A BONUS MIDWEEK newsletter. I can hear the exclamations of delight! I promise I won’t make a habit of it.
But Rory and I are getting ready to post out the very first book for our new fiction book club and I wanted to give you one last chance to join from the start.
One of my favourite things about this job is how a bunch of smart, interesting people can all read the same book and have totally different reactions to it. That’s the joy of any book group, of course. The added thrill of ours is that you get to share those reactions with the author. And to probe her about the writing process, the most intriguing bits of the book…anything at all really.
As some of you know, I’ve been running a non-fiction club since October. We’ve been so lucky to have some of the world’s best writers of true stories join our little gang, from Patrick Radden Keefe and Sathnam Sanghera to Lea Ypi and Barbara Demick. We’ve got Katherine Rundell and Tim Marshall coming up! (More info on the non-fiction club here.)
And now we’re going to do the same thing for fiction. The calibre of writers who will be sharing their time and their stories with us is astonishing. Oddly enough, having the meetings on Zoom makes them more rather than less intimate: you feel like you’ve been invited into the author’s study (their bookcase is often the backdrop!), sometimes with their dog shambling into shot.
We do 20 minutes of breakout groups so you get to discuss the book with other members, then it’s a quick interview by one of the Backstory team followed by plenty of time to ask the author your questions directly. And of course it means you can join the club from anywhere in the world.
We’re kicking off with Caleb Azumah Nelson’s breathtaking debut Open Water. We’re sending out the book this week, then meeting with Caleb on Zoom on Tuesday 18th July at 8pm. The full line-up so far is here.
Join us? It’s £15 a month, which includes the cost of each book. (Or you can join a one-off session for £22.50.) You can have the book posted to you, anywhere in the world, or pick it up from our shop.
Anyway, back to wrapping up the books! Click on the button below for more info or to sign up.
I hope to see some of you there,
Tom