Indie Bookshop Advent Calendar

The best presents are the ones you get yourself.

I absolutely love watching people open advent calendars and every year I watch people opening a variety of ridiculously expensive, niche, or absurd calendars. I also love books and independent bookshops so I thought why not make myself an indie bookshop advent calendar for myself? And nothing except my own time and budget was stopping me and so I did. I sent 24 indie bookshops a brief about my reading taste and bought a book from them unseen (and usually beautifully wrapped by them). I’m going to open one a day (sort of, I’m going to open them in small bursts so I don’t have to put makeup on every day or get up before a school visit to film one but I’m going to post one a day) and share on TikTok and Instagram from the 1st December (I’m @ acaseforbooks on both those platforms.)

Of course a big reason I wanted to do this was to shout out and celebrate 24 indie bookshops, so the primary purpose of this post is to have a place to list all the shops and their websites so that you can go and buy books from them. (I’ve also listed where they are geographically in case you’re physically close to any of them.)

They’re listed below with the number of the day their book is being opened. If you’re interested in what my brief was to bookshops so you can see how well you think what they picked matches that, then I’ll put that at the bottom of the post (feel free to let me know what you would have recommended!). At the end of the month I’ll update with what each bookshop recommended too!

1. Queen’s Park Books, West London

2. Storysmith, Bristol

3. Barn Owl Books, Wiltshire

4. The Children’s Bookshop, North London

5. Backstory, South London

6. Afrori Books, Brighton

7. The Common Press, East London

8. Storytellers Inc, Lancashire

9. The Alligator’s Mouth, South London

10. Simply Books, Manchester

11. Sevenoaks Bookshops, Kent

12. Padstow Bookshop, Cornwall

13. Wonderland Bookshop, Nottinghamshire

14. Booka Bookshop, Shropshire

15. Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh

16. Book-ish, South Wales

17. Mr B’s, Bath

18. Maldon Books, Essex

19. Forum Books, Northumberland

20. Max Minerva’s, Bristol

21. The Heath Bookshop, Birmingham

22. The London Review Bookshop, Central London

23. Topping & Company, Bath

24. Gay’s the Word, Central London

The brief!

(I bought most of these books online or over the phone so bookshops had the full brief, the shops I visited in person had a truncated version as it would be very awkward to just read this whole thing out IRL and then two shops run by good friends went on totally their own steam!)

• I am relatively well read so please embrace choosing wild cards, backlist and less popular books, but if there are books I’ve read that is no stress at all. (I’d avoid anything that’s been Women’s Prize longlisted in the last decade as I actively follow that prize).

• My favourite genres are fantasy, historical fiction and literary fiction but I also enjoy romcoms and narrative nonfiction. I occasionally read sci-fi and thrillers but I avoid horror and crime. I read across age categories. My favourite niche genres are whimsical meta/experimental fiction, books about books, and historical fantasy. I like slightly strange, beautifully written books with lots of heart.

• Some favourite authors are Ali Smith, Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantel, Eleanor Catton, Patrick DeWitt, Sheila Heti, Lily King, Isabel Greenberg, Leslie Jamison, George Saunders, Diana Wynne Jones, Helen Oyeyemi, Susanna Clarke, Jane Austen, Patricia Lockwood, Nell Stevens, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Emily St John Mandel, Katherine Arden and Yaa Gyasi.

• Some favourite individual books that I think are indicative of my taste are Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton, One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg, The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Little Big by John Crowley, Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer and Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin.

• Contemporary fiction I’ve loved recently has included Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Heart the Lover by Lily King, and Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. I also love epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings, Earthsea and The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin.

• My favourite non-fiction includes Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood, The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders.

• My favourite children’s and YA books include Anne of Green Gables, the Northern Lights books, Momo by Michael Ende, Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones and more recently Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead and The Boy Lost in the Maze by Joseph Coelho.