Winstone's Hunting Raven Books | Bookshop Review
A love letter to community
Welcome to the inaugural edition of my new series, Bookshop Reviews. Each edition will visit a different independent bookshop for a nosy at their tables and a chat with the booksellers.
Frome has always been a punky, alternative, slightly out of left field town, as Tina, manager of Winstone’s Hunting Raven Books, tells me. This gem in the Somerset countryside has a distinct character, expressed in its quirky eateries, art galleries, and independent shops. Walking up Cheap Street feels like I’ve taken a wrong turn into the Mont St Michel - a crooked cobblestone street full of colour. A stream runs down its centre, crossed by a ladder propped against a shopfront. The business owners here all know each other, and many of the shoppers milling around, children, dogs and laughter all adding to the atmosphere of the sunny Friday morning when I visit. The shop’s doorway is recessed into a porch, which opens like the wide arms of a friend, welcoming you in. The shop is far from silent, no need to tiptoe - it’s full of the kind of warm atmosphere that can’t be manufactured, only organically grown. It’s a love letter to community.
It’s obvious from the moment I meet Tina how dearly she holds that community. She and Harriet, assistant manager, are a well-oiled and smiling team. Today she’s dressed in a blue and white dress, although she assures me it’s usually jeans and jumpers - this afternoon she’s going to a wedding. But it’s her upbeat personality that really puts me at ease, a little nervous for my first in-person interview and having written none of my questions down, and reminds me that I’m just chatting to someone else who really loves books.
At Café la Strada up the street, we both choose Portuguese egg custard tarts with flaky pastry. My first question is about what she’s reading. She’s always got so many on the go, she says - right now she’s enjoying The Raven’s Nest by Sarah Thomas, the author’s story of visiting Iceland for a week only to fall in love with a man and the location and spend half a decade there. And she’s just finished I Will Greet the Sun Again by Khashayar J. Khabushani, which she describes as a beautifully sensitive coming of age story in which the reader is slightly ahead of the protagonist in understanding himself.
Tina first worked at Hunting Raven part time in 2010, and has been manager since 2018. She places her career there into three chapters - bookseller, and then manager pre- and post-pandemic. They’d often talked about being part of a community, but lockdown was a sudden litmus test of that belief, and thankfully proved it true. Going from a sellout event standing on the counter to speak to the crowd to nobody allowed in and doorstep book deliveries was immense, but the town did show up to support them. The cost of living is perhaps making things harder, she reflects; where the pandemic had us lending one another a shoulder, the next crisis may force people to tend their own concerns first. But the bookshop is robust, she reassures me - part of Winstone’s since 2016 but part of Frome for forty years now. They are deeply rooted in the town. And the most surprising thing about coming out of the pandemic, she says, is how quickly it seems to have gone back to normal.
The second hand and antiquarian bookshop in the town and Hunting Raven are part of an ecosystem of independents that strengthen each other, Tina tells me, and jokes that you can’t move for a best-selling author here. As we’re eating delicious egg custard tarts we meet Andrew Ziminski, author of The Stonemason. Back in the shop a little later the author of The Vintage Shop Libby Page is browsing, celebrating finishing her latest book The Lifeline. Beyond authors, many people in the shop are regulars, ordering things in, picking up reservations, asking for recommendations. Tina and Harriet are clearly trusted and cherished by their customers.
Perhaps in part because it’s the summer holidays families are everywhere here, and Tina agrees the town is very family-friendly. Hunting Raven’s children’s section is a much beloved part of the shop, and accounts for a third of their sales. It’s wonderful to have the space for more range than parents might find elsewhere, she tells me, to introduce young readers to a variety of voices. And while parenting can be a huge barrier to reading, we’ve both experienced changes in our usual tastes - when we might usually gravitate to literary or challenging styles, lacking the headspace and struggling to read, more ‘commercial’ fiction was a haven.
Those categories are largely made up anyway - Tina calls it ‘cat-agony’ when unboxing books, the dilemma of where to place something to help it find its readers and sell. Many books really don’t fit only one category, and will appeal to more than one type of reader. And Tina has an ethos of suspending all book snobbery - there is no hierarchy of reading, only the satisfaction of introducing readers to new things, taking them from the most visible authors to others who will also speak to their imaginations; not replacing but expanding. While a bookshop curates their stock, she believes it’s not their job to tell you what’s good. Even a reader’s opinion will change in different seasons of life - Tina herself hated The Handmaid’s Tale the first two times she read it, and the third was blown away by it. Books and their readers are not static, and things we once didn’t connect with make sense on another viewing. It’s a privilege in the shop to help someone find the book that unlocks a reading slump.
Readers still often apologise as they hand over a book at the till, Tina tells me, for being drawn in by the cover, but she enthuses about the skill of the people who can create those covers to help readers find what they want. The jacket is a shorthand for what’s inside, and there’s no need to apologise for understanding that communication.
When we turn to upcoming books we’re excited for, Tina tells me about the children’s edition of Amy Jeff’s Storyland, and Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren. It’s tricky from the bookshop to keep these things in view - often she’s ordering two or three months ahead, and it’s a delightful surprise what’s there when opening the box.
In September, Hunting Raven are hosting their Accidental Book Festival - after a tricky outing of the Frome Literature Festival last year, they were determined to take a year off. And then in what was meant to be a two-week holiday, Tina couldn’t help but organise one - or rather, found she had done without quite meaning to, with several events right beside each other in September, and an equally-accidental all-women line up covering memoir, mental health, fiction and travel writing. (You can find details for the Accidental Book Festival here.) Tina’s excited to have returning author Joanna Quinn, after narrowly missing getting knocked over running to say hello when the author dropped off a proof of The Whalebone Theatre.
Browsing the bookshop after our chat, I’m drawn to so many books we’ve just talked about - The Raven’s Nest is going straight on my TBR list, and Libby Page’s The Vintage Shop is going to be my pull-in-case-of-emergency read when I need cheering up. The shop is packed with treasure - displays of the Booker, Nota Bene Prize and Wainwrights Prizes, as well as local authors spotlighted and the bright array of children’s books. The tables remind me of a sweetshop, the promise of all the delicious things on offer spread out waiting for you to choose. There are titles I recognise and many that I don’t, and I have to make difficult choices to keep my purchases down to two (I take a lot of photos on my phone to remember for another day). In the end, I leave with Esc&Ctrl by Steve Hollyman, and Cheri by Jo Ann Beard, a book Tina promises me is incredibly poignant. I wonder if I could read while walking, but decide the cobbled street and the stream are too risky. I’ll have to stop off in a café instead.
You can visit Hunting Raven Books at 9-10 Cheap Street, Frome, and online at shop.winstonebooks.co.uk
