How A Storied London Bookshop Keeps Reading Personal

In this episode, I chat with Nikky Dunne from Heywood Hill in Mayfair, London.

Step behind the door of a London landmark and discover why a great independent bookshop still beats like a human heart. I chat with Nikky Dunne, bookseller-in-chief at Heywood Hill in Mayfair, to unpack ninety years of tailored bookselling, a wartime chapter powered by Nancy Mitford’s wit, and a present-day practice built on listening first and recommending second. From brown-paper parcels to rare firsts, Nikky shows how curation, not scale, creates lasting value for readers who crave depth, surprise, and beauty.

Across two floors of a Georgian townhouse, Heywood Hill blends new, old, and antiquarian books into a living catalogue where literature, history, architecture, biography, travel, and children’s titles coexist. Nikky explains how the shop sustains its mission with three pillars: research-led library building for homes and offices worldwide, a bespoke subscription service that interviews readers to match their tastes, and a rare book program that partners with passionate collectors. It’s a portrait of bookselling as craftsmanship; intimate, precise, and often delightfully demanding.

We also celebrate the publishers who keep literature adventurous. Independent presses like Fitzcarraldo and Pushkin bring bold voices and translations to younger readers hungry for challenging ideas, proving that serious books have a vibrant audience. The theme is consistent: human rhythms, not algorithms. When a bookseller listens well, a reader’s world widens.

If you believe bookstores are more than retail, places of serendipity, memory, and conversation, this story will feel like home. Subscribe, share with a book-loving friend, and leave a review to help others find the show. What book shifted your reading life? Tell us.

Heywood Hill

Fitzcaraldo Editions

Pushkin Press

Héloïse Press

Charco Press

Transcript

Welcome And Show Updates

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Hi, I'm Naja Jackson Berkeley. Reading, writing, interviewing, and bookship book loves. And then it's the bookshop plant. Now it is 50 years. We explore the world books through conversations with authors, independent bookshop owners, booksellers, and publishing professionals of people literature alive. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, share it, and leave a review wherever you listen. You're listening to episode 321. Hi there, I've been keeping busy over the past month creating the Narrative Exchange, which is where you can find out everything you need to know about the Bookshop Podcast, the Lunch with an Author Literary Series, our writing workshops, and our soon-to-be-launched membership club and the Narrative Exchange zine. The latter two we're planning to launch at the end of March 2026. You can find us at www.thenarrativeexchange.com, and for questions, you can email us at info athenarrativeexchange.com. In this episode, we're speaking with Nikki Dunn, the bookseller-in-chief at the gorgeous Haywood Hill bookshop in Mayfair, London. Haywood Hill is a literary landmark where generations of writers, readers, and collectors from across the globe consider the bookshop as a place where good writing and beautiful books really matter. Situated on two floors of a Georgian townhouse, Haywood Hill sells new, old, and antiquarian books, as well as producing catalogues on numerous themes. The emphasis remains on literature, history, architecture, biography, and travel, as well as keeping a children's department well stocked with the best new and classic titles. First and foremost, Haywood Hill is about the enjoyment of books. The staff are always interested in which books or writers an individual customer has most enjoyed. The more they get to know a reader and their reading tastes, the more tailored their service becomes. Hi, Nikki, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Thank you, Mandy. It's a real pleasure to be with you today. Now, it might be a bit noisy because I'm actually in our packing room. You'll see lots of packages, and there's Jerry. Jerry's head packer. We have uh a team who uh gif wrap all of our books going out of here, um, which is a bit of an unusual feature in this day and age.

