This bundle incorporates a collection of bookseller favourites. Each bundle has been carefully picked by one of our team to reflect their reading tastes. Each bundle is beautifully gift-wrapped in tissue paper and string and can be collected in store or sent straight to your door.

Jane’s Bundle includes~ Fresh water for flowers by Valerie Perrin, Opposite of A Person by Lieke Marsman, and Human Nature by Serge Joncour.

Fresh Water~

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her daily life is lived to the rhythms of the hilarious and touching confidences of random visitors and her colleagues-three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest. Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of police chief Julien Seul, wishing to deposit his mother's ashes on the gravesite of a complete stranger.Julien is not the only one to guard a painful secret: his mother's story of clandestine love breaks through Violette's carefully constructed defences to reveal the tragic loss of her daughter, and her steely determination to find out who is responsible. The funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness, Fresh Water for Flowers brings out the exceptional and the poetic in the ordinary. A delightful, atmospheric, absorbing tale.

Opposite of a Person~

If people were evil, and I wished to be good, then I had to make sure that I was the opposite of a person.

When Ida, a Dutch climatologist, accepts an internship at a climate research institute in the Italian Alps, it means leaving her girlfriend Robin behind in Amsterdam. As she and her new colleagues prepare to demolish a decommissioned hydropower dam, Ida finds herself grappling with love, loneliness and her place in a society unwilling to confront global warming.

An unflinchingly honest narrative of vulnerability, longing and introspection is disrupted by essays and poems, creating an incisive, witty and devastatingly smart portrait of how we live now. Distilling all our contemporary fears, Marsman examines what we must face head-on if we – individuals, humanity, the world – are to survive. And she asks us: if we are to survive, what is our impetus? For what are we fighting?

Startlingly unique, timely and ultimately deeply moving, The Opposite of a Person is a dazzling, cerebral tour-de-force, a poignant love story and an urgent, unforgettable call to arms.

Human Nature~

For the first time, he found himself alone at the farm, with no sound whatever from the livestock, nor from anyone else, not the least sign of life. And yet, within these walls, life had always won through. As France prepares to see in a new millennium, the country is battered by apocalyptic storms. But holed up on the farm where he and his three sisters grew up, Alexandre seems less afraid of the weather than of the police turning up. Alone in the darkness, he reflects on the end of a rural way of life he once thought could never change. And his thoughts return to the baking hot summer of 1976, when he met Constanze, an environmental activist who fell for the beauty of the countryside, and was prepared to use any means to save it. Serge Joncour's impassioned, ambitious novel charts three decades of political, social, and environmental upheaval through the lives of a French farming family, as the delicate bond between the human and natural worlds threatens to snap.