Welcome
Books Paper Scissors is an independent bookshop in leafy South Belfast, near to the Botanic Gardens, Queen’s University and the Ulster Museum.
We stock a curated selection of new fiction and non-fiction, plus classics, Irish writing and poetry. We also have a children's room, with choices from newborn to teenager. If you don't see the book you want in store or on-line, just ask via e-mail or telephone, we can source most books in just a few days.
Beyond books we stock high quality stationery, notebooks, pens, diaries and greetings cards. Plus gift wrap and of course, scissors. .
Please note, our website inventory is not tracked with our shop stock. Books on the website are available as direct order and may not be in the shop, but can be delivered within 2 days.
New
Mr Penguin & The Temple of Doom : Book 4, Alex T Smith ( Sept 2021, hardback)
£6.99
From the internationally bestselling creator of Claude comes a hero like no other: Mr Penguin. Indiana Jones meets Hercule Poirot in this series from Alex T. Smith, ideal for 7+ readers of Dave Pigeon.Follow Mr Penguin and his trusty sidekick Colin (the spider) as they head into the desert! When their good friend Edith is kidnapped, they're on their most important mission yet. Can they survive a perilous train journey to the great pyramids? Will Mr Penguin complete the three impossible tasks - and get home in time for a fish finger sandwich ...?Find out in the fourth Mr Penguin book with plenty of slapstick humour, mystery and adventure. Highly illustrated throughout with a striking black and orange design.
'perfect introduction to mystery stories' - Scotsman
Follow him on Twitter @Alex_T_Smith
Danger At Dead Man’s Pass, MG Leonard ( paperback Sept 2021)
£7.99
Embark on a thrilling fourth adventure in the bestselling, prize-winning Adventures on Trains series - Danger at Dead Man's Pass, from M. G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, as Harrison Beck investigates an ancient family curse high in the German mountains. (Each book does work on its own though)Illustrated in black-and-white throughout by Elisa Paganelli. Perfect for Halloween. A mysterious letter from an old friend asks Hal and Uncle Nat to help investigate a spooky supernatural mystery.
Legend has it the Kratzensteins, a family of rich and powerful railway tycoons, are cursed, but there is no such thing as a curse, is there . . .?Hal and Nat take the night train to Berlin and go undercover.
From a creaking spooky old house at the foot of the Harz mountains, they take the Kratzenstein family's funeral train to the peak of the Brocken Mountain. Can Hal uncover the secrets of the Brocken railway and the family curse before disaster strikes?
Sherlock Homes & The Empty House ( easy classics), Arthur Conan Doyle ( paperback Sept 2021)
£6.99
An illustrated adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Sherlock Holmes mystery - at an easy-to-read level for readers of all ages! Also includes a QR code for the free audiobook! Mr Robert Adair was killed last night at his mansion in Park Lane. He had spent the evening gambling and his winnings were still on the table. His door was locked from the inside and his window was left open ...It has been three years since the death of Sherlock Holmes. Watson is now solving mysteries solo and he's about to face his toughest one yet: the impossible murder of Mr Adair. What Watson doesn't know is that this curious case will unearth secrets from beyond the grave ..
Dragon Rider: The Aurelia Curse (bk 3), by Cornelia Funke ( paperback Sept 2021)
£7.99
The third dragon adventure from the legendary author of Inkheart, Cornelia Funke - over one million English language copies of DRAGON RIDER sold worldwide, and now a major movie on Sky Cinema! 'A warm-hearted dream of a book.' THE GUARDIAN
Dragon RiderBen and the Greenblooms must protect a mythical new creature rising from the ocean that can bring light or darkness to whoever it first meets - a vast, mythical Aurelia. It's a race against time to protect it, for if the Aurelia is hurt, all fabulous creatures will vanish from Earth. In the end though, it may take the arrival of the original silver dragon, Firedrake, to help save them all ...
Dragons, myth and magic unite in the third instalment of Cornelia Funke's bestselling epic fantasy-adventure series! Dragon Rider has now been adapted for the big screen in a major animation with a stellar cast including Felicity Jones and Patrick Stewart, available on Sky Cinema. Features stunning cover artwork and maps from Laura Ellen Anderson.