Inside The Packing Room

90 Years Of Tailored Bookselling

From Lobbyist To Bookseller

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Well, I do appreciate the fact that you are using brown paper. That's great. This year, Haywood Hill celebrates 90 years of tailored book selling at the heart of Mayfair. How did you find your way into book selling? Because I read that you were in PR before joining Haywood Hill.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

Yes, um, I was a lobbyist um uh for um my sins um for about 10 10 or 10 years or so before coming here. And then I was um uh I was on the board of this bookshop because my father-in-law owned uh half of the uh of the shares in the shop and he couldn't attend all the meetings, and my office was nearby, and um and he knew that on holiday I preferred going to bookshops to um than the beach. So um he kindly uh proposed me to attend meetings instead of him, and then quickly uh I rather enjoyed it and um uh and deepened my involvement, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

And how has your personal taste evolved since you first began bookselling? And where do you still argue with your younger reading self?

Keeping The Reading Mind Young

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Oh, those are good questions. Um I think that uh I like to think that my reading self has got younger as my physical self has got older. Um because I think the world is full of um rather there's a tendency for um the middle-aged and older to um perhaps again. I don't like to generalize Landy, but people have to take steps to prevent them, their their minds from ossifying and um stagnating. And it's a bit like um exercise. We've got to keep moving as we get older, and I think the mind needs stimulation too, and I think that we have to be we have to be careful to avoid um having our mind um sort of like a stagnant pool with nothing disturbing it, um and um uh and there is a real risk of that. And and contemporary fiction books by much younger people, not just young, not just about age, but but rather so challenging books, are a great way, in my opinion, to uh stave off the the sort of feelings of self-satisfaction that um people enter or can risk accumulating in their older age when it comes to their own opinions and uh points of view. Um so I think books are quite good at um keeping your mind uh active and young. That's not to say that I'm um particularly um broader reader, but um I like literature because it's uh it provides uh uh an ever-changing kind of environment uh with which one can into which one can place oneself. So um I don't just mean a sort of built environment, although it does that, but also a natural environment. You're you're always moving through life and and literature is rather a useful backdrop to interpret um what you encounter in the real world. So that's what I like that reading. I'm not a very good reader, I'm um I came to it very late. I'd hardly read a book till I was about 20, and I've been kind of trying to make up for it ever since. And I suppose I um I wanted as a younger reader, I wanted to sort of uh tick off some big books and sort of show off that I've put through Ulysses and read my Proust and and um what else, Don Quixote. Um I was attracted to those kind of mountain ranges, uh, those kind of books, those sort of big, uh hard to scale books, and um, and I'm still drawn to those. So I think I'm I'm less hopefully less pretentious, slightly less pret marginally less pretentious in what I and hopefully quite Catholic with a small c in my reading and um trying to range a bit widely. But that's the great thing. There's such a such a huge variety, and never more so than now. There's such an amazing breadth of voice out there, and um uh so it's uh yeah, I know that's it's a great time to be a reader, I would say. Um may not maybe be the best time ever.

Independent Presses And Translation

SPEAKER_01 7:12

And with this in mind, I think it's a great time to acknowledge independent publishers around the globe. They take huge risks to bring books and authors to bookshelves that would be overlooked by the big five publishers. For that I'm just eternally thankful because without them, we wouldn't have some of the books that you similar to what you were talking about earlier, that make you really think, especially when it comes to books being translated into English.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

They do. And um your listeners should um, if they haven't, should should certainly try uh a couple of London-based independent publishers. Um one is Fitzcaraldo, another is uh Pushkin, Pushkin Press. And um Fitzcaraldo is um a high literary um small publisher in East London, uh run by a wonderful Anglo-French man called Jacques Testa, and he has had an incredible success picking um and translating European um works into and bringing them to an English-speaking audience. And he also publishes beautiful um objects, and they're always red or sorry, blue or white, um, and very attractive and handsome things. Um again, I'm sorry, I'm not um I I said I was trying to be less pretentious, but I do like to have a nice object in my hand. Um and um and then Adam Adam Freudenheim at um at Pushkin, these which also started out actually as a translator of European fiction into English, they um have broadened their range. But I I agree there's still a literary ecology in London um that um is big enough to sustain some enterprises. Um I'm not saying it is bookselling or publishing as easy, it really isn't. Um, but uh there's still an audience.

