Tag: Haus Publishing

Walking Pepys’s London by Jacky Colliss Harvey

Walking Pepys’s London by Jacky Colliss Harvey

Summary:

Samuel Pepys walked round London for miles. The 21/2 miles to Whitehall from his house near the Tower of London was accomplished on an almost daily basis, and so many of his professional conversations took place whilst walking that the streets became for him an alternative to his office. With Pepys’s London, the reader will come to know life in London from the pavement up and see its streets from the perspective of this renowned diarist. The city was almost as much a character in Pepys’s life as his family or friends, and the book draws many parallels between his experience of 17th-century London and the lives of Londoners today. Colliss Harvey’s new book reconstructs the sensory and emotional experience of the past, bringing geography, biography and history into one. Full of fascinating details and written with extraordinary sensitivity, Pepys’s London is an unmissable exploration into the places that made the greatest English diarist of all time.

My Review:

In my youth I really enjoyed reading Samuel Pepys’s diary his accounts of the Great Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London the following year both witnessed by Pepys’s and they offer a great insight of what it was like in the city as the rich and wealthy fled including the king. I have walked many times through London retracing the many key places of times past, but I was delighted to have received a copy of Walking Pepys’s London (Haus Publishing) by Jacky Colliss Harvey just released in a stunning read hardback edition simply perfect for your pocket.

Samuel Pepys was a great walker and he walked across London daily, and it is said that the streets were indeed his office. I have often thought about what routes he took and now Jacky Colliss Harvey has written a book that is a guide to five of the walks that Samuel Pepys would often take and now you can retrace he famous walks.

Each walk is of varying length and Jacky is your guide as you trace Pepys steps the author points out many famous places and landmarks. They are both entertaining and informative. Walks from Westminster to the City, a night walk, a walk along the river to Greenwich and even a New Year’s Day walk. Each synonymous as the great man himself would have walked each.

You will get to visit many famous places that would be of real interest to anyone who loves the city and its links to famous names, and many are pointed out.

The real beauty of this book is that you do not have to travel to London, from the comfort of your chair Jacky is your guide and there are maps that lead you along each walk.

The night-time walk is really a half-day walk through London then across the river to Southwark and to one of the oldest pubs in the country the George Inn which dates back from 1677 and a place I know very well and remains a place close to my heart. It is owned and leased by the National Trust and is worthy of a visit.

I really enjoyed Jacky’s writing as she guides you across the capital pointing out places of interest. If you enjoy history and London, I can really recommend Walking Pepys’s London by Jacky Colliss Harvey.

220 Pages.

My thanks to Haus Publishing for the review copy of Walking Pepys’s London by Jacky Colliss Harvey

Walking Pepys’s London by Jacky Colliss Harvey is published by Haus Publishing    and was published on 15th April 2021. Available to order through Waterstones, Amazon and through your local independent bookshop or through Bookshop.org that supports your local independent bookshop. UK Bookshop.org

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SHOWCASE #8

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SHOWCASE

8. HAUS PUBLISHING

This week sees the eighth in the series of Independent Publishers Showcase. This week I am delighted to welcome Haus Publishing to the weekly showcase.

Haus Publishing was founded in 2003 by Barbara Schwepcke and was inspired by the German publishing house Rowohlt. Haus Publishing has grown to now publish around 25 books a year and focus is primarily on: History, politics, current affairs, memoirs and books on art, in 2008 Haus Publishing started to publish literary fiction in translation. They also have some fabulous books on travel. Haus will keep 250 titles in print.

With Christmas in mind, if you are looking for a gift it is worth having a look at their website (details below) They also publish each year political booklets in the Curiosities Series.

Keep an eye on their Twitter feed @HausPublishingor visit their website: Haus Publishing  On their website you can make purchases in time for Christmas.

A selection of the fiction titles currently released and soon to be released through Haus Publishing:

Dicken’s London by Peter Clark

Published: 2nd December 2019

Summary:

Few novelists have written so intimately about a city in the way that Charles Dickens wrote about London. A near-photographic memory made his contact with the city indelible from a very young age and it remained his constant focus. Virginia Woolf maintained that, `we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens,’ as he produces `characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks.’ But the `character’ he was drawn back to throughout his novels was London itself, all aspects of the capital from the coaching inns of his early years to the taverns and watermen of the Thames; these were the constant cityscapes of his life and work. Based on five walks in central London, Peter Clark illuminates the settings of Dickens’s London, his life, his journalism and his fiction. He also explores `The First Suburbs’ (Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Highgate and Limehouse) as they feature in Dickens’s writing.

