Monthly book-talk over a complimentary glass of wine or soft drink.

When: 2nd Monday of each month, 6.30-8p.m.

Where: The Woodstock Bookshop, 23 Oxford Street, Woodstock OX20 1TH

Who: Existing members. Owing to limited space and enthusiastic uptake, we regret that our book group is full for now. We hope our monthly choices will provide reading ideas and inspiration for others wishing to read along!

This month’s choice: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Enjoy a 15% discount when you buy your copy at The Woodstock Bookshop. 

Please join us at The Woodstock Bookshop where our own Berne Ferry will be in conversation with Helen Graham, author of the historical novel Disappearing Acts: The Real Mackay’s Granddaughter which is based on her family's theatrical history and is due to be published on 28 May 2026.

Book Description:

Lottie has lived in a magical world of stories and imagination under the shelter of her beloved grandfather, a famous comic actor, for as long as she can remember - but now he’s dead and she’s stranded in a houseful of cousins, her strict Victorian uncle only noticing her when she steps out of line. Using her imagination, she begins to navigate the real world on her own terms, lurching from one idea to the next, taking risks and keeping secrets, determined no one will stop her pursuing her theatrical dreams. Eloping with an aspiring actor at seventeen, Lottie realises too late she has handed control of her life to her charming unpredictable husband who quickly discards the plans they made together and forms a very different kind of travelling theatre company.

A game of wits ensues, each vying for control in a world of comedy, illusions, and sleight of hand as they tour the length and breadth of the country till tragedy strikes and the future is suddenly impossible to imagine.

8pm finish time is approximate.

TICKETS £5.00 including wine (or a soft drink) & canapés.

Monthly book-talk over a complimentary glass of wine or soft drink.

When: 2nd Monday of each month, 6.30-8p.m.

Where: The Woodstock Bookshop, 23 Oxford Street, Woodstock OX20 1TH

Who: Existing members. Owing to limited space and enthusiastic uptake, we regret that our book group is full for now. We hope our monthly choices will provide reading ideas and inspiration for others wishing to read along!

This month’s choice: Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto

Enjoy a 15% discount when you buy your copy at The Woodstock Bookshop. 

Please join us at The Woodstock Bookshop where Peter Carpenter will talk about his book: BOWIELAND: Walking in the footsteps of David.

Following open heart surgery, Peter Carpenter was given one instruction - walk if you want to stay alive.

So, when his hero died in 2016, he knew what he had to do. The figure who was to so many a companion and guide had left no single focal point for homage. To reconnect with him, Carpenter would take a walk into the past, to the places where David Jones became something more: David Bowie.

Leaving behind well-known shrines to Bowie, he journeyed through South London edgelands to obscurer haunts. Carpenter's quest, a series of happy accidents and chance meetings, took him to Bickley as well as Berlin and Brixton, to Eel Pie Island as well as Heddon Street and Beckenham. Carpenter's perambulations echo Bowie's own wandering creative spirit.

They reveal multiple influences, both conscious and unconscious, in Bowie's creative development. Ultimately, Carpenter reaches a fresh understanding of where Bowie sits in the culture, not as an outlier, but as part of a tradition, informed by those artists, poets and musicians who passed on their wisdom to him. A celebration of the revelatory powers of walking, and by no means just for Bowie obsessives, BOWIELAND opens up our geography in ways rarely seen or so well understood.

Fabulous... What a ghost story! A ripping read.' IAIN SINCLAIR, author of London Orbital

'Vividly celebrates Bowie as not just a chameleonic visionary, but a nomadic one, a creature informed by place and circumstance.' STUART MACONIE

'Bowieland will make you want to take your very own pilgrimage, accompanied by the great man's songs.' ALEXANDER LARMAN, THE OBSERVER

'A sublime, time-travelling quest.' TIFFANY MURRAY, author of My Family and Other Rock Stars

'A joyful and fascinating journey which anchors Bowie's genius in the pavements.' KEVIN LOADER, producer of The Buddha of Suburbia

8pm finish is approximate. Please note that if there is sufficient demand this event may be moved to a larger central Woodstock venue. The date and time will remain unchanged and we will notify you in good time if this is planned.

For further information contact: info@woodstockbookshop.co.uk

TICKETS £5

Wine (or soft drink) & canapés included.

Please join us at The Woodstock Bookshop where Caroline Mills will talk about her book: This is Not My Land: 30 Years on a Small Cotswolds Farm.

This is Not My Land is award-winning travel writer Caroline Mills' enchanting narrative about life on a small farm in the heart of the English countryside. In 1995, when Caroline and her partner Paul were in their early 20s, they bought 65 acres of land on the edge of the north Cotswolds. Initially, they regarded it innocently as just land - something, hopefully, from which to make a living.

Then they gave the land a name, and it became something. In almost 500 years, Caroline's land has had just four owners, including King Henry VIII. Walking repeatedly around the same five meadows and woodland, she witnesses how the farm and the surrounding landscape evolve across three decades.