Origins And Wartime Stories

SPEAKER_01 9:08

I'll add too that from many of the independent bookshop owners and booksellers I've spoken with around the world have said that the Fitzcaraldo and the Pushkin, uh the Heloise Press and Chaco Press, they're all selling to a younger reader now. To me, that is exciting. Okay, let's talk about the history of Hayward Hill. Can you share any information that you have about how the store coped with the bombings during World War II in London?

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Sure. Well, um, it was um 90 years ago that um the this very year that um uh a man called George Hayward Hill set up his bookshop. Actually, it was at number 17 Curzon Street then, which is a few doors away, and then it was moved during the Second World War um here to number 10. And what was uh what he did was from the beginning he sold old and new books. So he always dealt in antiquarian books as well as new publications, and that has been a feature of the show ever since. Um, so it's an unusual thing. Most, as you will appreciate, most bookshops either do one or the other, not both. Um small number who try and do both, and um it's um challenging doing both, but um, because they are different, different worlds. Um, you know, he opened the shop, it wasn't even before the war, it was tough. It was the it was the depression. Um, you know, it was not an easy time. I think book selling is always hard. I think it's always been difficult. Um it's never been easy. Um, firstly, you've got to be quite you've got to attract an audience, you've got to attract some clients, and um you also have to look after people well, and um and then the operational challenges of of books coming in and out are considerable. So it's never easy. But what he um uh I mean in the in the lore of the shop, of course, this is wave of all my time, um, he ended up having to go off to join up to the army in the war, and um he he didn't join up immediately because of medical reasons. He he tried to, but they wouldn't have him until 1942, I think. But before he went, he hired Nancy Mitford um to join the team, and she was very instrumental in uh attracting um an audience, uh customers to the place. She was very charismatic. In fact, she poor thing had um came to work here because she'd had a series of um miscarriages in um um years before she joined, and the last one of which she involved an operation that um she woke up from and discovered she'd had a hysterectomy.

unknown 11:52

Oh no.

Nancy Mitford’s Vivacity And Impact

SPEAKER_00 11:53

And um, so she was a bit blue and um not in great spirits. So someone suggested she come and worked here, and that's what she did. I um was used to say that um yeah, it is quite an antidote for um uh feeling sad working here because there's an awful lot of human contact all the time, all day long. Um, you're talking to people or and usually about books. Um, so it's a good distraction from other other things. Um I suppose a lot of jobs are like that, but I I I've noticed it is it's quite a sort of nourishing thing to be doing with your time. So she she worked here uh for three years during the Second World War. As it happens, books are one of the few things that weren't uh rationed in the Second World War. So if you had the means, you could spend whatever you wanted on books, and Mayfair being um being a prosperous district and uh a place where those days a lot of English people still lived. I think the shop did quite well out of that. Um, and then coupled with her vivacity and and um good humour, she attracted a lot of uh writers. She was a writer already, and her circle had uh included people like Evelyn Wall, and um they would come and see her and have a have a joke and buy a book, hopefully. Um, but also a lot of visiting American uh service people and um other people. So she she she kind of put the place on the map, and then she uh took a sabbatical beginning of 1945 to um finish or to write The Pursuit of Love, um, and that was published in May of that year, and the um uh to great instant uh acclaim and success. And she sold um, I think I'm right in saying about 200,000 copies in that six months after that, um, which is a bestseller by any standards. I think her love life had directed her towards Paris, and uh and her she asked if she could become a bookseller for Hayward Hill in Paris, and so that's what she set off to do. But um the royalties were so um so hefty that um she didn't need to do much books actual bookselling after that. Um but anyway, but that that was those that was the wartime period.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

And was the area of Mayfair bombed during World War II?

