School Days 1951-62, by Gordon Smith. Published by Gordon Smith.

I can close my eyes, go back 50 years or so and bring it all – or a great deal of it – to life again: the swings, the football and rounders on the pitch, the Geo, the bandie pool. Dandy and Beano on Friday, news and weather forecasts only on the wireless.

Batalden: Shipwreck and Emi­gration, by Trond Strømgren. Strømgren Publishing.

Trond Strømgren is an unusual but confident Norwegian publisher. I say unusual because his imprint is “Strømgren Publishing: Batalden – New York – Tokyo”. You’d expect an international publisher to have office in the two cities right enough, but Batalden?

Benny-benny Seawater: The First Day of the Summer Holidays by Lisa Johnson, illustrated by Katherine Laidlay. Published by The Shetland Times, £6.99.

Four Score Years and Ten, by James W. Irvine. Published by A. Irvine, £11.40.

United Through Sport, Orkney v Shetland – The story of the Junior Inter-County, by Jockie Wood. Published by The Orcadian Ltd at £23.99 and available from The Shetland Times Bookshop.

Serpentine, by Tom Morton. Mainstream Publishing, £9.99.

This interesting new thriller from Tom Morton is about The IRA, terrorists, golf, bomb plots, sabot­age, murders, corruption and violence in the extreme.

The book is set initially in Gaza, as the hero of the story, Mark Murricane, is kidnapped while trying to free an already kidnapped businessman.…

The Simmer issue of The New Shetlander, number 248, goes on sale on Friday, with a strikingly varied mix of content: topical, historical and literary.

Alongside an editorial entitled Trönies stands a most unusual poem by Jim Mainland; both deal with recent scandals regarding the conduct of MPs. On a contentious issue nearer home, several…

Lifeboat Heroes by Edward Wake-Walker. Haynes Publish­ing, £19.99.

Most of us can only try to imagine it. But there are a number of people in Shetland who know only too well what it is like to be woken from a warm, comfy bed in the early hours of a wild winter’s day by the alarm…

Kindly Folk and Bonny Boats, by Gloria Wilson. History Press, £12.99

When one is old enough to look back over quite a few decades, it’s somewhat disconcerting to realise that many things once universal and seemingly everlasting are now rare and historical. Such is the case with fishing boats; you’ll search far and wide today…

The June edition of the Shetland Life magazine goes on sale today, and proves to be one of the best for some time.

Very interesting is editor Malachy Tallack’s take on the current Westminster revelations, where he points the finger at journalists, labelling them a “notorious bunch of expenses junkies”. Interesting because Tallack is a…