Isadora Moon series : The Shooting Star ( hardback October 2021)
£5.99
Isadora Moon is special because she's different. Her mum is a fairy and her dad is a vampire and she's a bit of both. Isadora is observing the night sky for a school project - her class is learning everything about space and she decides to look at the stars for inspiration.But wait, what is that? Through the telescope, Isadora spots a shooting star that falls to Earth! After courageously finding the place where the star landed, Isadora discovers a new twinkling friend. Her name is Nova, she is a Glow Sprite and she is not supposed to be there. Even worse, Nova's moon kitten Pluto is lost and she needs Isadora's help to find him.
Between magical campfires, space lessons, moon cheese and a glowing sleepover, Isadora will need to use all her wits to help Nova finding Pluto before her new friend has to fly back to the stars. With irresistible pink and black artwork throughout by author/illustrator Harriet Muncaster and a totally unique heroine with an out-of-this-world family, this is a beautiful, charming, and funny series of first chapter books. Perfect for fans of Claude, Dixie O'Day, and Squishy McFluff, Isadora Moon is the ideal choice for readers who want their magic and sparkle with a bit of bite! One of our most popular series.
Following Frankenstein, Catherine De Bruton ( paperback October 2021)
£7.99
A brilliantly-conceived and hugely imaginative 'sequel' to Mary Shelley's masterpiece, Following Frankenstein is a hugely exciting and beautifully-written historical adventure, perfect for 9-12 year olds. Sometimes I was jealous of the monster of Frankenstein. I grew up believing my father cared more for him than he did for me.And was I wrong? Maggie Walton's father has dedicated his life to a single pursuit: hunting down the monster created by Victor Frankenstein. It has cost Maggie and her family everything - and now her father is staking everything on one last voyage to the Arctic, with Maggie secretly in tow, where he hopes to find the monster at last. But there they make a shocking discovery: Frankenstein's monster has a son...
A breath-taking, epic adventure, spanning the icy wastes of the Arctic Tundra to the vaudeville circus of New York, from the award-winning author of No Ballet Shoes in Syria and Another Twist in the Tale.
Pax: Journey Home, by Sara Pennypacker ( Hardback October 2021)
£12.99
From bestselling and award-winning author Sara Pennypacker comes the long-awaited sequel to Pax; gorgeously crafted, utterly compelling with stunning illustrations by award-winning author and illustrator Jon Klassen. It's been a year since Peter and his pet fox, Pax, have seen each other. Once inseparable, they now lead very different lives.Pax must protect his litter of kits in a dangerous world. Meanwhile Peter, orphaned after the war, has left his adopted home and joined the Water Warriors, a group determined to heal the land from the scars of the war. When one of Pax's kits falls desperately ill, he turns to the one human he knows he can trust.
And no matter how hard Peter tries to harden his broken heart, love keeps finding a way in. Now both boy and fox find themselves on journeys toward home, healing - and each other. A breathtaking novel about chosen families and the healing power of love.
The Great Dream Robbery ( Smith & James) hardback Sept 2021
£12.99
I can't recommend these guys highly enough! For fans of David Walliams and the Treehouse series, this story moves your readers on a bit and offers them lots of great new vocabulary whilst keeping the fun and zany approach.
A brand-new adventure beyond your wildest dreams, from the bestselling authors of KID NORMAL. Unlike most 12 year-olds, Maya Clayton is desperate to go to bed early. Falling asleep is the only chance she has to save her dad - the brilliant but slightly odd Professor Dexter.
The Professor invented a device that allows you to visit other people's dreams. But the devious Lilith Delamere has trapped him inside a nightmare and Maya and the mysterious Dream Bandits must find a way to rescue him before it's too late!Maya will face a dangerous journey and some difficult choices. But sometimes all you need is a dream . . . and a bit of courage.
Featuring a hospital heist, some banana-loving llamas and a talking cat called Bin Bag, this is one mind-bending adventure you won't want to wake up from.
Burntcoat, Sarah Hall ( hardback 7 Oct 2021)
£12.99
In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations.The symptoms are well known: her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit.
The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.
'Sarah Hall makes language shimmer and burn . . .
One of the finest writers at work today.'DAMON GALGUT' Sarah Hall is the author of Sudden Traveller - Award winning short stories from 2020, plus numerous other novels : The Wolf Border, Madame Zero
The Happy Hedgerow (hardback October 2021)
£10.99
Nestled in the countryside, lies a barley field surrounded by hedgerows and woods. Old Oak stands amidst his own beloved hedgerow, which teems with contented wildlife. One day the farmer decides to get rid of one of the hedgerows: the old Oak watches in sorrow as his dear friend Beech's hedgerow is pulled up and destroyed.Now the soil dribbles down the hill when it rains, and the wind blows away the top soil. The crops will no longer thrive in this huge new field. But hope is returned when a new farmer comes to plant saplings one cold winter morning.