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Yes, I mean yeah, I mean we're we're close to Buckingham Palace, that was bombed. There's a lovely painting that I saw once of the uh we they were called barrage balloons, the balloons that would be put up in central London to prevent bombers getting too close to um buildings. And um there's a painting of of the barrage balloons just from here um looking towards the park. Um there was also a lot of um uh yeah, there was lots of government buildings were were bombed here and other buildings, yeah. So no, I I there probably was some story about that, but I I I can't I can't remember, I don't know intimately enough. Um Nancy Mittford was very um once she forgot to lock the door and um and she arrived in the morning and there were people already inside and with nobody to you know to sell them the book and um my goodness and uh she was quite gatti, I think, in some some ways. Um but uh and she had a good line that people want you know, she it was it's so small the shop, she said um customers um uh they like being pressed bosom to bosom the way it's people always enjoy it.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

She sounds like someone I would love to have met. Um now many indie bookshops rely on a secondary source of income in their business. Can you talk about this idea as it relates to Haywood Hill and your future plans? I know you work a lot with Viking cruisers, and you also do a lot of library building too.

Business Realities Of Bookselling

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Yes, so we we um we have always done the things that we do, and that's when you kindly introduce us with the phrase tailored book selling, that is what sets us apart, I suppose. We provide these different services that um make uh make the whole business work. And there are three of them really. One is um we call it a library department, that's where for private or corporate um clients we assemble libraries on any subject, and we probably do 25 to 30 projects a year around the world, um, and they vary in every sense from the subject uh value of books because some people want to collect um serious um literary artifacts, others um just want reading libraries. Um for lots of bookish people, it's a bit of a sort of shock to think that you can employ someone to choose books for you. Um well, I'm here to say that you can and you should because it's um really enjoyable process for everyone. Um it's the opposite of books by the yard. We we get to know people, we chat to them, we we understand what they want to achieve, and then we go out and find the books that we think they will particularly like. And it's been uh it's every project is different. We assemble the libraries in a in a workshop, we get the shelves looking exactly how we think they should look. There's always a narrative flowing between I can't see your shelves mandy behind, but I can't quite see the book titles.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

I'm getting I'm embarrassed.

Secondary Revenue And Services

Building Private And Corporate Libraries

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Um well, we we would um there's no need to be embarrassed. Um it's it's a very intimate thing, um, looking at someone's books and dressing someone's bookshelves is also an intimate thing, but we um we it's a really fundamental part of what we do. Um, and we have worked on some sensational projects um all over all over the world. Viking is a corporate client, they're very unusual because we don't have many corporate clients, but because they're book lovers, the owners, they appreciate what we do. There's always a mix of in-print titles, usually predominantly out-of-print titles, whatever subject we're tackling, sometimes an element of collectible material as well, sometimes entirely collectible material, and it could be uh any any kind of subject. Um, from the very general, somebody once rang up from their home in the Hamptons and said, I'm fed up with all the glossy rubbish that I see on my friends' houses. Um, can you pull my shelves with a thousand good books I should read before I die? That was a good one. Could be literally anything. Once somebody wanted a library on dragonflies once. It's a researcher-led thing for us. Our team are highly intelligent, um, generally young people who are curious and um go and um establish what they think should be in a in a library on any any subjects. We come up with an ideal bibliography generally and then um find the books wherever they may be. Um so it's very bespoke. We don't charge a fee. Um, we should do, um, and we we just charge the retail price of the books, whether they're new or old. Um, it's great fun. So that's one service um which doesn't actually really take place here in the shop. Another one that does is our subscription service. Uh soon after I joined, um, a wonderful woman called Patricia Lovejoy came into the shop and she's from Hartford, Connecticut. And she just wanted to speak to the manager and she said, I just want you to know how much this shop means to me. You've been sending me a book every month since 1975. I didn't know about this. And um, and I thought, well, if we do that for Patricia, we can do that for anyone. So we we described it as a subscription and um marketed as such, and as a result, um, we've had many thousands of subscribers since then, and that's what Jerry's wrapping away now. You can see a few of them there. Oh my goodness. There are two types. We either have a tailored option where we choose books based on your specific taste, Amanda, or we um after having interviewed you and established your interests, um, or we um have subject and genre specific options. Uh so we have one on espionage called Tradecraft, for example, and one on crime and mystery called Who Done It. So that's another very important thing for the business. Um and then the third service is is really um rare books and helping people collect and pursue their interests in in fine with fine and and scarce um material. When you find someone who's really motivated by collecting um and books, they're usually quite interesting people um with something um slightly eccentric about them, and they're rewarding people to get to know. They yeah, I mean the real collectors tend to know a lot more about a subject than any dealer, any sort of grubbing commercial dealer like me. Um they're the real connoisseurs. Um and and most book dealers are failed collectors, um, because we we we we we we don't have the the time or the uh the the money to to devote to it.

