I’ve received but not yet had time to read The Fish Ladder, a first book by Katharine Norbury, which comes highly recommended by writers including Michael Holroyd (“magical and most original”) and Philip Pullman (“a luminous sort of book, beautifully written, darting here and there like a kingfisher over a stream”). It’s billed as a combination of travelogue and memoir, in which the writer, after a miscarriage, sets out with her nine-year-old daughter to follow a river from sea to source. I’m mentioning it early because I’ve just seen that Katharine Norbury will be discussing it with the novelist, poet and memoirist Blake Morrison at the London Review Bookshop on February 18. For details see the bookshop’s website.