FITZCARRALDO
The Slow River
— Dervla Ní Cheallaigh
— Fiction · Irish · 2024
The Slow River
A 192-page novel that took me four nights. I read the last chapter twice. — H.L.
£12.99 pb
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Fourteen thousand titles in a forty-square-metre room above a former dairy in Leith — new and secondhand, with a particular weakness for Scottish literature, the Russians, and very good poetry chapbooks nobody else stocks.
We opened Crane & Quire in the autumn of 2007, with three hundred books in cardboard boxes and a hand-painted sign in the window. The shop was, at that point, mostly Hugh's books — Una owned a coffee cart on Princes Street and was not yet involved.
Eighteen years on, the boxes are gone but the painted sign remains. We carry roughly fourteen thousand titles at any given moment, of which about four thousand are secondhand, traded in by customers or hunted down at estate sales we still drive to on Sundays.
In 2014 we began publishing under the same name — four to six titles a year, mostly slim, mostly first books, almost all by Scottish writers or writers who pass through Scotland and stay long enough to want to be read here.
This is not a shop with a category for everything. We don't stock most bestsellers. We stock what we'd want to read, and what we'd recommend to a friend who came in asking. If you've been recommended here by someone you trust, the chances are very good that we'll have something for you too.
MacKinnon's third novel — and the one we suspect will be the book she's remembered for. A widowed lighthouse keeper on a fictional island somewhere off the Outer Hebrides begins to suspect that the door to her cellar opens, on certain nights, to somewhere else entirely. What unfolds is part ghost story, part meditation on Scottish island depopulation, and entirely strange.
It's funnier than that synopsis suggests, more sad than its publicity material lets on, and contains the best chapter on grief we've read in five or six years. We have given it to nine customers this month; six have come back for second copies.
"A near-perfect small novel. MacKinnon writes the sea the way her predecessors wrote the moor: as a character with a temper."— The Times Literary Supplement
Four picks from four booksellers — each with a short note on why. Most of these have been sitting on our recommendation tables for weeks already, and continue to sell better than anything reviewed in the broadsheets.
A 192-page novel that took me four nights. I read the last chapter twice. — H.L.
Thirty essays on weather, paintings, and his daughter. Lyrical without being precious. — U.M-B.
Forty-eight pages of poems about her father's last year, written from a hospital chair. Devastating, very fine. — S.O.
A new translation of an 1886 Spanish gothic. As good as Hardy, somehow nobody's heard of it. — M.K.
Since 2014 we've put out roughly five books a year — first novels, slim poetry collections, an occasional essay book. Always letterpress-printed for the limited editions, always with hand-bound endpapers, always in print runs small enough that we can keep track of which copy went to whom.
We host a reading every Thursday at 7pm in the downstairs room — usually one author, sometimes two, always a glass of something inexpensive and almost always free. Reservations are appreciated but not required; the room holds twenty-eight.
Reads from A Door at the Edge of the World
The author of this week's pick, in conversation with our own Una Macrae-Bennett. Iona will read for about forty minutes; the conversation will run until closing.
Roisin Welsh + Calum Aberdour
A shared reading from two new collections. Roisin reads from Long Distance; Calum from his forthcoming A Field Guide to the Unmade Bed, available a month before publication.
Velmans, Bértolo & Costa
A panel discussion on translation, hosted by our small press — covering Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese contemporary literature. Drinks from the Holyrood Distillery from 6pm.
A monthly subscription to the bookshop. Each month, one of us at the shop chooses a book for you personally — based on a 20-minute conversation we have when you sign up, and on what you've made of the previous month's. The book arrives in the post, hand-wrapped, with a note from whoever picked it.
We have a hundred and forty-two subscribers as of November. We cap it at two hundred.
— A monthly hand-selected book, wrapped, with a note.