Tailored Subscriptions And Genres

SPEAKER_01 20:59

I've mentioned this before on the show, but when my mother passed away and my dad had passed years earlier, and my siblings and I were meticulously going through every piece of paper, everything in the house. And there were bookcases everywhere because my parents were avid readers and they would read to us. You know, that's how we grew up. We love books. Above my mother's desk, there are about five shelves of books. And at the top, it looked kind of weird. They looked like they were pushed out way out the front. So I got on a ladder and I went up there, and there were two layers of books. And behind the first layer, there was a row of romance novels. And my sister said, Oh my goodness, what are we gonna do with them? And I said, Are you kidding? I'm bringing them back to California with me. Because to me, it was just a part of my mother that I didn't know about, that she loved reading these romance novels and that she hid them. I was fascinated by that. Since then, I've reread them multiple times, and every time I read them, it brings me closer to my. Mum, especially De Maurier's Jamaica Inn.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

Well, that's so nice to hear. I mean, I hide hide things behind things in my in my um in my bookshelves, and I'm sure you do too, Mandy, if I can get in there. So, yes, and and actually when someone um dies and and the next of kin are looking at the shelves, as soon as the shelves lose their books, then the person's gone. I've totally gone from the room. And that whilst they're still there, whilst the books are still as they were, they're still there. It changes the character of or the personality of the place. If if you if the next of kin get the children of someone who dies, you know, they can they shouldn't rush it, they shouldn't rush dismantling the the shelves. Um I mean we do a lot of that, we buy a lot of books from people who um have died, and it's often the case that you're the you know one partner dies first and then the books stay in situ until the other partners die. It's such a personal thing. Um and um we I hope we're quite empathetic when we go around people's houses to look at their books, but um we also have to be quite um savvy. What you don't want to do is have a lot of books that you can't sell, um and um and a lot of people's expectations about books that have been collected for over a long time is that they may have some more value than they actually do.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Let's get back to the bookshop. At the heart of every Hindu bookshop, of course, are the booksellers. I'd love to hear about the booksellers at Haywood Hill.

