I think targets and incentivising staff is quite tricky, in retail generally, but I think the book world is its own unique type of retail, isn’t it?

HT: Yeah, very much so. I’ve worked in other retail and it’s very different. 

JR: I’d usually start by talking about the shop first and the bookseller second, but I guess this time I thought that given the timings of when you took over, it might be good to set the scene slightly first. 

Could you tell me a bit about your background, how you got into bookselling and how that first year was for you?

HT: Well, I run the shop with my husband. We got the shop completely - I always say completely accidentally, but it wasn’t really. We used to live in the Midlands, we moved to Cumbria, I had a daughter, and I’d worked in all sorts of things. I’d worked in HR, I’d worked in retail, I’d worked in customer service. All very useful things for working in a bookshop. And when my daughter was small I took on the role of project manager for the town, for Sedbergh. So that involved running events and promoting the town in general, having an awareness of what was going on and linking things together and I guess, really, just to promote the town and tourism in the town, which was a part-time role. As part of that, Sedbergh is England’s official Book Town. Which loads of people don’t know. It’s like the best-kept secret! 

So I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, why doesn’t anyone know this?’ It was one of the things I wanted to make a big deal out of, and, one of the things that hadn’t happened was that we hadn’t had a book festival for a while. I thought, ‘Why aren’t we doing that?’

Well, the previous committee were a little older and some people had gotten ill, so I organised a small-scale book festival in 2018. As part of that, I was working with the previous owners of the bookshop. We ran the festival and it was lovely, it went well. I’d spent a lot of time in the shop, and I was sat in the shop on one of the last days of the festival and made a really flippant remark about how lovely it would be to work in a bookshop. A week later I got a phone call from the owner saying, ‘Can you come in?’, and I thought, ‘God, what have I done?’ 
He sat me down and asked, ‘Are you serious? Because we need to retire at some point.’ 

You know, they were in their seventies, maybe. I was completely shocked. It wasn’t what I expected at all. So I said that I’d have to go home and think about it.
Well, I went home to speak to my husband fully expecting him to say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, and went, ‘Why not?’ 

So, it kind of kicked off from there really. My husband worked in IT and he was away a lot. Three weeks out of five he was out of the country. So we had our daughter, who was four, and she’s autistic so was quite challenging to look after on my own. 

‘It would mean we’d both be here, we’d be in town, be around more. Why don’t we do it?’

JR: A total change of pace for the two of you then?

HT: Yeah, so that was the plan. My husband spent some time working in the bookshop, I’d already spent some time in it anyway, and we were working towards taking it on and then the pandemic hit. 

So, we should’ve taken the shop on 1st April for the new financial year in 2020 and that didn’t happen. All the paperwork was still going through and everything got delayed. We were eventually official owners of the shop on 1st June and I think we had two weeks closed because it was still a lockdown then we reopened mid-June, and it just hasn’t been normal since! 
We then had subsequent lockdowns after that, and yeah, Brexit, cost of living, fuel crisis…

JR: Yeah, you’ve kind of faced it all these last few years.
 
So this seemingly wholesome, idyllic entry into this rural bookshop life turned into quite a different story for you. 

HT: Absolutely, it started out being spun that way and then it just turned into quite a stressful one. You know, ‘Oh my god, what are we doing, how do we do this?’ 

I mean, it’s been good. There are lots of lovely things about it but it has been considerably harder than we ever imagined. Not that we thought it would be easy, but we were taking on an established business. We were hoping to just smoothly pass it across and carry on, and make a lot of changes, but it all went out the window. We didn’t change anything. We were just holding on for dear life. 

JR: So, I’d have thought, I guess, it may have helped being in such an established bookshop - 

HT: Definitely.

JR: - riding the wave of those lockdowns. Do you think your situation, being a book town and having such a community of local bookshops, helped you get through those lockdowns? 

HT: Um, I don’t know really.

