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Tuesday 10am - 6pm Wednesday 10am - 6pm Thursday 10am - 6pm Friday 10am - 6pm Saturday 10am - 6pm Sunday 11am - 4pm

Storysmith Books, 236 North Street, Bristol (2026)

18/06/2026

A perfect night at the Cube last night, as we welcomed Olivia Laing back to Bristol to discuss their novel The Silver Book (Storysmith Book of the Year 2025™️) with Aneet Nijjar of Other Parties.

This was truly a Cinecittà nerd’s dream: we went deep and hard on Donati, Visconti, Fellini, Donald Sutherland’s teeth, Pasolini’s revolutionary outlook and the weaponisation of his murder, the potent undercurrent of toxic masculinity explored in The Silver Book, the opposing atmospheres of sets for Sàlo (jovial!) and Casanova (terrible!) and how they fed into Nicholas and Danilo’s story.

We were so happy to be able to show Fellini’s Casanova after the event too, the only way to finish off such a wonderful evening (apart from showing Sàlo lol). Also got some new book gossip about which we should probably say zilch in case someone at PRH comes after us, but let’s just say we’re excited to return to a different aspect of this story in future works…

Massive and prolonged thanks to Olivia for their time and insight and the magnificent book which we love forever, to Aneet for indulging our shared need for The Minutiae That Matters in her questions, to the always-amazing crew at the Cube, and to everyone who came along and made it such a smashing sell-out.

We have some signed copies of contemporary and classic Laing works, grab yours from the shop or the website!

ℂ𝕌𝔹𝔼 ℂ𝕀ℕ𝔼𝕄𝔸 Penguin Hamish Hamilton

16/06/2026

🐻😎 NEW WINDOW

We had a blast with Duncan Beedie on Sunday - a packed out storytime and draw-along to celebrate the return of everyone’s favourite stare-y bear! A Holiday for Bear is classic Beedie: funny, beautifully designed and full of instantly iconic images (it’s the frame of Bear applying sun cream that did it for us).

And then Duncan climbed into our window to install the biggest Bear we’ve ever seen - it’s come out amazingly, and we hope he brings a little holiday vibes-boost to North Street…

We also have a little stack of signed copies ready for anyone who might be in need of a holiday - get yours while you can!

Duncan Beedie

13/06/2026

HAPPY IBW!

To celebrate we will be:

-giving away 100 five-quid National Book Tokens first come first serve when you buy something (thanks National Book Tokens), these are disappearing so be quick

-welcoming Duncan Beedie for a free kids’ event tomorrow morning 🐻 (literally 2 spaces left for this, go website)

-talking to Olivia Laing about their new novel and watching Fellini’s Casanova at the Cube (sold out soz)

-continuing to pay taxes and living wages to our booksellers, working with schools and orgs in our community to do Beneficial Things, foregrounding independence in literature and exploration in reading, not becoming pathetic trillionaires, saying ‘A.I. IS SICK BROOOOO!!!!’ in an unbelievably petty mocking voice wherever we see it, did we mention the taxes and wages thing

See you this week for 📚

The Booksellers Association

11/06/2026

🐻BOOKSELLER’S DOUBLE🤕

Dare you draw a thematic line between Holly’s most recent and most excellent reads? Read on to see what makes these books so special…

My Clavicle And Other Massive Misalignments, by Marta Sanz (trans. Katie King)
Obsessive, strange, and sharply humorous, My Clavicle is a woman’s attempt to define her pain. Our narrator has a pain in her clavicle, a pain that she’s sure is a ‘harbinger of a malignancy’. As this pain expands, deforming, recomposing, and shapeshifting throughout her body, it becomes symptomatic of a larger anxiety, consuming her like a ‘flesh-eating disease’. And, despite all her efforts, the source of her pain remains enigmatic; she starts to doubt she’s even in pain at all.

She sets out instead to find an ‘ideological origin’, dissecting and diagnosing other ‘massive misalignments’, both physical and societal, that might be plaguing her. Is she too bourgeois? Too easily swayed by medical marketing campaigns and aromatherapy? Or is her pain symptomatic of a larger insecurity which has its roots in modern life and the anxiety of late capitalism? In its probing and punctilious style, My Clavicle dissects our bodily betrayals and anxieties - anxieties that are symptomatic both of our own health and of a wider societal degradation.