Rare Books And The Collector’s Mindset

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Yeah, of course. So we are a team of about 20, a full-time team of about 20. And I think the one thing we have all have in common is um is a uh bookish dynamo within us. Um and we all are readers and and we've all got very different sort of points of view and taste, but we're you we're a good team. We're probably leaning towards the average age, would be a lot younger than me. I'm 55, but I think most of the team are in their 20s or thereabouts. And um yeah, we a lot of people come here as a spread out of university and um as a first job for two or three years. We hope we we have a very nice group at the moment. Um, we've always had a nice group, always have a very few people have joined and it hasn't worked out. Um it's quite demanding. I mean, you're constantly having to deal with people. Um, so you've got to like people, and you've got to like books, and you've got to be quite organized because um, you know, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Um, so you've got to you've got to have quite a good memory. And we've had some amazing people over the years, you know, from Nancy Moford onwards. There was someone who left recent, not recent a few years ago, and I think she was the she was the best reader ever encouraged. Best in the sense that she read the most in terms of quantity, but her reading was incredibly um insightful. And um, I mean she read two or three hundred books a year. I mean, incredible quantities of books. And then you say to her, Look, okay, well, what's uh what's this about? Do you recommend it? And she'd give you a um perfectly modulated paragraph ending with a recommendation or not, uh, every single time she was she was exceptional. So she was unusual in the sheer quality and quantity of her reading. But it's really as much about being a big reader, it's also and she was good at this too, but it's really about listening and being attentive to what someone is telling you about their own reading. Um, so we have the subscription process. We we we, as I said before, we interview people and we find out about their reading interests and where they are in their reading. And that is um all about listening to them and picking up what they're telling you about their books that they like and don't like. It's not an inquisition, it's not a didactic exercise, it's it's it's really an exercise in listening by us. So the the test of it is whether we then interpret accurately um what kind of reader this person is or would like to be. So that's you've got to be a really good listener, above all. Uh, and um and you've got to be so you've got to be quite interested in in people and um um what they're telling you.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Um and plus you have to be physically strong, able to lift boxes of books. That's one of the things I discovered.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Physical robustness is a big part of it. Uh we call it the Hayward Hill Gym, moving boxes up and up and down stairs and and uh the sacks of our subscriptions that go out all the time. Oh my goodness. Um, so it's the absolute dead opposite of what people think working in a bookshop is like people think it's just sitting around having the odd conversation, a lot of tea and the odd conversation. Um, I mean, we do have quite a lot of tea, or at least the others do. I don't really drink tea, but but it's it's it's much more physical, it's it's and it's it's demanding in every sense. And and I always say it's rewarding in every sense, except one, um, because it's it's definitely not it's definitely not the route to riches, but there are other rewards in life. And you have um you get um um through the people you meet and um the kind of conversations you have, you do get um some other benefits um from being a bookseller.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Yes, absolutely. What would be lost, not just commercially, but culturally, if shops like Haywood Hill disappeared? And if Haywood Hill is still there in another 90 years, what do you hope will not have changed?

The Team Behind The Counter

SPEAKER_00 27:41

I hope that won't have changed that you can have a conversation with a human being. So, Mandy, we say human rhythms, not algorithms. And um and authentic intelligence, not artificial intelligence. I had to write a threatening email to a property developer who hadn't paid us. And um and I included a um draft press release about the iniquity of our situation, and um yeah, I got AI to write that, which took took five seconds rather than me two hours. So um but um it's good for that. It's good for that and may have other uses, but but we are um all about the human sort of sensibility that is through one's reading able to travel to very unexpected places and has a sort of serendipity about it that um is part of the real pleasures of one of the great pleasures of being uh being uh alive as is um having one's horizons slightly broadened by um books and um the different kinds of books that um you can be introduced to by a human bookseller who really cares about it. So I think we we want to keep that. We want to keep the caring and the listening and the um introduction um and the the sort of breadth of voice that um you'll find in a bookshop like ours. A lot a lot of bookshops are um issue-led, they might have a particular identity around something or other. We haven't got that. Um and then there's a lot of sort of most high street bookshops are quite sort of generic and um they are trying to appeal to everyone. I mean, we're trying to appeal to everyone too, but I guess for the real independent bookshop, which is about a thousand left in in this country, it's gone it's gone up slightly. It went down for many years and it's gone up slightly. Um, it's actually, I think for a very long time, always been about the thousand mark. So um it's that's really what the um independent book buyer in this country is can support, about a thousand independent bookshops um in a country of 60 million or 65 million, whatever it is. Um it's always been a small band of um of oddballs like me who who um kind of um uh uh love it and want to see it thrive. And I think if we all disappear, we're all different. We're all we're like um each independent bookshop is different from it from the next one. We're all like sort of a facet on a on a very flawed um duel. One independent bookshop isn't you know that great, but a thousand different ones amounts to something that's culturally enriching. So, yeah, of course, I feel very passionately about that, and that we should um we should still um endure.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Yeah, I agree. Let's talk books. What are you currently reading? And is there one book you wish more people would read?

