The Violet Bookshop

The Violet Bookshop An independent bookshop in Upton upon Severn, Worcestershire. Featuring a selection of fiction and non-fiction for adults and children.
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Looking for a last-minute gift before Father's Day tomorrow? Books, notebooks, bookmarks, and National Book Tokens - sor...
20/06/2026

Looking for a last-minute gift before Father's Day tomorrow? Books, notebooks, bookmarks, and National Book Tokens - sorted!

Open Saturday 10am-5pm.

It's the Friday of Independent Bookshop Week and our indie and local author focus today is Poetry! We're completely spoi...
19/06/2026

It's the Friday of Independent Bookshop Week and our indie and local author focus today is Poetry! We're completely spoilt for fantastic local poets in Upton and the wider area. Here are just a few...

📚Stephen Chappell
Portrait of the Artist with a Young Dog contains mainly comic and whimsical poems inspired by Stephen's pup Molly. These are for you if you love tender, insightful, funny poetry.

📚 Harriet Elston
Upton local Harriet's debut collection Maybe Tomorrow is a volume written in the quiet after chaos. In a space where wine glasses once stood, words began to bloom, revealing small truths about identity, healing, and the courage to begin again.

📚 Michelle Louise Gordon
"home is not a place
but feeling in our souls
that we belong here"
Focusing on her favourite poetry format, which forces her to be succinct and direct with her word choices, In Haiku is a collection written over several decades and collected together this year.

📚 Dennis Healy
Home illuminates the ties of kin, identity with place, origin, the challenge and solace of love, our galactic home and our very sense of self. Children in the Window, Dennis' newest collection, addresses more varies topics and includes a beautiful section of 'Sonnets for a Wife'. Dennis' poetry can be both light and irreverent whilst simultaneously profound, philosophical, and always beautifully eloquent.

📚 Elizabeth Lockwood
Elizabeth is a writer interested in the duality of life, how happiness and sadness coexist and how grief informs and changes our realities. Waves of Stardust is a breathtakingly sad and beautiful collection of words and illustrations telling the story of the loss of Elizabeth's baby son, Osian. Rain and Leaves is the collection that grew from the time afterwards coping with grief and caring for her three other children. Raw, intensely personal and beautiful poetry.

📚 Fergus McGonigal
Witty, sharp, often absurd poetry, Fergus' writing can be both more abstract (Send More Pianos) and personal (Writing With My Elsewhere Head). The Thought Which Fell Down the Back of the Sofa is riot for all ages

📚 Ali Oxtoby
Heart to Heart is a delightful collection of observations and emotions that are full of warmth and entirely relatable; they prompt both joy and tears and always a smile. You can also find some of Ali's individual poems on greetings cards.

📚 Ian Parker Dodd
Ian's first collection, All They Will Call You, is a response to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children since 2016. Did Love Come Off The Ration is a collection about love; the pain of it, the joy of it, the lack of it, the search for it, and how lovely refracts through the prism of life.

📚 The Malvern Spoken Word Group
An Ekphrastic Anthology came by way of experiment; the group took a themed picture every month as inspiration for their writing - this collection showcases them, and includes a wide variety of styles and responses from local poets and writers.

Next up for our Independent Bookshop Week showcase of local and independent authors - Children's Books!📚 Jan AllenUpton ...
18/06/2026

Next up for our Independent Bookshop Week showcase of local and independent authors - Children's Books!

📚 Jan Allen
Upton local Jan Allen's books about the adventurous little rabbit Ranni are great first chapter books - ideal for age 3+ to read together with an adult, and for older children who are starting to read independently.

📚 Martin P. Buckley
Trouble in Trickletown is fantasy adventure in true Terry Pratchett Style, complete with Martin's own beautiful full-colour illustrations. Suitable for middle-grade readers (age approx 7-11), the author has drawn on his own experience of neurodiversity to ensure his book is is written and designed to be suitable for dyslexic readers.

📚 Christina Chard
When a magical golden snowflake turns Verity Soap's stone garden sculpture and soft toy into real animals, she goes on an adventure she will never forget! This is a beautifully illustrated, magical picture book, perfect for gifting.

📚 Jeanne Frith
Writing a children's book was a lifelong dream of Jeanne's, which she achieved aged 53 with Harley, Pepi and the Treasure Map. A beautiful, bright first picture book following the adventures of two little pups!

📚 Paula Garfield
Paula told the stories of her childhood adventures to her own children for years, before sharing them with all of us in The Story of Snoopie Goose. With gorgeous illustrations, and a cover location many Worcestershire grownups will recognise!

📚 Verity James
Join Boodle as he goes in search of adventure.in this delightful collection of stories, brought to life with beautiful watercolours by Pauline Potterill. Ideal for reading together or for children learning to read by themselves doe the first time.

📚 Joy Reynolds
Betty's Eggs was written and illustrated as a gift to Joy's two adopted grandchildren, and published recently in the hope that it will "enable children, adopted or not, to understand that to be loved is the greatest gift that can be given". Profits from the sale of Betty's Eggs will be shared between Toybox and other charities.

📚 Hannah Tribe
Inspired by her visits to her grandparents in Ledbury, Hannah's lovely book follows Thomas the cat, who sleeps under the railway bridge and steals fish from the market with his best friend Gary. A story about friendship, change and belonging.

📚 Matthew Wiggins
War Bear is the bravest bear. He doesn't fight supervillains, but however hard things get, he is always there for his friends. Together they face problems and dangers, but never stop helping each other find their way to freedom. £1 of every sale of War Bear goes towards War Child UK.

📚 Sue Yardley
Cyril the Racehorse is one of our bestselling picture books, drawing on Sue's upbringing on a Worcestershire farm as the daughter of a racehorse trainer, and her very real horse Cyril, this funny, lively, rhyming picture book is a real treat for preschoolers and reception-aged readers.

