‘Fiction is all we have left.’
Books are the last refuge of the individual. Written by one person for one person, reading them is an experience that is uniquely personal and private. A last human thinking experience, with an immutable external source, always unlockable, always different. Machines will never be able to read books as we can.
The modern shopping experience is to abuse the bookshop and sample its stock before purchasing cheaper online. But for all the ubiquity of best-sellers and holiday beach reads from the giant bookstores subsidised by their millionaire proprietors, the true native reading experience still has a core untapped resource, the independent bookshop.
This site is devoted to that last bastion of reading resources, that promoter of the popular and the obscure, the thriller, the psychological brain-stirrer and the love story, the independent bookshop.
With the encumbrance of fake news, political spin, professional mendacity and the cheating practice of cyber crime, truth looks like an outmoded concept. Fiction provides an ideal escape from such a world and its external misery. Fiction is a writer’s truth, after all. Maybe fiction is all we have left.
Our mission is to travel round the country and hunt down the best of these bookshops and tell you about them so that you can share in the joy and love of reading that they promote. Join our membership today and follow us on twitter.
If you have found an independent bookshop that you love and that you think should be on this site, email us with your review and pictures to info@indybookshops.com or details of the shop and we’ll visit it. Let’s spread the good news that reading and the great shops that promote it are still around.