By showing children just how empty our countryside would be without these wonderful, ancient habitats, the story engenders a lasting affection and appreciation of our hedgerows. Illustrated in a charming style, with accurate details of flora and fauna.
Life Without Children : Stories, by Roddy Doyle ( hardback October 2021)
£14.99
A brilliantly warm, witty and moving portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heart-rending short stories. Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief.Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone. In these ten, beautifully moving short stories mostly written over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times.
A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret.
Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness, and the shifting of history underneath our feet.
April in Spain, John Banville ( hardback October 2021)
£14.99
The sumptuous, propulsive, sun-kissed follow up to the bestselling Snow, from the Booker Prize winning author' He wanted to know who she was, and why he was convinced he had some unremembered connection with her. It was as simple as that. But he knew it wasn't. It wasn't simple at all.'
When Dublin pathologist Quirke glimpses a familiar face while on holiday with his wife, it's hard, at first, to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him. Could she really be who he thinks she is, and have a connection with a crime that nearly brought ruin to an Irish political dynasty? Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home and Detective St John Strafford is soon dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one on route: as a terrifying hitman hunts down his prey, they are all set for a brutal showdown.
Praise for Snow: 'Superb ... crime fiction for the connoisseur.' The Times
Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnett ( hardback, October 2021)
£14.99
"I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger." London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks.But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character. In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents these notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite.
The result is a dazzling - and often wickedly humorous - meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.
Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen (hardback, October 2021)
£20.00
'His best novel yet ... A Middlemarch-like triumph' Telegraph '
It is a testament to Franzen's authorial habits of empathy, his curiosity about the lives of others, his efforts in a land of cliche to add twists to easy assumptions, that you are likely to find yourself caring about how things turn out for each of the Hildebrandts equally' Observer
It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless - unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it.
Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh-graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and their keen-eyed take on the complexities of contemporary America. Now, for the first time, in Crossroads, Franzen explores the history of a generation. With characteristic humour and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that feels no less immediate.
Manifesto, Bernardine Evaristo ( Hardback, October 2021)
£14.99
The powerful, urgent manifesto on never giving up from Booker prize-winning trailblazer, Bernardine Evaristo. In 2019, Bernardine Evaristo became the first black woman to win the Booker Prize since its inception fifty years earlier - a revolutionary landmark for Britain. Her journey was a long one, but she made it, and she made history. Manifesto is her intimate and fearless account of how she did it.From a childhood steeped in racism from neighbours, priests and even some white members of her own family, to discovering the arts through her local youth theatre; from stuffing her belongings into bin bags, always on the move between temporary homes, to exploring many romantic partners both toxic and loving, male and female, and eventually finding her soulmate; from setting up Britain's first theatre company for Black women in the eighties to growing into the trailblazing writer, theatre-maker, teacher, mentor and activist we see today - Bernardine charts her rebellion against the mainstream and her life-long commitment to community and creativity. And, through the prism of her extraordinary experiences, she offers vital insights into the nature of race, class, feminism, sexuality and ageing in modern Britain. Bernardine Evaristo's life story is a manifesto for courage, integrity, optimism, resourcefulness and tenacity.
Bernardine Evaristo is one of Britain's best writers, an iconic and unique voice, filled with warmth, subtlety and humanity.
The Power of Geography : Ten Maps That Reveals the Future of Our World, Tim Marshall ( paperback October 2021)
£9.99
Tim Marshall's global bestseller Prisoners of Geography showed how every nation's choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Since then, the geography hasn't changed. But the world has.In this revelatory new book, Marshall explores ten regions that are set to shape global politics in a new age of great-power rivalry: Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Greece, Turkey, the Sahel, Ethiopia, Spain and Space. Find out why Europe's next refugee crisis is closer than it thinks as trouble brews in the Sahel; why the Middle East must look beyond oil and sand to secure its future; why the eastern Mediterranean is one of the most volatile flashpoints of the twenty-first century; and why the Earth's atmosphere is set to become the world's next battleground. Delivered with Marshall's trademark wit and insight, this is a lucid and gripping exploration of the power of geography to shape humanity's past, present - and future.