JR: I guess it could be seen as an ‘every man for themselves’ kind of situation, but when you’re learning the ropes at the same time as firefighting - 

HT: Yeah, in some ways it gave us a bit of a breathing space to learn stuff and to have an idea what was going on. You weren’t from day one having a barrage of customers and you’re there trying to figure it all out. From that perspective it was good. We did have quite a lot of community support through lockdown. People emailing or calling and putting orders in and things like that, so that was nice. It was just such an odd time.

We spent so much time in the bookshop. Our daughter was here. Our son’s a bit older so he kind of did his own thing, but our daughter spent her Monday to Friday here with us so we could do stuff and she was doing a bit of school work. It was just really surreal. We kind of lived in the bookshop Monday to Friday. It was very strange.

JR: Let’s talk about the shop itself. It’s quite a unique story. It was a factory and a village hall, a cinema, and then a bookshop.

HT: Yeah, that’s right. So, Mark and Evelyn moved from Hay-on-Wye and set this up when it became a book town, or just a bit before. It’s an interesting building, it’s an interesting building to deal with as well. It’s an old building which is never easy with books. 

JR: Absolutely. I mean, you’re between the Dales and the Lakes so you’ve got your fair share of wet weather.

HT: Oh yes! It’s not our favourite thing. Rain and old buildings don’t go well together. 

In terms of location, as I say it’s very much for tourists. It’s a beautiful place and a great place for walking and that kind of thing. But it can be quiet during the winter.

JR: So, give us an idea of the size of the bookshop. You proudly say you’re the largest bookshop in the Yorkshire Dales. How many books do you have in stock?

HT: Well, we do secondhand and new. It was set up as secondhand originally. We probably have about 100,000 books here. So, it’s huge. It is quite big. 

JR: And that’s grown since I did a bit of homework.

HT: Oh, yes. We still do secondhand. Maybe seventy-five per cent secondhand and then we try and have a selection of the newest stuff. For us it just makes sense. We’re in a rural location, the nearest new bookshop, or, like a Waterstones, is in Kendal half an hour away. And especially in lockdown it just made sense to have new stuff here. They’d started a few new books before we took it on. But yeah, it just made sense. 

We aimed to have - and we’re still not quite there yet because, you know, you have to manage stock and cashflow and things - in each subject area some new, newly published, and some secondhand [books]. You’d have the whole range. We also sell antiquarian and rare books here as well, so you have the whole - from very newly published right back to super old, rare books. It was a nice thing to have in a building of this size.

JR: And how do you find managing that level of stock? That’s such a mammoth task, isn’t it?

HT: It’s hard. It’s harder than you’d think. And it takes a lot of time in terms of the balance between new and secondhand. With new books, in terms of physically taking the books in: it arrives, you price it up, you scan it into the system and it’s put out. It doesn’t take that much doing but you’ve still got to work out what you’re ordering and you’ve got to sit down with reps, and so that takes time from that side of things. 

But with secondhand books or rare and antiquarian there’s a lot of research that goes into them. There’s a lot of time spent looking that book up, to work out the value and where it’s going to go. 
We are inundated with secondhand books. I think a combination of people spending more time at home, and having time to clear out. Unfortunately, lots of people died. We are contacted about people’s libraries that are left behind. We’re also in a cost of living crisis and people want to make some money, so, like yesterday, I wasn’t in the shop, but we had eight enquiries just in one day of people’s stuff they want to sell to us. 

Occasionally we get donations but mostly we buy secondhand books so we’re always contacted and obviously, you can’t buy everything. I mean, we could fill it five times over with what we’re offered, and this building’s huge! So from that, that’s a mammoth amount of work. We’ve got boxes and boxes of stock here that are still to be processed and with more coming. And balancing the two with a really small team is quite hard.

JR: Yeah, obviously it’s a massive shop and it’s a big logistical system, I’m sure. How large a team do you have?

