Get your event tickets
Backstory is all about going beyond the book, getting the story behind the story. We’d love to give you a warm Backstory welcome at one of our in-person events soon (I promise you: our wine is worth the northern line).
Wiz Wharton and Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Tuesday 23rd May, 7.30pm, Backstory
Wiz Wharton is the author of a debut novel exploring British-Chinese identity, opening in Brixton in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong. In conversation with Costa Prize-shortlisted author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, whose new novel The Sleep Watcher is about how our understanding of who our families are can shift suddenly and irrevocably.
Helen O’Hara - Women vs Hollywood
Wednesday 24th May, 7.30pm, Backstory
Empire magazine’s ‘Geek Queen’ Helen O’Hara joins us to discuss the histories, victories, and injustices of women in Hollywood. We're so excited to sit down with Helen - a class broadcaster (regular co-host on the Empire podcast), and fiercely eloquent writer. There's even a companion podcast to the book, which Rory recommends!
Philip Hensher - To Battersea Park
Wednesday 31st May, 7.30pm, Backstory
The Booker-shortlisted author joins us to discuss his latest novel, much of which takes place in the familiar surroundings of Clapham and Battersea, in the very unfamiliar days of the lockdown, and which then takes a turn for the surreal.
Jill Nalder - Love From the Pink Palace
Wednesday 7th June, 7.30pm, Backstory
Local resident and AIDS awareness campaigner, Jill Nalder, joins us to talk about her life during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which partly inspired Russell T Davies’s TV drama It’s A Sin.
Join the club(s)
Join our engaged reading community, wherever you are in the world.
Fiction book club (£15 a month or £22.50 for one-off; includes the book)
A book club with a twist - the author joins in, too. Members get the book four weeks in advance, then come together on Zoom. Like any other book club, we discuss what you made of the book with other members. Unlike other book clubs, the author then joins us for the final 40 mins: an interview by Backstory then your chance to ask them your questions directly.
Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water 18th July, 8pm, Zoom
Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch 15th August, 8pm, Zoom
Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea 12th September, 8pm, Zoom
Non-fiction book club (£15 a month or £22.50 for one-off; includes the book)
Same set-up as the fiction one above. Chaired by me, since non-fiction is my first love! We’ve had some amazingly high-calibre authors so far like Patrick Radden Keefe and Sathnam Sanghera. These sessions are so intimate; they feel like invitations to the author’s study. Do join us and give it a go.
Michael Pedersen, Boy Friends: A Memoir of Joy, Grief and Male Friendship 30th May, 8pm, Zoom
Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne 27th June, 8pm, Zoom
Edward Chisholm, A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City 25th July, 8pm, Zoom
Tim Marshall, The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World 31st August, 8pm, Zoom
This week’s bestseller
Megan and I were delighted to welcome local author - and also Mayor of London - Sadiq Khan yesterday. We’re thrilled he chose to pop into Backstory for his first bookshop visit ahead of the launch of his book next Thursday.
Part-memoir, part-manifesto for change, Breathe is about how Khan’s diagnosis of adult-onset asthma, shortly before he became mayor, has informed his attempts to clean up London’s air as part of efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
We have lots of signed copies, so please click on the link to reserve one or have one sent anywhere in the UK, with free delivery.
Team pick of the week
Denise recommends: Good Pop, Bad Pop by Jarvis Cocker (new in paperback)
Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker takes us on an irreverent (it was always going to be irreverent) journey through his loft. Yes, really, his loft.
The book is peppered with photographs of what he finds there from a can ring pull to a packet of chewing gum and his first attempts at lyrics. With it Jarvis tells his story but also the story of 20th century pop culture. There are some brilliant anecdotes, told with candour and great humour. As the blurb on the back of the book says, ‘this isn't a life story, it's a loft story’. - Denise
“EVERY PRIME MINISTER NEEDS A WILLIE”, Margaret Thatcher mirthlessly insisted, referring to her de facto deputy Willie Whitelaw. The apparent innocence with which this remark was delivered did little to dissuade a certain breed of Tory men from the notion they’d discovered a new erogenous zone somewhere to the west of the South Sandwich Islands.
I do not have a Willie. But I do have a Marta, and I’d recommend one to every bookshop owner.
Ever since university, I’ve relied on Marta, my friend and sometime tennis partner, to deliver a once-weekly kick up the arse on everything from career goals to dating. She is Polish and secretly delightful and as such gets away with far more frank assessments (“you’ve put on weight, Tom”) than I’d allow my biologically circumlocutious British-born friends.
So our walk in the park last weekend was - well, you guessed it - no walk in the park. I’d mentioned to Marta that I was planning a “not-away day” with Backstory’s crack top team, Rory and Denise. By the end of our half-hour saunter, this onetime management consultant who now works in private equity had me muttering about metrics and dreaming of dashboards. To her, it really was nothing; it was all pretty obvious stuff. To me, it was a revelation.
I think my previous aversion to this kind of stuff - what I suppose you could broadly call management speak and its associated techniques - is partly cultural. There’s a particularly British loathing of the idea of being so vulgar as to state your goals in any area of life, let alone to track them. And how preposterous to apply such ideas to a bookshop!
Fleet Street certainly didn’t help. You don’t have to be a cynic to work there, but you’ll become one within a fortnight or two. Whatever innocence and idealism I had as a 21-year-old trainee hack was pretty quickly pummelled out of me. HR was for bores; performance reviews were entirely for show; the real business of journalism couldn’t be measured by the suits. At the time, I relished this: I glamourised cynicism in much the same way I emulated the drinking and the occasional, um, “topspin” on the intro. It was all so grown up. Now, I’m not so sure.
Of course, it’s very early days for my newfound embrace of KPIs. I promise that we’re not going to start using algorithms to work out what books to stock or do anything that might detract from the soul of the place. (For what it’s worth, the long-term goal we decided on was to aim for Backstory to mature into London’s best bookshop, defined by how cherished it is by its customers and its team - even Karl Marx couldn’t have found much to quibble with there.)
But I have found having a clearer idea of what we should be doing and what perhaps we don’t need to worry so much about both focussing and strangely liberating. So thanks, Marta! And for our next chat… men?
Tom