Overview

‘Shadow Lines very much celebrates the world of books’ —Telegraph Nicholas Royle’s love of second-hand books and the ‘inclusions’ he finds inside them, their presence betrayed by ‘shadow lines’, is about making connections. Someone has scribbled a number in a book? He’ll text or call. An old address? He’ll return the book to where it used to live. Follow him as he walks between bookshops, reading as he goes, on the hunt for treasure, for ways to make us feel closer – to the books on our shelves, to each other and to our own lives. Share in Royle’s enthusiasm for the Rev W Awdry’s Railway Series, Penguin Modern Stories and Paul Auster’s cult classic, The New York Trilogy, as well as books in art and film. If you love books, bookshops and browsing, this is your perfect all-year gift – head to your happy place with a copy Shadow Lines today! (Note: ‘inclusions’ not supplied.)

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9781784633073

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Reviews

★★★★ What links Bin Laden’s bodyguard to an Oxfam bookshop in London? In Shadow Lines, Nicholas Royle tracks down the owners of objects slipped into second-hand books – with amusing and surprising results. -- Ian Sansom * The Telegraph * Royle invests more passion into his subject than EL James did in whips, and its all incredibly infectious. He leavens any perceived pedantry with droll self-deprecation and, personally, I haven’t laughed harder with a book for a long time. -- Nick Duerden * Obseerver *

★★★★ If you're a book sort of person, you're going to enjoy this book, which is a book about books, by a book sort of person, and for book sort of people. Nicholas Royle is fast becoming the bibliophile's bibliophile. -- Ian Sansom * The Telegraph * Royle invests more passion into his subject than EL James did in whips, and it’s all incredibly infectious. He leavens any perceived pedantry with droll self-deprecation and, personally, I haven’t laughed harder with a book for a long time. -- Nick Duerden * Observer * This is a book about books and bookshops that will bring joy to every reader and collector, but it is also about the strangeness and sublimity of individuals, and our tender contacts with each other. -- Mark Valentine * Wormwoodiana * Shadow Lines is all about the connections between humans and language and books and covers and art and walking and reading and collecting; the joy of tracking down titles and of lucky finds and random inclusions. It appears to be all about Nicholas Royle but actually it is about all of us who read. -- Rupert Loydell * International Times * Nicholas Royle’s Shadow Lines is a bibliophile’s dream: a series of linked essays about his obsession for secondhand books. The attraction for Royle is not just the books themselves, but the detritus he finds inside them – old postcards, tickets, receipts, you name it. He observes his own mania with wit and wry self-deprecation. -- Jonathan Coe * The Guardian *

Author Information

Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited thirty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in chapbook format. Forthcoming, from Confingo Publishing, is Paris Fantastique, and Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books (Salt).

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