Churchill’s Britain: From the Antrim Coast to the Isle of Wight by Peter Clark

Published: 20th September 2020

Summary:

More than half a century after his death, Winston Churchill, the most significant British statesman of the twentieth century, continues to intrigue us. Peter Clark’s book, however, is not merely another Churchill biography. Churchill’s Britain takes us on a geographical journey through Churchill’s life, leading us in Churchill’s footsteps through locations in Britain and Ireland that are tied to key aspects of his biography. Some are Familiar-Blenheim Palace, where he was born; Chartwell, his beloved house in the country; and the Cabinet War Rooms, where he planned the campaigns of World War II. But we also are taken to his schools, his parliamentary constituencies, locations of famous speeches, the place where he started to paint, the tobacco shop where he bought his cigars, and the graves of his family and close friends. Clark brings us close to the statesman Churchill by visiting sites that were important to the story of his long life, from the site where his father proposed to his American mother on the Isle of Wight to his grave in a country churchyard in Oxfordshire. Designed as a gazetteer with helpful regional maps, Churchill’s Britain can be dipped into, consulted by the traveler on a Churchill tour of Britain, or read straight through–and no matter how it’s read, it will deliver fresh insights into this extraordinary man.

On the Rope: A Hero’s Story by Eric Hackl

(Translated by Stephen Brown)

Release Date: 28th May 2020

Summary:

The compelling story of how the quiet artisan Reinhold Duschka (1900 1993) came to save two lives in Vienna during Nazi rule. Duschka managed to hide Jewish mother Regina and her daughter Lucia in his workshop for four years. The three of them were tied together with an invisible rope, surviving by luck and mutual trust. The aftermath of these years is also explored, with the humility and honesty of Duschka evoking emotion in any reader. This story wouldn t exist without the promise that Lucia Heilman made herself: to honour the passionate alpinist Reinhold Duschka who saved her and her mother from deportation to a Nazi-German concentration camp. Based on Lucia s memories, the story takes the reader from the dramatic, if monotonous, years in the hideout right up to the present. Erich Hackl s exact language, which is glowing with passion, not only brings to life the saviours and the saved it forces us to acknowledge the current relevance of this story in a Europe where civil courage is needed more than ever.

DH Lawrence in Italy by Richard Owen

Release Date: 15th August 2020

Summary:

November 1925: In search of health and sun, the writer D. H. Lawrence arrives on the Italian Riviera with his wife, Frieda, and is exhilarated by the view of the sparkling Mediterranean from his rented villa, set amid olives and vines. But over the next six months, Frieda will be fatally attracted to their landlord, a dashing Italian army officer. This incident of infidelity influenced Lawrence to write two short stories, “Sun” and “The Virgin and the Gypsy,” in which women are drawn to earthy, muscular men, both of which prefigured his scandalous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In DH Lawrence in Italy, Owen reconstructs the drama leading up to the creation of one of the most controversial novels of all time by drawing on the unpublished letters and diaries of Rina Secker, the Anglo-Italian wife of Lawrence’s publisher. In addition to telling the story of the origins of Lady Chatterley, DH Lawrence in Italy explores Lawrence’s passion for all things Italian, tracking his path to the Riviera from Lake Garda to Lerici, Abruzzo, Capri, Sicily, and Sardinia.

Salzburg: City of Culture by Hubert Nowak

Release Date: 14th March 2020

Summary:

As the seat of prince-bishops it found wealth and power, as the birthplace of Mozart it found fame, and as a festival city it found its purpose and destiny. But can today’s Salzburg really be described by anything more than music and majestic baroque architecture? Hubert Nowak, who lived and worked in Salzburg for many years, sets out to find the lesser-known side of the city. Leaving the festival district, he plunges into the atmospheric old quarter and places known only to natives – and often not even to them. Through the stories of those who visited the city over the centuries, he gives the reader a fresh perspective and gives the old city new life. Salzburg: A City of Culture is essential reading for anyone interested in visiting the city.

For further information on the publications from Haus Publishing please visit their website: Haus Publishing

You can also find them on Twitter: @HausPublishing Instagram: @hauspublishing and Facebook: @hauspublishing

If you have enjoyed this week’s showcase, please look out for my next Independent Publishers Showcase next week. If you are an indie publisher and would like to add your name to the showcase, you can contact me via Twitter: @TheLastWord1962