News

Alice Oswald is the new CCB Patron CCB is pleased and proud to announce a new patron, one of England’s greatest poets, Alice Oswald. Alice was trained as a classicist at New College, University of Oxford. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), received a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Her second book, Dart (2002), was the outcome of years of research into the history, environment, and community along the River Dart in … Read more

Exeter’s Custom House was home to the Quay Words literary festival and its first writer-in-residence for six weeks from 29th June-3rd August. The festival was part of an initiative to explore the potential for the beautiful Custom House, built in 1680 at the height of Exeter’s woollen cloth industry, to become a hub for literature. The programme was put together by Literature Works on behalf of the Exeter Canal and Quay Trust, and with support from Arts Council England. We … Read more

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Day on 3rd October the Booksellers Association and Forward Arts Foundation have announced Poetry Booksellers Love, 25 favourite poetry books from the last 25 years which were nominated and voted for by booksellers in the UK and Ireland. The list includes anthologies and single-author collections which cater for all palates and ages, and we hope it will help keep poetry sales booming for the next 25 years. A passion for politics, … Read more

We’re ridiculously excited to hear the announcement that a new Sally Rooney novel has been announced for publication this Autumn. ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ (Hardback, £16.99) is due to be published on 7th September 2021, and centres around the relationship between two best friends nearing their thirties in different places and on very different trajectories. Whether you are a fan of both her previous novels, have enjoyed the recent BBC3 adaptation of ‘Normal People’, or have just kept hearing about … Read more

If you’d like to arrange a time when you can come and browse the shop without other customers present, please drop us an email to: [email protected] We’ll be back in touch as soon as we can. Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you.

As Autumn draws in, the staff here at the bookshop start looking forward to curling up with a good book, and reading an Agatha Christie whodunnit from cover to cover can be a great way to stay warm while the temperatures drop outside. Part of the joy of her novels for us, as a bookshop based in Devon, is spotting the Devonian locations that feature regularly in her books, and taking pilgrimages to visit those places can be a great … Read more

Before the next equinox is upon us we thought we should look back to those long June days and celebrate Crediton’s first Big Read. Our aim was to inspire as many people as possible in the Crediton area to read and talk about the same books, and to promote reading as a shared pleasure. The idea of a Big Read was new to many people and Crediton embraced it enthusiastically. It was a genuinely community wide project which succeeded because … Read more