Event announcement
Summer is finally here and what better time to look at the remarkable rise and rise of the English wine scene. Henry Jeffreys will take us through the quirky characters behind what is now a multi-million-pound industry with quality to rival Champagne.
Upcoming events
Backstory summer sessions — the return of our popular music nights at the bookshop. Book your £5 ticket now to secure your spot:
Poetry open mic night — this Thursday, sign up at 6.30pm
We'll have a mic set up in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere for anyone to come and share their poetry or prose. Open mic-ers will sign up at the door and, once called up, will have five minutes (though no need to fill that all up!). It’s a great environment to share your work, whether you're a pro open mic-er or a first-timer. No tickets, just turn up
REFUGEE TALES in aid of Wandsworth Welcomes Refugees — 19th June, 7.30pm — SOLD OUT
CONOR NILAND, The Racket — 26th June, 7.30pm
The week before Wimbledon kicks off, ex tennis pro Conor Niland is coming to Backstory to talk to us about his new book The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation - and the other 99%. I love the idea of a book all about the almost-famous, the players who are brilliant but not quite brilliant enough, who roam the globe in the tours but can only ever dream of just about squeaking into the first round or two of a Grand Slam.
ALICE WINN introduces YAEL VAN DER WOUDEN, The Safekeep — 28th June, 7.30pm
One of Backstory's favourite authors introduces a new favourite, Yael van der Wouden. Her debut novel, The Safekeep, is set in the conservative Dutch countryside in the early 1960s. A young woman still tends the family home — keeping rigorous inventories of all its contents — years after her mother has died and her siblings have moved out. She is left to keep standards, and her own company. Until, that is, one of her brothers is called away on business and he imposes his new girlfriend on the house. And so the stage is set for a beguiling, claustrophobic and very fresh summer read. Trust us, you’ll be wanting to talk about it when you put it down.
Fiction book club on Zoom, 18th June: Katherine Heiny, Games and Rituals
Non-fiction book club on Zoom, 25th June: Cara McGoogan, The Poison Line
Your summer reads
Download our 16-page guide, packed with suggestions for summer reading from literary fiction and thrillers to non-fiction and kids books
Calling readers in New York
If you’re a newsletter reader based in New York, we’d love to invite you to a little party we’re hosting in a couple of weeks to celebrate the US launch of our magazine. Just hit reply to this email.
***
AT BACKSTORY, WE TALK a lot about BOTMs and because I have a puerile sense of humour this usually makes me giggle. As I’ve written before, the whole team puts a lot of thought and energy into deciding which new release should be our Book Of The Month, which we should champion in the hope that it will delight as many readers as possible.
Sometimes our book of the month will capture the zeitgeist, sometimes it determinedly flies against it. But there is a different kind of BOTM which is much harder to schedule, a beast that is impossible to tame but can prove a wild ride… a Book Of The Moment.
Almost two years into running a bookshop, I think I’ve spotted my first true Book Of The Moment in the wild. Of course, I’ve already seen my share of buzzy books. There was a moment the Christmas before last when I thought illiteracy rates would decline quicker than demand for Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Since then, we’ve seen boomlets for Really Good, Actually, David Nicholls’s latest novel (the lovely You Are Here) and even, improbably, Rory Stewart’s book about Parliament.
But nothing has felt remotely like the emergence of Butter — a novel about a cook-turned-killer by the Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton — as a Book Of The Moment. For the last couple of months, it has seemed to the six of us at Backstory that we have done little else but unpack boxes of the book and then try to put them on the shelves quicker than they are being torn down by eager customers. It’s a lot of Butter churning.
And the data confirm that this phenomenon is different. Butter was only published in the UK on the last day of February, but it has already joined Backstory’s hallowed Hundred Club: the (currently 62) titles of which we’ve sold 100 or more copies in the 20 months since we opened our doors.
At this time of the year, a strong-selling paperback might shift 10 or so copies a week, especially if we put it on one of our tables or face-out on a bookcase at the front of the shop. Butter sold that in a day last Sunday, and 30 copies that week. This week it is on course to top that number. It even came close to dislodging our number-one seller: the latest issue of Backstory magazine.
What’s going on? Well, it’s clearly got that extremely hard-to-predict buzz factor. As I sold a copy yesterday, a customer told me “everyone is reading it on the tube”. Denise tells me buyers typically tell her they’ve seen it “all over TikTok”, asking her if it’s any good (she hasn’t read it), before buying it anyway.
I haven’t read it either, so I can’t judge it from a literary standpoint, though I was impressed/surprised to find it amid a long list of worthy books The Times was recommending the new prime minister read. “Try Butter for distraction,” wrote their columnist Alice Thomson. “The Japanese bestseller about a cook turned killer is beautifully written and as far from British political life as possible.” For a more conventional review, here’s the Guardian’s verdict.
From a commercial standpoint, it has three factors solidly in its favour. First, it is Japanese. There’s a huge interest in the country (and Korea) at the moment (another of our current bestsellers is Chris Broad’s Abroad in Japan), and Japanese fiction in translation does especially well. Deduct marks, however, for no cat on the cover. Second, quirky crime is big. See Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister The Serial Killer or Bella Mackie’s How To Kill Your Family.
The third — and oddest — factor is the colour of its cover. Do you notice anything that unites several of our five bestselling books?
Yellow (and orange) is everywhere in book world right now. And Butter is certainly easy to spot: if a customer has heard a friend vaguely recommend it, they are likely to clock it within the first few seconds walking into our shop. I mentioned this to a big fish in publishing the other day, who told me an old truism about book covers: “yellow sell-o”. (Note to authors: if your publisher offers you a yellow cover, go with it.)
I messaged Polly Barton, Butter’s translator, to see if she could shed light on The Book. “Nothing even remotely like this has happened to me before, and it’s kind of wild to see,” she messaged back.
After calling it a “rollicking yarn, with very vivid central characters”, she pointed to another factor that she hopes is at play.
“Personally I’d like to think that there’s something else going on with the success of this book, too, which relates particularly to its treatment of issues around body image and fatphobia. It’s my sense that progressively minded people in the West are often so keen to present an open-minded attitude to things that we can sometimes rush to adopt the take we know to be the right one without actually working through it for ourselves.
“I feel like there’s something about the candidness of the discussion of these topics in the book, particularly fractured through the slightly new lens (for many readers) of the Japanese context, that is quite cathartic and instructive for people, and somehow gives them the permission to delve into their own experiences around eating.
“But that’s just me: another thing I've found about this book is that it’s pretty kaleidoscopic, and everyone comes away from it with a different takeaway, a different impression. Which is, in itself, quite a lovely thing I think.”
This last bit, especially, resonates. There are all kinds of hypotheses for why certain books do well and others flop. But our individual reasons for picking out or passing over a given book are many. I ignored the buzz around Butter for the first couple of months (like a lot of booksellers, I’m sometimes unhelpfully allergic to hype), but the tipping point came when yet another damaged copy arrived from the publishers, HarperCollins. Rather than recycling it, I added it to my TBR.
It’s next on my list. With Polly Barton at the helm, I’m sure I won’t conclude I can’t believe it’s not better.
Tom