Our picks this week
Order these books, and hundreds more, from Backstory:
Brace, brace: The Seaplane on Final Approach by Rebecca Rukeyser. If Sally Rooney’s characters went to Alaska and actually did something interesting with all their yearning, they might end up in the wilderness lodge in this sharply humorous debut novel, where the wholesome facades of the young staff crack to reveal a dark pursuit of sleaze and vengeance. - Tara
Campus power play: Vladimir by Julia May Jonas. Previously indifferent to her husband’s affairs, a female academic contends with a string of accusations against her husband by his young students in this taut novel. When Vladimir - an accomplished professor 15 years her junior - arrives at her department, she becomes fixated. He reawakens her writing ambitions, and becomes the object of her desire - with unexpected, disturbing consequences. - Dani
Let’s do the time warp again: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. Woven together with Mandel's signature time-hopping touch, this novel maps a strange phenomenon over time. First, a young man hears the sound of a violin in a forest in 1912. Then, much later, a detective in the Night City in the 2400s investigates the phenomenon across several points in time. A spell-binding tapestry that will have you hanging on every word. - Rory
Buying a present for my Mum is always a nightmare. Most sons would say the same thing, I know, but most sons don’t have a Mum who used to run her own gift shop. So the question in my case is not so much what do you buy the woman who has everything as what do you buy the woman who has seen everything, picked out the best and already rejected the rest? A box of posh soap just won’t cut it.
So, like any good millennial, I tend to favour experiences instead. We still talk about that lovely lunch at the Ritz, my late stepdad in his element. Or the holiday for, ahem, a significant birthday, when at almost every stop we really were ambushed by cake.
So it was that, in a great panic a few birthdays back, I discovered book subscriptions. I knew Mum would enjoy unwrapping the monthly delivery from Heywood Hill, the beautiful Mayfair bookshop, almost as much as she would reading the books themselves. More recently, Jenny, my oldest sister, gave me a subscription from Cogito in Northumberland, which had the added benefit of reminding me of home every time the parcel arrived. I loved opening the package each month and expanding my horizons with books I might not always have picked out myself.
It was a no-brainer, then, to set up the Backstory book subscription. And thank goodness I did: I’m lucky enough to have subscribers in Connecticut and California, Denmark and Durham.
It’s been the most fun bit of the job so far. I spend a day each month rummaging through the bookshelves, auditioning books for different customers until I find something I think might make them smile or laugh or put away all other distractions for a five-hour marathon read.
Some shops send the same book to every subscriber. And that makes a lot of sense. Partly because you can negotiate much better margins with a publisher if you’re buying lots of copies, but also because if you really, really love a particular book, why not share it with everyone?
For me, though, the joy is in the particular. Of course, like any committed evangelist, I will send some of my absolute favourites to several subscribers. They are simply too good to miss. But for the most part I enjoy pondering whether I dare push Mrs X to read Y. Or, even better, stumbling across a title in a publisher’s catalogue of upcoming releases that I just know so-and-so is going to lap up.
I let subscribers choose between receiving total surprises each month or filling in a brief form about themselves and their reading habits to guide my choices. So far, the split has been about 50/50. The forms are revealing, allowing me to put together a (probably misguided) mental image of the recipient as I am perusing the bookshelves. The “total surprises” lot is a different challenge: I gave her something quite heavy last month; would she like something else stodgy or a palate-cleansing novel?
I mention this now because I happened to visit a friend the other night as they picked up their Backstory subscription parcel from the doormat. (I promise that not all subscribers are my friends!) It was the first time I’d seen a subscriber unwrap their book in front of me, like at Christmas, and I was a little nervous. But his face lit up as he saw it was A Line in the Sand, James Barr’s account of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (and beyond) that carved up the Middle East. (I was relieved, too, to see lots of old maps on my friend’s wall.) A success for the literary matchmaker!
I also mention this now because father’s day is coming up… And, dare I say it, I think a Backstory subscription could make an excellent present. Since you ask, we do them in 3, 6 and 12 month blocs; fiction, non-fiction or a mix of both. I’ll even throw in a father’s day card that you can send to him with all the details. And I can’t say fairer than that. (I think the market stall is rubbing off on me.)
The only trouble is, I probably can’t get away with giving one of them to my Dad. Drat. Now, when I said that Mum was difficult to buy for…
Tom
In the papers
We read them, so you…no, actually do read them! We love newspapers! You can buy these books from Backstory
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi. “More literary than most romance novels,” is the FT’s verdict. “Emezi has a poet’s facility for striking imagery in their descriptions of the paradisiacal island, which are full of sensory detail. And simple lines of text are charged with emotion.”
How to Stage a Coup, and Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft by Rory Cormac. The Times finds this account of the tricks of modern warfare “rich in anecdote and detail”. Cormac, the reviewer argues, “is an engaged teacher, the kind of lecturer who holds his students’ attention with illustrative stories of derring-do and dirty tricks.”
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley. The Economist reckons this “searing depiction of sexual exploitation and…gripping account of a struggle for survival” is “an accomplished first novel with a remarkable heroine whom the reader wills on every step of the way.”
Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris. “Sedaris recounts his lockdown experience with his customary blend of wry self-deprecation and affable misanthropy,” says The Guardian.
The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars by Frances Spalding. In this “enjoyable book”, The Spectator says Spalding “comes into her own… when discussing the lives and work of individuals, offering eloquent and elegant summaries of the aims and achievements of Matthew Smith, Cedric Morris, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood and Paul Nash. She is particularly good on the peripatetic watercolourist and rebel Frances Hodgkins, a marvellous New Zealand painter whose work we don’t see enough of in this country.”