Welcome!
Michael Walmer has set about publishing a list where the main ingredient is quality. Authors will be sourced from all over the world, with a love of erudition, be it elegant or rough-edged, simple or complex, poetic or blunt, or all of these!, as the enlivening and guiding principle.
New And Upcoming
Introduced by Mary Blance
In April 1931, a young English sailor was sitting in a café in London, attempting to persuade a documentary film-maker that she was the perfect assistant for a stint of filming on a remote Shetland islet. Joan Grigsby was the applicant, with boat-handling skills and sterling practical capacities. Jenny Brown (later Gilbertson) was the film-maker, beginning her first shoot in a beloved location. Grigsby got the job…
An Island Rooing documents not only this brief early summer stay on the Isle of Stenness, but also Grigsby’s further solo adventures right through the season: staying with a crofting family in Heylor, and sampling the period of calling the sheep in from the hills, lambing, removal of their fleeces by hand (the rooing of the title); setting the tatties for the new crop, and hearing many stories around the fire at night about Shetland history and major events, including several tragic accounts of shipwreck; heading to Lerwick to explore the knitwear and fishing industries, including first-hand experience of being part of the crew of a drifter seeking their next big catch; befriending the gutting women onshore and learning that deceptively difficult skill.
Grigsby’s style is fluent, adventuresome and direct, both in terms of how she treats the world, and how she writes. This freedom and honesty shapes, in this her second book, a narrative full to brimming with vigour and character. An Island Rooing was first published in 1933.
NORTHUS SHETLAND CLASSICS Myndins / memoir stream, volume 2
PUBLICATION: March 25, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7638700-4-8 paperback
Angus Rugg is a successful eye specialist in a city in the South in the turbulent 1960s. His career has been stellar in its own way, having started way back during the war, when he assisted the legendary Guillaume de Sevres in his experiments, first on soldier cadavers and then on live subjects, prisoners of war. Now Angus is ageing fast, and his doctor tells him that his heart is compromised – he won’t live long.
His wife Maeve and son Hilary are still in the dark about this latest development – the right time to tell them needs to be found. It is all the more critical as Maeve is pregnant with their second child, after an interval of over twenty years. Hilary struggles with his father’s success and the generational gap between them, but is slowly forging his independent way as a journalist at the city’s main paper.
Hilary’s fiancée Jadeen substitute teaches at the local secondary school and is alive to the currents that are beginning to sweep through society in these stormy times. Asked to teach from a history textbook with a prejudiced discussion of race, she struggles between her personal convictions and her career aspirations.
When Angus gives one of his entertaining talks on the history of the Sevres experiments for a local society, a rival paper to Hilary’s sends someone new, veteran staffer Andrew Dodds, who happens to be one of Angus’ current patients. Hilary has always covered these talks dutifully, without enthusiasm. When Dodds’ story appears the following day, it is clear that he has seen an angle Hilary has missed in his father’s smooth patter. The story of experiments on prisoners quickly goes national, and then international. Angus, at this critical time of his life and that of his family, is immediately notorious. Before the day is out, the situation will have come to a head also in all of their private lives, the currents of ambivalence and dissatisfaction exposed, and the comfort in which they have lived for so long shattered.
In her third novel, Janet Burroway navigates with panache the rapids of the 1960s, when old certainties began to crumble and a new awareness dawned. Her superbly modulated prose attains new heights, limning the lives and minds of four people with rich complexity and full-flavoured subtlety.
The famed novelist and critic Rosellen Brown discusses this novel with the author in an interview specially undertaken for this publication, providing insights into the creative process not only of this piece, but the persistent preoccupations across Burroway’s oeuvre which make her one of the outstanding proponents of fiction of her times.
PUBLICATION: February 25, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7638700-3-1 paperback
WALMER BELLES-LETTRES vol. 7
In 1901, with only two poetry volumes to his name, G.K. Chesterton was very much in the up-and-coming bracket among writers. But he had already built a reputation for brilliant wit, original incisiveness, and a love of paradox in many essays published in journals.
A group of these had a common theme: they were defences, discussing things which society, to his mind, dismissed unfairly or, at the very best, undervalued. Lifting sixteen of them from the pages of The Speaker, he compiled his very first book of prose.
In A Defence of Rash Vows he despises the limitations imposed by mealy-mouthed cowardice; in A Defence of Skeletons he revels in essential coarseness; in A Defence of Nonsense he insists that childlike wonder requires preservation in our culture; in A Defence of Heraldry he frowns upon the lowest common denominations which modern democracy espouses; in A Defence of Ugly Things he celebrates nature’s unashamed exuberance; in A Defence of Humility he similarly supports the beauty of the commonplace; and in A Defence of Patriotism he bemoans the vulgarity which has usurped the true patriot’s necessary sensitivity.
These short essays, and the nine others in this book, illustrate a mind whose original political and social insight, and piercing critical instincts, though they were sometimes led astray by quick-temperedness, cut through dogma and convention to an extraordinary degree.
PUBLICATION: October 25, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7635656-5-4 paperback