Staff Profile – Harriet L
22 October 2025
Get to know Harriet L, our assistant manager
Harriet L is our assistant manager and has worked at the shop now for 3 years. She is a huge lover of classics, spy thrillers and anything Irish. Her three picks for desert island reads are; A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, and A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
The first of my desert island picks is the ever wonderful A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. I don’t think I can fully explain quite how much I love this novel. It’s a beautiful, funny comedy of manners and Forster’s writing is gorgeous, emotive, and no matter how many times I read it, I find something new and brilliant every single time. The scene of Lucy’s ‘Good Man’ in the violets is a strong contestant for my favourite scene in any book. It’s just perfection and I could read it over and over again.
My second desert island pick is another old favourite. Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle is a brilliant coming of age novel and I fell in love with Cassandra and her madcap family when I first read the novel at fourteen and have loved this book ever since. Told through Cassandra’s diaries, I Capture the Castle is a story of first love and the confusion and chaos of growing up. It also features one of my favourite opening lines of any book: ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.’
For my final desert island pick I realised that, if I were to be marooned on a desert island, I would have to have something by Dickens. The question of which Dickens I would bring has proved very difficult, but I have settled on A Christmas Carol. Dickens’ classic Christmas story of Scrooge and the Ghosts is a favourite in my family and is a key part of our Christmas tradition: every year the long journey down to visit my Grandparents always includes listening to the audiobook and to this day I can quote large chunks of the text from heart. Again, this is a book with a truly brilliant opening sentence (‘Marley was dead: to begin with.’) and the brilliance only goes on from there. I cannot count how many times I have read or listened to it and yet I never get bored of it – every time it is new and wonderful.