Stock my bookshop

I've got to order 5,000 different titles. Help!

Jul 03, 2022

My pick of July’s new releases

Order now from Backstory. They’ll be delivered on, or soon after, publication day:

Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews (21st Jul, 256pp, £16.99). Billed as a lush and intimate love story from the award-winning author of Saltwater. A girl grows up in north-east England amid scarcity, precarity and a toxic culture of bodily shame, certain that she must make herself ever smaller to be loved. Years later, living in tiny rented rooms and working in noisy bars across London and Paris, she fights to create her own life.
She meets someone who cracks her open and offers her a new way to experience the world. But when he invites her to join him in Barcelona, the promise of pleasure and care makes her uneasy. In the shimmering heat of the Mediterranean, she faces the possibility of a different existence, and must choose what to hold on to from her past.
The Bewitching by Jill Dawson (7th Jul, 320pp, £20). A shocking novel that speaks to our times, drawing on the 16th-century case of the witches of Warboys. Alice Samuel might be old and sharp-tongued, but she's no fool. Visiting her new neighbours in her Fenland village, she suspects Squire Throckmorton's household is not as God-fearing as it seems and finds the children troubled. Yet when one of the daughters accuses her of witchcraft, Alice has no inkling of how quickly matters will escalate and fails to grasp the danger she is in.
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe (7th Jul, 368pp, £20). Radden Keefe is one of my favourite non-fiction writers… Say Nothing, about murder and memory in Northern Ireland, and Empire of Pain, on the Sackler family and the opioid epidemic, are among the best books of recent years. This collection brings together 12 of his shorter true stories of skulduggery and intrigue.
New in paperback:
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (7th Jul, 592pp, £9.99). In 1954, 18-year-old Emmett returns home to his younger brother, Billy, after serving 15 months in a juvenile facility for involuntary manslaughter. They are getting ready to leave their old life behind and head out to sunny California.
But they're not alone. Two runaways from the youth work farm, Duchess and Wolly, have followed Emmett all the way to Nebraska with a plan of their own, one that will take the four of them on an unexpected and fateful journey in the opposite direction - to New York City.
Godspeed by Nickolas Butler (7th Jul, 352pp, £8.99). One of my favourite authors has turned his hand to a thriller. Here’s the blurb: Bart, Teddy and Cole have been best friends since childhood. Having founded their own small-town construction company, they yearn to build a legacy, something to leave behind to their families. So when Gretchen Connors, a mysterious millionaire lawyer from California, approaches them with a stunning, almost formidable project in the mountains above their town, the three friends convince themselves it's the job which will secure their future. But what is Gretchen hiding from them? And why does the build have to be complete by Christmas, a near-impossible deadline? With the lines between ambition and greed more slippery and dangerous than the three friends ever imagined, how far will they push themselves and what will be the cost of their dream?
A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel to the Car to What Comes Next by Tom Standage (21st Jul, 272pp, £9.99). Our society has been shaped by the car in innumerable ways, many of which are so familiar that we no longer notice them. Why does red mean stop and green mean go? Why do some countries drive on the left, and some on the right? How did cars, introduced only a little over a century ago, change the way the world was administered, laid out and policed, along with experiences like eating and shopping? And what might travel in a post-car world look like? Beginning around 3,500BC with the wheel, and moving through the eras of horsepower, trains and bicycles, Tom Standage puts the rise of the car - and the future of urban transport - into a broader historical context.

I realise I haven’t written anything about permanent premises for a while now. That’s not because I haven’t been looking, or that I’ve had a traumatic falling-out with my commercial-property equivalent of Phil-and-Kirstie. Not for the first time, blame the lawyers.

I’ve found somewhere in Balham that would be great, but i’s are being dotted and t’s crossed, by three sets of solicitors. Which, as you can imagine, takes time. So I’m hoping to have some exciting news to share with you in the next two or three weeks.

Balham beware: Mum manning the pop-up yesterday

In the meantime, though, I’m beginning to think what my dream shop would look like. And the first thing a good bookshop should have, I’ve decided, is books. Lots and lots of books. At least 5,000 of them, in fact.

Another newbie bookseller I visited a few weeks ago advised me to start early on compiling these mammoth orders. He had waited until close to opening and pulled together the list over several late-night sessions with his colleagues. Fun, but frantic. As I’m discovering, your eyes rather glaze over after p142 of the Penguin September presentation, no matter how gripping the books.

***I’m starting a Backstory non-fiction book group in August. We’ll read a book a month, then join the author for a Zoom Q&A. Sign up here for more information***

I’ve got a few hundred or so books I absolutely love that I am determined will be on my shelves. Then there are are probably another 1,000 that “all good bookshops” must stock. And a rotating cast of, say, 500 new releases that look fascinating or feature snogging gay teenagers or Japanese cats (apparently?!) and will therefore fly off the shelves.

But that still leaves 3,000 or so spots on the list. Which books deserve their place? I thought I’d do what has always worked well so far: ask your advice. I’ve created another of my nifty little Google forms and I’d love you to, well, stock my bookshop.

I’d like to hear of any books that you absolutely loved reading. It could be last week, last year, or 20 years ago. (Ideally they’re still in print, but don’t worry too much about that!) Pretty much any genre goes, too: I’ll be stocking children’s and YA as well as non-fiction (lots of current affairs, politics, business & economics and history, of course, but also biography, culture, sport, travel) and great novels.

If you have time to write a one-minute review (what’s the book about and why did you love it?) that would be great, too. I’ll choose a few of the best for a “customer recommendations” section, with your first names so you can proudly point them out to friends and families. I’d love recommendations from your children, too, if they have favourites.

You can recommend one book, or three, or 30. Whatever you like. Graphic novels or crime or poetry or romance or literary fiction in translation or biographies of obscure economists. So long as you loved the book, and would recommend it to someone else, anything goes.

Here’s the link again. I can’t wait to see what you pick.

Thanks so much,

Tom :)