HT: At the moment there’s me and my husband who run it and then we have four part-time staff.

JR: OK. I mean, that’s tiny really, for the size of the building. My experience is solely in new books and even our largest shop was roughly fifteen thousand books, maybe, at most. But we had six or so staff. 

It’s just a different game, isn’t it?

HT: It is, it is. It’s interesting trying to balance conflicting interests between new and secondhand stock. Secondhand stock takes a lot of time. And we’re trying to list stuff online and you’ve got to be able to catalogue a book which takes even more time. There are a lot of different skills for different sides but everyone has to be able to do a bit of everything.

JR: Well, that was going to be my next question. Do you have different roles or different areas within the shop, I guess not.

HT: I’d love it if we’d be able to do it that way, but no. We just don’t have enough people. Everyone has to be able to do everything. I mean, it isn’t quite as simple as that, there are certain things that some people can’t do, but generally speaking, everyone has to muck in. That’s just how things have to roll really, depending on what’s happening on that day. 

JR: Do you think the shop has a specific genre or focus leaning at its centre? Do you think you’re maybe more fiction than non-fiction or does that fluctuate? 

HT: It probably does fluctuate a little bit, actually, but probably more non-fiction. Under the previous owners, [the shop had] very much a science/maths [leaning], because that was what they were into. But we haven’t run it that way. We haven’t really had the capacity to focus all in on anything in particular. 

We like to make sure we have a bit of everything, we certainly look for stuff that’s a little more niche. So within a subject, if you’ve got a book that’s general, something like the history of England, versus something like a very specific event, we’re going to pick the super niche, weird, interesting stuff. We try and be a bit more like that and have something on everything or about everything but make it super niche.

JR: And I guess that’s what makes your shop unique. It’s all about the stock, isn’t it?

HT: Yeah. I mean, people are always surprised at how big it is, how much stock we have for where it is. Even when you stand outside. It’s quite a big building, I think, but you’ll still hear people wander through the door and go, ‘Wow, I wasn’t expecting that!’ Which is lovely. It’s really nice.

JR: Considering the size of the place and the footfall, do you find that you have a solid core customer base? Have you got those locals who come in regularly?

HT: We definitely have regulars. We have regulars who are local. We have regulars who are not local and will just order and they’ll drop me a line on social media or drop us an email or give us a call. ‘Can you get me this?’, ‘Can you get me a bit of that?’, ‘Have you got anything on?’ Which is really lovely. We have a set of people, but we couldn’t call them locals because they’re from all over. But yeah, you could say we have a core following.

JR: Do you think that existed before the pandemic? 

HT: I think there were a few but I honestly couldn’t say for sure. I know we have more locals shopping here now. I think that’s purely from a change of, like, they’re people we know, they’re our friends. People we’ve mixed in circles with before, who maybe didn’t think about coming here, I’m not sure. But definitely, people who have come to us since we took over.
​
Mark and Evelyn, the previous owners, were a lot older than us and I think they had a lot more of an older customer base and since we took it on we’ve got some younger people coming in.

JR: That’s interesting. Do you find you’re getting more families now too?

HT: Definitely. We’ve done a lot with the children's books and there’s still more to do this year, hopefully. Because it was mostly secondhand children's books, secondhand children’s books are generally bought by adults. It’s not for kids. So we’ve brought in a lot of new books because if you’re going to buy it for an actual child you’re going to buy a brand new book, generally speaking. I mean, if you’re a parent and you just want one book you might buy it secondhand but generally it’s people who are gifting and they come in to buy nice shiny new books. 
​
That’s something we’ve brought in, lots of new kid's books, and we’ve put in a new rug and once COVID was over we put in some new toys and tried to make it a bit more attractive for kids.

JR: And it’s nice to foster those relationships with families because you’re going to see those kids grow up.