Once Upon a Tune : Stories from the Orchestra, James Mayhew (hardback sept 2021)
£16.99
Once Upon a Tune brings you six wonderful stories from many lands, all of which inspired great music. You can battle trolls with Peer Gynt if you go In The Hall of the Mountain King; grapple with a magic broom in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, meet the evil Witch of the North in The Swan of Tuonela, sail the seven seas with Sinbad the Sailor in Scheherazade; be a prince disguised as a bee in The Flight of the Bumblebee and become a fearless hero in William Tell. The stories are excitingly told and stunningly illustrated by James Mayhew, who is famous for bringing live classical music, art and storytelling to families across the UK.There are also Musical Notes where you can find out more about the stories and music, plus James's recommended recordings to download and listen to.
The Great Dream Robbery : Greg James & Chris Smith (hardback Sept 2021)
£12.99
A brand-new adventure beyond your wildest dreams, from the bestselling authors of KID NORMAL. Unlike most 12 year-olds, Maya Clayton is desperate to go to bed early. Falling asleep is the only chance she has to save her dad - the brilliant but slightly odd Professor Dexter.The Professor invented a device that allows you to visit other people's dreams. But the devious Lilith Delamere has trapped him inside a nightmare and Maya and the mysterious Dream Bandits must find a way to rescue him before it's too late!Maya will face a dangerous journey and some difficult choices. But sometimes all you need is a dream .
. . and a bit of courage.
Featuring a hospital heist, some banana-loving llamas and a talking cat called Bin Bag, this is one mind-bending adventure you won't want to wake up from. If you feel you have just too many David Walliams books, this is a great next step ( and with lots of great vocabulary!) From the authors of the Kid Normal Series.
The Week at World's End, Emma Carroll ( Hardback, Sept 2021)
£12.99
The hotly anticipated new standalone from the bestselling and award-winning Queen of Historical Fiction, Emma Carroll.
Britain, 1962 'Who are you?' I asked. 'You don't know who I am? You mean, it's not been on the news?' The girl glanced from Ray to me and back again.
'It's better I don't tell you,' she said firmly. Nothing ever happens in World's End Close. So when Stevie discovers a runaway girl in her coal shed, the first thing she does is fetch her best friend, Ray.
Both are dying for a bit of adventure, and when the girl begs for help, they readily agree. Yet they soon realise they've taken on more than they bargained for. The girl, Anna, reveals she's on the run from people who are trying to poison her.
Meanwhile, on the news, the Americans and Russians are arguing over missiles in Cuba. As the threat of war grows, Anna's behaviour becomes more mysterious. And when Stevie unearths a dark family secret, she wonders if Anna has come to World's End Close on purpose, with a special message just for her .
A funny, engaging thriller set in the 1960's. Hilary Mantel for the 8-13 year olds!
Polly Pecorino, Emma Chichester Clark ( Hardback Sept 2021)
£10.99
Polly Pecorino: The Girl Who Rescues Animals
A captivating, illustrated young fiction novel about a kind girl and a lost bear cub, with a classic feel from the much-loved, award-winning author-illustrator. Are you brave enough to enter the Wild Bear Woods? Polly Pecorino rescues animals, and she can talk to them too. She spends all of her time caring for those at Happy Days Zoo, where the devious owners, Mr and Mrs Snell, will do anything to make money.
One day they steal a bear cub, certain that he will do wonders for ticket sales, but the ferocious bears living in Wild Bear Woods want their cub back. Will Polly be brave enough to stand up to the Snells and take Booboo, the bear cub, back where he belongs?"[G]o down to the woods for a gentle bear story... This divinely illustrated book begs to become a series...
Book Club
The BPS Book Club meets in the last week of every month. We have two sessions, each one covering the same book so just pick the session that suits you. There is no need to book, just show up. It's a relaxed and unintimidating sharing of views and opinions.
Please contact us if you have any questions about the book club.
BOOKS as GIFTS
Perhaps you have a relative or friend who loves reading but you have no idea what to choose, or you just don't see them enough? We will make recommendations based on a few hints! We offer a monthly subscription gift service where the book(s) are chosen and dispatched by Books Paper Scissors with a gift message from the giver.
The recipient will receive an introductory letter allowing them to select genres and identify favourites - we do the rest!
For children or adults.
Hardback Subscription £20
Paperback Subscription £11
Please enquire if you would like more details.
Our Book Store
15 Stranmillis Rd, Belfast BT9 5AF
Phone: 028 9066 7815
Monday - Saturday- 10.00 - 17:00
