Today’s Compass Points is an EU referendum-free
zone, but personally, I think the Jaffé & Neale bookshop in Chipping
Norton has got the right idea.
Simon Armitage will be reading poems from his beautiful hardback Still: A Poetic Response to Photographs of the Somme
Battlefield (£25.00, hb, 978-1911253136) this Sunday at 4:30pm on BBC
Radio 4. This sequence of poems is in response to 26 panoramic photographs
of Somme battlefields chosen from archives at the Imperial War Museum. The
Somme Offensive took place on the Western Front between July and November 1916,
and is considered to be one of the bloodiest in British military history. Simon Armitage has written thirty poems of between
two and 20 lines that are paired with black-and-white images that are a hundred
years old. The contemporary words meld with the visual devastations of
war to haunting effect. Map-like images of cratered fields and
hieroglyphic trench patterns; landscapes of sepia-toned towns and ghostly
villages; panoramas of apparently tranquil meadows and country lanes that
disguise more macabre details form an atmospheric backdrop to these moving
poems. Still is a 74-page large scale
landscape publication with introductory texts, contemporary maps, fold-outs and
decorated endpapers. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name that
opened at East Gallery in Norwich on 10 May, which is the first venue in a
national tour. Still is published by Enitharmon
in July – and you can listen to that Radio Four reading via a link to
the programme, which is entitled The Echo Chamber here – I would very much
recommend it.
Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story by Matti Friedman (hb,
£12.99, 978 1785900433) published by Biteback, received a tremendous
review in Prospect, this week, with Ben Judah proclaiming that it “will
be remembered as a classic.” Part memoir, part reportage and part haunting
elegy for lost youth, award-winning writer Matti
Friedman's powerful account follows the author and a band of young
soldiers in an unnamed war in in Lebanon in the late 1990s.Pumpkinflowers is a lyrical yet devastating
insight into the day-to-day realities of war, and a powerful coming-of-age
narrative. Raw and beautifully rendered, this essential chronicle casts an
unflinching look at the nature of modern warfare, in which there is never a
clear victor and innocence is not all that is lost. Prospect magazine
said “Pumpkinflowers is a sad, lyrical book – proud and fierce on its own
terms. Friedman’s prose is elegant and concise, yet it is studded with gems
from the Talmud and Torah that only a writer deeply learned in the Jewish
tradition could offer. His memoirs of his time in the mist and the mountains of
Lebanon are full of haunting insights into what it means to be a soldier. It
will be remembered as a classic.” You can read the full review here.
There was also a great review (which you can read here)
for Crossing the Sea: With Syrians on the Exodus to
Europe (hb, £15.00, 978 1908276827) by respected migration
journalist Daniel Trilling in the Times Literary Supplement. He says the
book “exemplifies the best qualities of immersive journalism . . . Bauer’s
brave investigation tells us an important truth about the refugee experience.”
Award-winning journalist Wolfgang Bauer and photographer Stanislav
Krupar were the first undercover
reporters to document the journey of Syrian refugees from Egypt to Europe.
Posing as English teachers in 2014, they were direct witnesses to the brutality
of smuggler gangs, the processes of detainment and deportation, the dangers of
sea-crossing on rickety boats, and the final furtive journey through Europe.
Combining their own travels with other eyewitness accounts in the first book of
reportage of its kind; Crossing the Sea brings to life both the systemic problems and the
individual faces behind the crisis, and is a passionate appeal for more
humanitarian refugee policies. It’s published by And Other Stories and
is out now.
Are you tired and forgetful all the time? We’ve all
experienced that foggy feeling – where you suddenly lose track of your train of
thought or struggle to find the right word. But while you might shrug it off as
a sign of ageing, for many of us, Dr Mike Dow believes these are symptoms of a “new epidemic”.
This sense of being “in a slump, a bit detached and disengaged from life” is
caused by “the way we eat, sleep, work and live”. The Brain Fog Fix: Reclaim Your Focus, Memory and Joy in Just
3 Weeks (£12.99, pb, 978 1781805923)
is published by Hay House and has just had a huge extract and feature in
this week’s Mirror – you can read the full piece here.