HT: Absolutely, absolutely. And you’ve got to get kids interested in books early. That’s key. That’s something I’ve always believed in even before I was a bookseller, as someone who has read since I was small. My son’s read since he was small. My daughter has a slightly different outlook on bookshops because she’s practically grown up here, but, you know, she still loves books. 
​
So yeah, I think it’s really important and it’s brought more families in here. Previously we’ve had, because we’ve got an upstairs and a downstairs, the kid's books split over two levels. Younger kids are downstairs, and older ones are upstairs. This year I’m hoping we can pull it all into one and make it a big nice space. But we’ll see. It’s quite ambitious.

JR: Yeah, it’s nice to keep it all together, isn’t it? It makes it a little more accessible and friendly.

HT: Yeah. It doesn’t make any sense, but we haven’t had the capacity to be able to make a massive change.

JR: Well, when you’ve got that much stock it’s a really big move. 

HT: It is. I’m hoping we make it this year. It’s been on the list since we took it on.

JR: That’ll be exciting to see. 

So, you’ve already spoken about the fact that you’re in a book town and I guess I was hoping you might be able to explain what that means to you. 
It’s great that you’ve got a community of booksellers. Do you find that you’re all working independently or is there a crossover? 

How does the town work in terms of bookselling?

HT: So, it’s not like Hay-on-Wye. There aren’t that many bookshops here. We’re the biggest by far. There’s a community bookshop here where the profits go back into the community and fund all sorts of projects. You can put in an application and they’ll kind of give you a bit of money. There’s a bookshop in the tourist information centre where individual book dealers rent shelves, so they have all different kinds of specialisms. You can get some really interesting books in there. And then we have other shops that have books in them but they sell other things. There’s a walking shop that sells walking boots and outdoor clothing but they also sell books that relate to all of those things. We have a few shops a bit like that. It’s all mixed in here.

JR: And that’s quite nice. It sounds slightly more organic and like you’re not all fighting for air. ​

HT: Yeah, absolutely. It’s all very different, no one is competing. It’s interesting, people come here expecting to see millions of bookshops and it’s not really like that, we just have a bookish angle, if that makes sense. ​

JR: Yeah, and that’s lovely. And you know, not every book town can be like Hay-on-Wye and I guess it would take the magic away from it if people tried.

HT: Sometimes it can be hard to see. You have to look a bit harder but there’s a lot here. There’s a lot of history here as well, in terms of history for bookish people. There’s a big history of Quakerism here, Adam Sedgwick, who is a famous geologist. There are loads of interesting links that you can research here that we’ve got books on. Family history is a really big thing as well. People look up books on family history specific to the area. There’s just so much you can buy books on. There’s no real competition. ​

JR: If you’re a big reader and if you’re a bookish type then I think having those pilgrimages - not just to book towns but also to those remote or rural bookshops - can be a really special experience, can’t it?

​HT: Oh, definitely. It’s a different experience depending on where you go, isn’t it? There are lots of famous bookshops that you always see on lists but every place has its own feel. It’s interesting, I’m trying to think, we get quite a few people to come and say, ‘Oh, this is my favourite bookshop’, but I need to keep asking people why. ​

JR: It’s great to have that said about your shop. It’s a nice pat on the back, obviously, but I guess it’s a reassurance that you’re doing something right.

HT: It is, absolutely. You don’t get a lot of it, in terms of direction. You kind of just get on and hope you’re doing the right thing. So it is nice when someone says that. ​

JR: Let’s talk a bit about your book events. I see that you’ve got a Persephone event next month and Karen Bentley Brown joining you at the end of this month. How do events work for you?

HT: The previous owners didn’t really do events. It just wasn’t something they wanted to do. Then obviously the pandemic hit which made it hard for events. We had one or two. In fact, the first-ever event we held was Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac tour and he was amazing. We had to limit it, I think we had twenty people. We can probably fit forty in but obviously, everyone had to be spaced out. So, we had a room of twenty people. It was a very dramatic evening. Robin came to do his event and it was the biggest storm in years. There are four or five pages in his book just on his visit here, which is amazing, but he had a really traumatic drive back to his hotel. My husband was driving him but literally - there was a storm, it was raining, there were trees in the road, they had to keep turning around. It took about four hours to do a twenty-minute journey!