Realising that five fields and a wood is a big world in a small space, Caroline's nature writing exemplifies slow travel in its most microcosmic form. This is Not My Land brings the English countryside to life through a series of vignettes or 'journeys'. Learn how Caroline and her partner learn to manage and expand a designated wildlife site, how they build an eco-house and how they interact with nature.

Join Caroline in finding enjoyment in wildlife: the barn owl that tracks up and down the meadow at dusk, the plumes of chimney sweeper moths that feed on the pignuts in spring, the migrant redwing flock that she awaits every autumn, and the ecstatic excitement of a skylark's arrival after 20 years of waiting. This is Not My Land recounts 30 years of living on and with the land, discovering an extraordinary 1,000-year history, transitioning to organic certification before it became fashionable (again), raising a family that becomes integral to the farm's identity, and learning its sense of place. Ultimately, Caroline realises that what she once regarded as merely 'land' is an increasingly rare and exceptional mosaic landscape - one with which she falls in love so deeply that it becomes unthinkable to her that anyone would wish to harm it, least of all those that with the power and duty to protect.

8pm finish is approximate. Please note that if there is sufficient demand this event may be moved to a larger central Woodstock venue. The date and time will remain unchanged and we will notify you in good time if this is planned.

For further information contact: info@woodstockbookshop.co.uk

TICKETS £5.00 including wine (or a soft drink) & canapés.

Please join us at The Woodstock Bookshop where Kate McLoughlin will talk about her book: Silence: A Literary History.

A majestic literary history, revealing the power and possibilities of silence found in literary works. Silence: A Literary History traces silences over twelve centuries of English literature, from the solitary states of exile on icy seas described in Anglo-Saxon poems to searches for silence in our own Age of Pings. This pioneering work of 'big' literary history encompasses exalted states of blissful union with the divine and with the natural world, the deep hushes of intimacy, spell-binding silent scenes on stage, encrypted expressions of same-sex love, the great literary epics of inarticulable grief, the game-changing idea of silence within the mind, the failure of words in the face of two World Wars, the hilarious awkwardness of some social silences, the echoing absence of lost voices, and silences as a powerful form of protest.

Throughout, Kate McLoughlin illuminates the intellectual and cultural influences shaping our relationships with silence and explores the paradoxical ways in which authors create silences through words. Medieval lyricists express complex theological notions through simple lullabies shushing babies to sleep. Renaissance sonneteers protest their tongue-tiedness in dazzling displays of verbal ingenuity.

Shakespeare creates silences that stage violent misogyny, calculating statecraft, the hurt of having to grow up and hard-won equanimity. Out of political favour at the Restoration, Milton dreams of a silent paradise. Wordsworth and Coleridge are dumbfounded by the sublimity of God's creation.

Jane Austen deflates pomposities with perfectly-timed pauses. Tennyson composes a three-thousand-line poem about the death of his best friend leaving him lost for words. Virginia Woolf repeatedly writes a novel about the things that people don't say.

In Silence: A Literary History, Kate McLoughlin explores such silences in all their richness and variety, illuminating the intellectual, cultural, political, and religious traditions that shape them. Across English literature silences emerge as powerful, moving, and sometimes very funny.

8pm finish is approximate. Please note that if there is sufficient demand this event may be moved to a larger central Woodstock venue. The date and time will remain unchanged and we will notify you in good time if this is planned.

For further information contact: info@woodstockbookshop.co.uk

TICKETS £5.00 including wine (or a soft drink) & canapés.

Please join us at The Woodstock Bookshop where Anna Beer (author of Death of an Englishman : An Oxford Mystery)  will re-join us to talk about her new crime fiction novel An Inkling of Death.

PRAISE FOR Death of an Englishman

‘A high octane jaunt full of laughter and wisdom. Funny, wise, with some deliciously sexy stepping stones... I adored Eve immediately.’
Judith Holder, star of the Older and Wider Podcast

‘Gripping, atmospheric and pleasingly twisty, Death of an Englishman is a captivating and engrossing read: I loved it.’
Chloé Houston, co-author of The Book Game by
Frances Wise

‘Always entertaining... Anna Beer plunges the reader into Oxford’s murky depths with the mystery of a missing manuscript and a cast of the eccentric to the obnoxious, even both...’
Amal Chatterjee, author of Across the Lakes

‘An absorbing, intriguing read... Lovers of detective fiction will relish the witty references to other crime writers and characters.’
Dr Lynn Robson, author of Early Modern Murder,
Calvinism and Female Spiritual Authority

‘Anna Beer constructs a riveting, often amusing narrative around conflicting cultural ideologies, revealing her characters with warmth and humanity,’
Helen Carr, author of Sceptred Isle

8pm finish is approximate. Please note that if there is sufficient demand this event may be moved to a larger central Woodstock venue. The date and time will remain unchanged and we will notify you in good time if this is planned.

For further information contact: info@woodstockbookshop.co.uk

TICKETS £5.00 including wine (or a soft drink) & canapés.g