This is really brilliant publicity for the book! The
Brain Fog Fix is an easy-to-follow three-week programme designed to
help naturally restore three of your brain's most crucial hormones, which Mike Dow believes
will enable the rest of your brain's chemistry to reach optimal levels to
improve your mood, increase your energy and enhance your spirit. I think we’d
all like a bit of that and Mike Dow promises that by the end of his simple programme,
you'll be thinking more clearly, remembering more accurately, learning more
quickly and unleashing the floodgates of your creativity. The Brian Fog Fix is
available now – as a result of the Mirror publicity it is zooming up the
charts on Amazon – don’t let them get all the sales!
Why on earth do we keep pets? Studies have shown that
people with pets have more mental health problems. They eat too much.
They spread disease. Every year thousands of people injure themselves tripping
over their cats and dogs. So why on earth do we keep pets and love them more
than our own children. In The Ups and Downs of being
a Pet Owner featuring around 120 brilliant cartoons drawn by Private
Eye’s brilliant Tony Husband, all is
explained. In these slightly surreal pages, you’ll discover dogs that look
exactly like their owners and tortoises that fetch frisbees! This is a cute and
light-hearted gift book by one of Britain’s leading cartoonists and it’s
published in September by Arcturus. You can order The Ups and Downs of being a Pet Owner (£7.99, hb, 978 1785997044) now.
And if a cat is your pet of choice, then you are bound to
enjoy this
from our chums at Buzzfeed – truths that only couples who live
with a cat will truly understand!
Whereas if you are a dog owner, then this
may be more your cup of tea – 12 thoughts your pooch has definitely had!
Are you missing out on sales because of "snobbery"?
The MD of publisher Choc Lit, Lyn Vernham believes this may well
be the case. She feels that many booksellers are "reluctant" to
stock and promote "high quality women's fiction and romance"
and this is playing into the hands of their online rivals. "Too many
booksellers are missing a trick," Vernham said. "A lot of
bookshops are very passionate about their product and what they sell – but they
sell what they read and they’re probably unlikely to read women’s fiction and
that content. Therefore, they’re probably reluctant to sell it. But at the end
of the day, they’re giving Amazon such a huge advantage, they’re making it so
easy for them because there’s no snobbery, they’ll just sell whatever they
want. For our readers, they’re not intimidated in any way [shopping online],
but when they go into a bookshop and look for a book that has a pretty pink
cover, they feel intimidated so they buy it online because they don’t feel
welcome in the stores."
Vernham added: “I think the industry as a
whole looks at the romance reader and thinks perhaps that they are a
stay-at-home mum, or very young, but the way that we choose our novels is
through our tasting panel and over the seven years [we've been operating] we’ve
managed to gain lots of information about who our readers are." Choc
Lit selects titles to publish through its ‘tasting panel’ which is made up
of readers. Speaking of the composition of Choc Lit's readers, Vernham
said: "It's fair to say a bookseller wouldn't sniff at such customers
walking through the door. As you would expect, most - but not all - of our
readers are women, but they are also in the main, professional and with money to
spend. Altogether 87% are aged between 26 and 64 - very much in keeping with
the profile of today's bookshop customers.” Vernham said: "The
issue that we have is that through the last seven years, our customers know
that they can’t get our books in bookshops, so they don’t go there. So we have
to work together to try and drive people into those bookshops, and that’s a bit
of work that we need to do as well as the bookshops. We need their support in
order to do that. I think that we – as an industry – need to make those
shops more welcoming, more diverse and able to offer more choice."
Altogether
18 of Choc Lit's books have generated just under £260,000 since the
first was published in 2009 according to Nielsen BookScan. The top three Choc
Lit best-selling titles are by Sue Moorcroft and are: Starting Over (978 1906931223, pb, £7.99), All That Mullarkey (978 1906931247, pb, £7.99) and
Love & Freedom (978 1906931667, pb, £7.99) Come on – if you don’t stock them
already, why not give them a whirl! You can read that story in full
here – and of course you can order all the Choc Lit titles from
Compass!
Books have generated many memorable quotations – as have
films of course. This
is fascinating – a look at some of the most memorable lines in films that
almost never happened!
That’s all for now folks! More
next week!
This blog is taken from a newsletter which is sent weekly to over 700 booksellers
as well as publishers and publicists. If you would like to order any of the
titles mentioned, then please talk to your Compass Sales Manager, or call the
office on 020 8326 5696.