JR: We caught him on the other end of that. 

HT: Yes, he came to you guys next!

JR: Yeah, well, that was the plan. So, after those four pages of chaos, he made his way, I think, at least to Carlisle, but Helen had to go pick him up. There were flooded roads, downed trees, electric wires, and all sorts. It was great drama for the book though, wasn’t it?

HT: It was. So, that was the first event we did. It was a really lovely event but still with restrictions. It wasn’t until last year we really went in for a schedule of events. 
​
I called it a ‘Summer of Events’. I think we had six or eight events. It feels like a long time ago. We had a run over the summer which was our first go at it, to be honest. And it was dependent on some of the authors contacting us. Some of them I thought would be more popular or more relevant to the area or something for here. It wasn’t like a big picture, it kind of just came together as a set of events and we ran with it. 

Physically in the shop, we can easily seat forty. We’d probably get in more but then it would feel a bit squashed. We clear everything away and sit everyone downstairs and it works quite nicely. You can still shop properly, pretty much. We don’t have to move so much that you can’t shop. 

JR: It’s good to be able to do both.

HT: People always ask, it’s so funny, ‘Can I go look at the books?’ Of course you can!

JR: Yeah, the till is never shut!

HT: Yeah, so it works nicely in that way. I think the hardest thing is transport here. It’s quite rural. An everlasting issue, isn’t it? Being able to get here. That’s our main issue with getting [authors] to us for events, us being so rural. Winter events, when it’s dark, I think are a bit more of a struggle depending on who it is. But yeah, we did that over the summer. 
We didn’t do anything past October other than a kid's event in December which was lovely. We had Charlie Moyler, she did The Tree Next Door, who came with Martin [Stanev] and they read the story and made decorations and that was lovely. 

And we have done things like getting the kids in for World Book Day as well. We invited the schools to bring the kids to the shop so each class came at a different time to have a look for their World Book Day book and have a look around the bookshop at the same time, to try and get them to come in. It’s a weird thing here, I don’t know if other bookshops get this, I don’t know if it’s just our building but some people walk past and go, ‘Is it a library?’, ‘Are we allowed in?’, and so we try and get the kids to come in. So if they come with school, they can then go home and go, ‘Can I go to the bookshop?’, or, you know, ‘I’ve been in the bookshop’, so they don’t think it something not accessible to them. 

JR: Sure, that makes sense. It’s a nice introduction anyway because World Book Day, I think, quite often gets derailed as to who’s got the best costume or let's all come in pyjamas but let's not actually talk about the books. It’s great to be able to bring them into an actual bookshop. That’s quite special.

HT: Yeah, and because we have so many different kinds of books here - not all the kids are going to be interested, to be fair - but because we have such a range from new to old, they can come here and they can look at older books, and you can talk to them about the significance of different books. It’s not all just boring stuff. Like, a comic, there’s a range. You can find books on anything just to try and get them interested. ​

JR: It’s lighting that spark one way or another. 

HT: Exactly. 

JR: And getting them through the door is such a big hurdle in the first place. It’s a great way to do it. 

Let’s talk a little bit about yourself. What kind of books do you like to read?

HT: Oh, that’s a good question. I read eclectically. I love anything to do with Scandinavian countries, Nordics, and the cultural side of that. Non-fiction. If there’s a book on Hygge or Lagom, all those kinds of cultural concepts, I love all of that. I’m more of a non-fiction reader but I do chuck in some fiction along the way. Obviously, I love the Moomins and Tove Jansson. That goes with it all. But I kind of read all sorts of things. We get sent proofs so if something catches my eye I’ll have a read but I try to read quite widely if I can. Although, it can be quite a struggle. I cannot read fast enough. 

