My favourites this week
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Sun, sex, hedonism and revenge: The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne. A British couple run over a local boy on their way to a house party in Morocco. As the champagne flows, the cost of their actions begins to weigh them down. Clever but pacey; ideal for the beach.
Put the world to rights: The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World by Gideon Rachman. An engaging new read from the FT’s chief foreign-affairs columnist, who notes the similar techniques of populist leaders in autocracies and democracies, from China to America. Boris Johnson has a (controversial) cameo.
What a mermaid has to say about colonialism: The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey. This divided opinion at my old book club. I really liked it, though, for its rich language and unhappy portrait of an island under the long shadow of colonialism. I’d love to know what you make of it.
I love a good lanyard. At The Economist, I shared an office with a reporter whose impressive collection of conference passes dangled from his bookshelves. I began sticking mine up on a pinboard in emulation/competition, but quickly realised I could never compete. Even spending four months going to nearly every trade show at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) wasn’t enough to out-lanyard John Peet.
This week brought a very exciting addition to the collection: my first-ever London Book Fair pass. Every year (though not for the last two, of course), publishers, agents, scouts, authors, booksellers, hacks and hawkers of all stripes descend on the Olympia conference centre to shoot the breeze.
And my, was there a lot of breeze to be shot. With perhaps one meeting space between every five delegates, we all seemed to be playing a giant and ever so literary game of musical chairs: no seat went unoccupied for more than about five seconds. Everyone was yabbering (sorry, conducting vital client meetings) all the time. The Penguin stand was rammed so full of tables that each was given an identifying number on a little pole, as if the bigwigs were waiting for Robert Harris to bring them a cheese toastie.
Of course, I was meant to be meeting people and figuring out how to run a bookshop. And I did do a fair amount of that. But I couldn’t stop journalism auto-pilot kicking in occasionally and ended up with pages of random observations in my notebook. Here are a few things I scribbled down, in no particular order:
Two publishers gossiping. One to the other: “I have my human face on for the next two days”;
Lost expressions. Most of the time. They can print anything, apparently, apart from a map to book fair;
A sales type at the urinal in the gents, talking into his phone propped on his shoulder;
One man to another, with an insidery air: “Oh yes, it was European Urban Bookshop of the Year”;
Amazon sponsored the café. The most un-Amazon business imaginable: overpriced (£2.40 for a bottle of water) and inefficient;
A book called “French Cock”. Presumably a detailed investigation into battery farming;
A pin-striped father handing a business card to his son of perhaps eight or nine: “Does that say Karen?”
Best of all, though, were the presentations on Wednesday, when the big publishers got 20 minutes each to pitch their forthcoming books to a bunch of booksellers. Think of it like Dragons’ Den, if all the dragons were impossibly nice and apologised for haggling.
It was an impressively slick operation. Each publisher had their own take on the format. The duo from Macmillan pitched one book at a time, quickfire, before passing the mic to their colleague. Simon & Schuster coped admirably with the last slot of the day, still bringing the zing after five hours of pitches. My heart sank when four people trooped up on stage from Team HarperCollins, replete with props. Traumatic memories of junior-school assemblies resurfaced. But that, too, was high-energy, and they wisely refrained from leading a chorus of Kumbaya.
So, to end the newsletter this week, here are the books from the publisher pitches that I’m personally most excited to read, in ascending order. You can pre-order any of them from Backstory now:
6. A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, 1945-2020. Like any le Carré buff, this will be on my Christmas list.
5. Saha by Cho Nam-Joo, the bestselling author of Kim Jiyoung, born 1982. I got into Korean fiction during a brief posting to Seoul. This novel is being pitched as “Parasite meets 1984”. What more do you want?
4. A Pocketful of Happiness by Richard E Grant. “An immensely personal and profound memoir” from Grant, whose wife, Joan, died last year after nearly 40 years together. No doubt it will be as warm as the man himself. (Check out Write Around the World if you haven’t already. So lovely.)
3. Cormac McCarthy returns with two new novels, a decade in the making: The Passenger in October, and Stella Maris in November. Very exciting.
2. Malorie Blackman’s autobiography. Yes, the Malorie Blackman we all read as kids. The book will follow her from childhood in south London, the daughter of Windrush-era immigrants from Barbados, through the 83 rejection letters she received for her first project, to becoming children’s laureate.
1. What Just Happened?! Dispatches from Turbulent Times by Marina Hyde. Funnier than a comedian, more incisive than a political editor, Hyde is one of my favourite columnists. Based on her Guardian output, this book promises to “tell the story of the hellscape of the Cameron, May and Johnson eras, Trumpian wtf-ery to celebrity twattery, the royal soap-opera and the series finale of the United Kingdom”. I can’t wait.