Bear Worries, by Natalia Shaloshvili
Like anxious souls of all ages, Bear worries. A lot. He worries that he’ll miss the bus, that he’ll get lost, that he’ll fall… and get wet, and cold, and sad (all relatable anxieties!). But, most of all, Bear worries he’ll run out of cookies (spoiler alert: he does). In an uncomfortably relatable series of ‘what ifs’, we follow bear in his anxious and spiralling search for cookies. But this isn’t just a story about worries - it’s about how, despite our worst fears, things can still turn out for the best. And the best, in this case, is cookies!

Quarto Kids Katie M King Holly

NB. those are Dan’s gnarled hooves in pics 2 and 3, not Holly’s 😬

05/06/2026

📦SUBSCRIPTION ROUND-UP📚

The end of another quarter means it’s time to rigorously assess our monthly book subscriptions with an honest performance review, and here it is: yadda yadda yadda, every book’s a banger.

In more detail: our fiction subscribers got an International Booker Prize-winner before it was crowned (co-inkydink?), a breathless experimental account of a pivotal weekend in the life of a writer, and a reissue of a groundbreaking q***r classic that encompasses deceptively quaint farce, a silly warlock, and a pivotal peacock.

-April: Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (trans. Lin King)
-May: About To Fall Apart, by Ashley Hickson-Lovence
-June: Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, by Henry Van D**e

Non-fiction subscribers have been devouring an unsparing yet beautiful account of the majesty of elephants and pernicious colonial hubris in 19th C East Africa, a novelist’s deeply felt paean to the beautiful but unwieldy landscape of the Himalayan foothills, and truly the gayest love story ever told.

-April: A Training School for Elephants, by Sophy Roberts
-May: Called by the Hills, by Anuradha Roy
-June: Deep House, by Jeremy Atherton Lin

Not only do you get a peerlessly interesting book each month, you also get delicious locally roasted coffee, and reading notes from our booksellers. If you want in, YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MUST DO, and it is buy yourself/a pal one of our subscriptions, and we shall inflict our bookseller-approved selections upon you until you can take no more.

Link in bio, website etc, please continue to indulge the ginormous multi-year reading diet we have so lovingly created ❤️

04/06/2026

So honoured and delighted to have our wall adorned with work by for this year (and it looks very at home between our existing pieces from and !)

It was an amazing few weekends, and always such a pleasure to see new artwork popping up all over BS3. If you haven’t done your obligatory trail yet, grab yr maps and get walking!

(swipe for super-fungal details 🍄‍🟫)

28/05/2026

📚BOOKSELLER’S DOUBLE📚

Even this insane heatwave cannot stop our booksellers from doling out ice-cool recommendations, and this time it’s Tasha with the refreshing goods…

📣On Morrison, by Namwali Serpell

Oh no! I’ve fallen in love with Toni Morrison all over again, thanks to Namwali Serpell’s seminal essay collection exploring Morrison’s vast literary output.

Much lauded for writing some of the all-time greats such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved, there is no doubt that Morrison was an inexhaustible talent. Yet, as Serpell so astutely points out in her introduction, there was a tendency amongst critics to dismiss Morrison as “difficult”, both as a personality and in her apparent unwillingness to be pigeonholed as a writer of the Black experience. With an authoritative flair, Serpell implores us to reframe our understanding of Morrison’s creativity, to see the ease with which she bounded across genres - from the Southern gothic to a comedy of manners - and to marvel at the wordplay and lyricism so essential to her body of work.

🐕The Oldest Bitch Alive, by Morgan Day

In all honesty, I’d never truly considered the meaning of life from a French Bulldog’s perspective, but now it is the only means by which I philosophise thanks to Morgan Day’s brilliantly exquisite debut, The Oldest Bitch Alive.

On the outskirts of a small American town, Gelsomina is the much-adored, much-regimented pet bound to the confines of her home, a glass structure that renders all notions of privacy nonexistent. Her days are defined by routine and mundanity, any transgressions quelled by verbal reprimands. Yet this all changes when Gelsomina unknowingly ingests a glob of parasitic worms from the garden pond. Two of the worms survive, and soon begin to explore the dog’s lumpen body, lamenting their choice in host and unsure of their destiny in this new world. Meanwhile, as Gelsomina weakens, a new consciousness emerges, and she meditates on a life of forced domestication. Day takes the relatively simple concept of “dog gets worms” and turns it into a wonderfully contemplative journey through the cosmos.