JR: No, and there’s never enough time in the day. It’s a hard balance to run the shop with a family, I’m sure. ​

HT: It is. I want to know how I can do it faster, and how people fit it all in. But in the shop, we all have different interests, so there are things I leave to other people who have a better knowledge of it, to be honest. 

JR: It’s good to be able to tap into that though. You don’t need to read everything. 

HT: Exactly. But that’s the sort of thing I try and go for. 

JR: And in-store, are you able to tailor some of the stock to your tastes or do you feel as though you mostly order for your locals?

HT: There’s a bit of both. We’ve quite a big nature area because of where we are. That’s a lot of what we sell. You’ve got your James Rebanks’ of course, and now his wife, who’s also very lovely. Her book’s been amazing. Loads of nature books that we sell over and over again. But we try and stock bits that we’re interested in as well, from all of the staff. My husband’s a massive Pratchett fan so we have the entire run of Pratchetts and anything related. And he’s quite a sci-fi reader, so he’ll get in a lot of those. I guess we do a bit of both. A bit of what we see go out the door and a little of what we like to read.

JR: Do you have a place in the shop for any staff recommendations? 

HT: It’s not something we’ve done regularly but it’s something I’d like to do more of. I post things occasionally on social media which is mostly from me and I’d like it to not be mostly about me. It’s just getting other people to find the time to pull their thoughts together. Sometimes one or two sentences are fine but sometimes you want a bit more than that. Recently I posted on the blog a review of Prophet Song [Paul Lynch] which was done by one of our staff which was lovely. Ellie joined us last year, she did an English degree and is very good at that sort of thing. She did a really lovely review of that for us. 

JR: And it’s nice for your customers to see your team getting involved as well.

HT: We want more of that. But our staff our shy! 

JR: A final couple of questions then. What were your big books of last year?

HT: Oh, there’s lots. Helen Rebanks’ book, The Farmer’s Wife, was quite big. But I’ll be honest, we don’t have stats for everything we sell so I can’t pull off a report. It’s by feeling. So, yeah, Helen’s book was really big, we always sell James Rebanks anyway, we must sell hundreds of those. I don’t know for fiction, it does seem to be a fair mix. We sell a bit of everything. ​

JR: I suppose in the antique and secondhand world you’re going to be doing a lot of single-copy sales. ​

HT: Yes. It’s mostly ones. So whatever’s here can be really random. I’m trying to think if there’s a fiction title that has flown… Oh, that’s a good one, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, or any of his works. ​

JR: Wow! I think, post-pandemic, people must still be in a bit of a dystopian mood, are they?

HT: Yeah, we do, we sell it over and over. Piles of it. 

JR: That’s such a strange juxtaposition of your idyllic Rebanks’ Lakes and Orwellian fiction. ​

HT: We have a whole table of Orwells because we sell so many of them.

JR: How odd. That’s so great to see.

OK, final question and hopefully a hopeful note to end on. Are there any books or events you’re especially looking forward to this year?

HT: I’ve just read a proof of Helen Russell’s How to Raise a Viking, which I’m not sure many other people are going to be talking about as much as I am, but I loved it. I love all of Helen Russell’s writing, she did The Year of Living Danishly. She moved out to Denmark and wrote all about that and how different it is. And she’s done this book. It’s kind of a parenting book but I found it fascinating just from the cultural differences and I think it’s a really lovely book. It’s a great example of - and I’m sure their country isn’t perfect - but it sounded like something we should all be aspiring to as a way of life.

​I think it’s a brilliant read. I’m not sure it’s going to be up there with everyone else’s recommendations but I’ll definitely be shouting about that one.

If you enjoyed reading about these staff recommendations and events, make sure you pay a visit to westwood books in person or online to show them your love this January, and beyond.