Listening Over Lecturing

The Physical Work Of A Bookshop

Human Rhythms Not Algorithms

SPEAKER_00 30:43

Well, I'm reading uh a few books at the moment, of course. I'm sure you are too. Um uh one is a historical novel called Leo Africanus uh by Amin Malof, written 25-30 years ago, and um it's about a actually rather famous geographer who um was brought up in in the Alhambra before the fall of the um Islamic government there in Andalusia in the 1490s, and um it's about the early early 16th century in um North Africa and and in Italy. It's it's about the exchange of information and knowledge between the Islamic and Christian worlds, and um that's a subject I'm interested in and how that had that incredible period of medical and scientific um and um astronomical um knowledge uh in the flourishing of um in the Islamic world, how that knowledge was um brought into the West and into the Christian world. Uh it's a it's a particularly interesting um subject. I've also recently finished Malcolm X's autobiography that um was um ghosted by Alex Haley and um and that really riveting book. The first two-thirds, anyway, were really splendidly um written and very interesting about uh his life story, particularly in his upbringing, uh, and life in Haalem and the when he was a young hustler. Um I loved that. Um there's a tremendous book called The Wave, um, which I read recently about um uh the aftermath of the tsunami on a on a uh uh on a wonderful writer and her family, and she lost all her family. And uh that's an incredible book um about grief, a strong recommend. And uh I read um a book about the um first fleet going to Australia from Britain, um uh an account by someone called Watkin Tench, who um was one of the soldiers um sent to by the British um to Australia in the um uh 1780s. I'm about to start Rob Doyle's Cameo, um uh a very interesting Irish writer, a real writer, as uh a very intelligent um person who actually he's been into science, which is rather nice for us. This is his uh sixth book. It's a it's a sort of satire on literary ambition, uh, and so I'm excited to read that. As for a book that um we should all read, what comes to mind? I um am a big fan of Martin Amis and miss him very much. Not that I knew him, I mean I met him, but I didn't know him. And I think his memoir experience is very instructive about um my generation and the one before. I think uh I'd like young people to read it and to understand where we're coming from. I mean, I like to think that books are a real bridge between generations and within generations. Uh I I kind of reject the the actual idea of a generation, the um the fact that we have to be categorized into these letters and that that somehow excludes us from um and determines our thinking or um our outlook. And um it seems that to have sort of really uh mirrored the um the rise of that thinking has rather mirrored the um the sort of atomization that social media has um has driven. And um I I'm sort of not really into that, I find that very um disappointing um and reductive. So I think Martin is a good antidote to that. Another book I really wish people would read is um Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book, which is um about the story of um Ulysses and its publication. That is a very revealing book about the birth of um not the birth, but the adolescence of literary modernism and how it um how the world used to be a hundred years ago. I'm a big Joyce fan and uh I love the story of um the book's birth, which was of many years. Kevin Birmingham is a really interesting writer, um, a sort of excavator of literary history, and uh he's done a brilliant job. So there's two.

SPEAKER_01 35:10

Yeah, and two good ones. Nikki, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. I've thoroughly enjoyed chatting with you. And the next time I'm in London, I'll pop by and say hi and buy a book.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

As my former colleague Anisha used to say, we'll rouge up the carpet for you and um uh roll it out, Landy. You'd be so welcome.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

And I don't drink tea either.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

Well great. Well great, well we'll go something stronger. We'll we'll um that's the fun thing about about uh being an independent bookseller. It's um you know, it's not like a strict corporate environment. It's um it's uh it's uh hopefully a um fun place to be, and um uh and that makes it a little bit different. It's somewhere between a church and a and a garden centre. Um and um uh and you know, we're moving the pots around. Um but um uh please come and say hi. You're so welcome.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

You've been listening to my conversation with Nikki Dunn from Haywood Hill in Mayfair, London. Thank you for joining me on the Bookshop Podcast. The show is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson Beverly, with music by Brian Beverly and graphic design by Alexandra Mooney. If you enjoyed the episode, please follow, share, and leave a review wherever you listen. Until next time, here's to the books that shape us and the bookshops that bring us together.