26/05/2026

NEW EVENT 🪐 ✍️

Stoked to say that two absolute surgeons of fiction will be joining us live in the shop in July for a freewheeling conversation about their new books! Deb Olin Unferth and Elizabeth McCracken will be here in Bristol to discuss Earth 7 (deft, inventive, righteous, hardcore-humane sci-fi) and A Long Game: How To Write Fiction (sticks a bent quill through the heart of what you think a ‘writing book’ should be).

Both books are standouts for the year in their own right, and this is going to be a wonderful chance to catch two unique and endlessly acclaimed talents (and longtime pals) in dialogue - we can’t wait to see where the conversation goes. Tickets are on sale now!

We’ve read Earth 7, and it’s a beautifully unusual sci-fi epic that encompasses grief, microbiology, human hybridity, sand, failed terraforming, and the decline of civilisation. Reading it also somehow feels like looking at the cover for Sleep’s cult classic stoner-doom record from 1994, Dopesmoker (this is a vibes thing, you will have to trust us). And any subscribers to George Saunders’ Story Club will recently have become amply familiar with Deb’s work too!

We’ve also read A Long Game, and fell deeply for its stoic adherence to the idea that most ‘craft’ books about writing are incredibly flawed. Structured as an exhaustive yet invigorating numbered list of tips and subsequent digressions that veer into memoir and essay, it is one of the most honorably honest writing books you’re likely to read, as well as a crunchy treatise for creative beings of any discipline.

Get your tickets from our bio link or storysmithbooks.com 🎟️

22/05/2026

📚BOOKSELLER’S DOUBLE📚

Callum just can’t stay mad at these books! A pair of recently devoured oddities which you’ll find on our recommends shelf…

🍊The Orange Eats Creeps, by Grace Krilanovich

Woah mama, this book is a rich meal indeedy. It sort of feels like a drunken memory of a bizarre night of chaos, fed back to you in dribs and drabs. It’ll be rattling around in my brain for a long time even though I’m not sure I could write out the details in a sensible fashion. But here’s a rough attempt.

The place: all across the Pacific Northwest. The people: homeless teenagers who could, maybe, be vampires, though it might just be a metaphor, but then they do seem to suck blood at points (metaphorically?). Oh and this isn’t Twilight by the way, there’s way too much s*x, substance abuse and basement punk shows for Edward Cullen and his homies.

The plot: hallucinatory road trip search for meaning coming of age story breathless psychosis collage? It’s the sort of book that makes you feel like you’re hanging on by a thread. And yet… so compelling. Only read it before bedtime if you want to be awake all night.

🏝️The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares trans. Ruth L C Simms)

The Fugitive finds himself on a desert island somewhere in the south pacific. An island which, rumour has it, harbours some gruesome and mysterious disease of the flesh. Other important features of note: an abandoned but perfectly preserved museum, a chapel, a swimming pool, an aquarium (the fish are dead), some stores of food and marshes filled with potentially hallucinatory but somewhat edible roots.

But after a couple of weeks, people arrive on the island in strange clothes. Summer comes early. A second sun and a second moon appear in the sky. And come to think of it, the aquarium tanks are now filled with identical living fish.

It’s taken me way too long to read The Invention of Morel but I can now firmly endorse it. There’s tragedy, comedy, philosophical play, abhorrently hubristic characters that rival some of the most iconic fictional dingbats. Go in without looking up the plot, though. It’s more fun that way.

09/05/2026

Frankly dumb and unmanageable amount of amazing new stuff springing onto the shelves these last couple weeks. Signed Jackie/Bobby bird book, UK train station architecture deep-dive, Calc-Vol IV, Plath-a-palooza, bulldog-fic, too much more to list, you must come and inspect 👀

Storysmith Books

18/06/2026

16/06/2026

13/06/2026

11/06/2026

05/06/2026

04/06/2026

28/05/2026

26/05/2026

22/05/2026

09/05/2026

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Tuesday	10am - 6pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 6pm
Saturday	10am - 6pm
Sunday	11am - 4pm