‘To travel by bookshop is to see the best of Britain.’

Fairlight Books is delighted to announce a new edition of Louise Boland’s Bookshop Tours of Britain, the slow-travel guide to Britain that navigates from bookshop to bookshop. Originally published in 2020, the book has been regularly updated and expanded in recent years to keep up with a host of new bookshop openings, and is now in its fifth edition, with over fifty new bookshops featured.

Featuring twenty tour routes that take the reader along the Jurassic Coast of south-west England, over the mountains of Wales, through England’s industrial heartland, up to the Scottish Highlands and back via Whitby, the Norfolk Broads, central London, the South Downs and Hardy’s Wessex, the book spotlights some of Britain’s most beautiful and heritage-rich areas, while celebrating the country’s many fantastic bookshops and the vital role they play in their communities.

Among the exciting new additions to Bookshop Tours of Britain are smuggler-themed Plunder in Ramsgate, bookshop and wine bar The BookCellar in Bristol, an enormous new branch of Topping and Company in York and the romance-focused Book Lovers Bookshop in Edinburgh.

Perfect for gifting and coffee-table browsing, the book includes maps and illustrations by Sara Mulvanny, and hundreds of gorgeous colour photos of bookshops and their owners – not forgetting some adorable bookshop pets!

Louise Boland said: ‘It’s been so uplifting to see new bookshops springing up all over the country in recent years, and I’m thrilled to be able to highlight and celebrate even more of them in this updated edition.’