We're halfway through Independent Bookshop Week, so you have a few more days to pop in and get involved! It's double loy...
17/06/2026

We're halfway through Independent Bookshop Week, so you have a few more days to pop in and get involved! It's double loyalty card stamps all the way through until the end of Saturday, plus free £5 National Book Tokens with any book purchase and free activity booklets and stickers with any children's book!

The full Indie Book Awards Shortlist is in stock, and includes fiction, non-fiction, children's and picture books - something for everyone to enjoy!

Finally, we're continuing to showcase local and independent authors (including lots of Upton and Malvern creatives!) with a post featuring a different genre each day, so head over to our page and give us a like and follow if you haven't already 😊

Continuing our showcase of indie and local authors for Independent Bookshop Week, and this time we're focusing on Short ...
16/06/2026

Continuing our showcase of indie and local authors for Independent Bookshop Week, and this time we're focusing on Short Stories!

📚 John Bradshaw
John describes Some Strange Short Stories as ranging from "seriously weird down through the quite strangely odd, into the slightly out of the ordinary". He's also the publisher of Twisted Tales, by various authors, which all culminate in an unexpected twist, often with a whip in it's tail!

📚 Karol Darnell
Boxes of Time is a collection that considers time, lifetimes and reality, and the notion that the individual boxes of time we live in might overlap and exist side by side. The final story of the book, The Goom Stool, is inspired by the old Goom Stool Cottages here in Upton upon Severn. Karol is also the publisher for We Love Mondays, an anthology of stories by the Monday Writers clubs which includes more stories from her and various other local writers including Pauline Potterill.

📚 Guy Inchbold
Nobody Steals My Air is a novella of space, and what it means to be human in the birth panga of a new era. It's joined by 6 more short stories that span Victorian steam-punk to the furthest reaches of space, time and being.

📚 Chris Lowe
Uncle Jack's Rainbow is a collection of modern fairytales from the mind of a professional storyteller, inspired by traditional folk tales and themes as well as his personal experiences and observations. You might have come across Chris performing his tales at Upton's Folk Festival or at the bookshop

We're showcasing local and independent authors this Indie Bookshop Week, and we're starting off strong with Fiction! 📚 D...
15/06/2026

We're showcasing local and independent authors this Indie Bookshop Week, and we're starting off strong with Fiction!

📚 Deborah Birch Writing
Secrets in Aqua is a twisty, psychological thriller that explores the impact of submerged family secrets and the fragile nature of memory and identity. Fans of Alice Feeney and Adele Parks will love this book.

📚 Karol Darnell
Don't Miss the Last Train Home is a biographical novel set in a northern mill town in the early 1900s, Karol used Beatrice's album of collected postcards plus historical research to write this story of adversity and discovery. (You can also find Karol's short story collections in stock, but more on those in another post!)

📚 Michelle Louise Gordon
What would you do if you suddenly found yourself in a different reality that was better for you, but not for those you loved? This is Caru's dilemma in The Girl Who Loved Too Much, perfect for fans of Matt Haig. If you like your fiction spiritual and reflective, try the Visionary Collection; stories of other realities and life after death (and we love how the covers all fit together!).

📚 Lynne Hackles
Gail Lockwood and Her Imaginary Agony Aunt and Dilys Lloyd's Dilemmas are warm, witty and relatable stories of women, their resilience and their happiness. Perfect summery reads!

📚 Pauline Potterill
The Much Meddling series are wonderful small town romantic comedies with quirky characters, ancient families and traditional lives, but with plenty of action and never predictable. For something a bit different, When Love and Rage Rip the Veil is a ghostly mystery of hotel inheritance and the challenging of beliefs and sanity.

📚 Philip Xeri
A London-set sci-fi fantasy, 'the pulse' is discovered, a hitherto unknown energy that for millennia has held back the darker side of human nature; the balance is now in jeopardy, and a mysterious department at Scotland Yard is brought in to investigate. A mix of The X Files and Rivers of London, this book blends together sci-fi, fantasy and crime investigation.

🎉📚It's independent Bookshop Week!📚🎉From Saturday 13th-Saturday 20th June we're celebrating at The Violet Bookshop:📚 The ...
13/06/2026

🎉📚It's independent Bookshop Week!📚🎉

From Saturday 13th-Saturday 20th June we're celebrating at The Violet Bookshop:

📚 The middle table is showcasing local and indie authors - there's something for everyone from fabulous local talent, including fiction, non fiction, poetry, short stories, memoir and children's books!

🏆 The full Indie Book Awards shortlist is on stock, with the winner announced later this week!

🎫 Double loyalty card stamps all week (pop in and get yours if you haven't already)!

📖 A free £5 National Book Token with every purchase that includes a book

📗 A free Gruffalo Summer Reading Activity Booklet with every children's book purchase!

Open usual hours of Tuesday-Saturday 10-5, plus extra on Monday 10-2.30 😄

What to do on a grim and rainy day?Grab yourself a new book ready for a cosy, rainy evening in of course!Can't pop in? H...
11/06/2026

What to do on a grim and rainy day?

Grab yourself a new book ready for a cosy, rainy evening in of course!

Can't pop in? Head to Bookshop.org and order anything you like for home delivery whilst supporting your favourite local indie bookshop 😊
https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/thevioletbookshop

Books that match my nails... Children's and Young Adult edition!
09/06/2026

Books that match my nails... Children's and Young Adult edition!

Address

Old Street
Upton Upon Severn
WR80ET

Opening Hours

Tuesday 10am - 5pm
Wednesday 10am - 5pm
Thursday 10am - 5pm
Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday 10am - 5pm

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