This week, Team Compass have been at our sales conference, hearing about all the fabulous
books that our wonderful publishers are bringing out between September 2018 and
February 2019. We can’t wait to tell you more about them in the coming months –
there are some real crackers!
There have
been some lovely reviews for the Books of Tbilisi (978
1910974315), Riga
(978-1910974384) – and the newest in the series – Havana (978 1910974018). STORGY said: "The Book of Tbilisi deserves
every piece of praise it gets. It deals with raw emotion, real struggles, and
introduces characters who leap from the page and exist outside of the stories
they were created for." You can read the whole review here. Selcouth
Station said of The Book of Riga: "I think that the concept of this book, short stories rooted in
the same place, works so well because of the nature of short stories. I’ve been
shown glimpses of Riga through the lens of several characters and their
perspective creators. I went into reading this book with high expectations,
weary because of how that usually leads to disappointment. However, when I
finished the last pages of The Book of Riga I
breathed that familiar sigh of content, pleased." That’s here. Bookmunch called
it a "quirky and varied"
collection here.
The forthcoming Book of Havana was
including in Culture Trip's Book Editor's
11 Books You Really Should Be reading for
June; that's here and The
Independent Literary Fiction Blog, said: “It’s a collection that’s saturated with the sights and smells of
Havana, that will lead you through the backstreets to show you the reality of
the city in all its glory and squalor. It’s hard to imagine wanting anything
more from a collection of this type.” They are all published by Comma.
“When London first hosted the Olympics,
in 1948, alongside boxing and canoeing there was also competitive poetry. By
2012 there were no medals for literature, but a fringe event called Poetry
Parnassus invited poets from every Olympic nation to read in London. In a
spirit of woolly equality there were no prizes on offer, but if there were,
Austria’s representative – the brilliant Evelyn Schlag – might
well have won. This week Schlag finally got the medal she deserved, one of
three gongs awarded at the Hay Festival (the others went to Margaret Atwood and
Jackie Morris). Much acclaimed as a novelist and poet on the continent, if
Schlag is still little read in Britain then All Under One Roof (£12.99, pb, 978 1784102241), which is out on 28 June
from Carcanet deserves to change
that. Witty, tender, occasionally baffling, often sexy, it's a small gem to
look forward to.” This
was the start of a major article in the Telegraph,
who have featured All Under One Roof as
their Poetry
Book of the Month. Subscribers can read the full article here.
If you weren’t
at the Hay Festival – but wish you had been, then you could do a lot worse than
listen here
to the special Guardian Hay Podcast
and discover which novel knocked Midnight’s
Children out of the running for the Golden Booker, which is marking 50 years of
the UK’s top literary award. You can also hear poet Tishani Doshi gives an
impassioned response to the problem of violence against women in India and neurologist
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explains why we should take teenagers more seriously.
Darker With the Lights On by David Hayden (978 0995705296,
pb, £9.99) is now up for two awards – it’s longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story
Prize and shortlisted for the inaugural London
Magazine Collyer Bristow Prize for Debut Fiction. The Guardian said “Once in a blue
moon, a book comes along that really is like nothing you’ve ever read before.
The 20 stories in this debut collection from David Hayden
are strange, uncomfortable fables of memory, metamorphosis, time, disassociation
and death: hard to fathom, but impossible to ignore; twisty and riddling, yet
with a blunt impact that reverberates long after the final page.” It’s just
been published in paperback by Little
Island Press and as Eimear McBride said: “Why it's taken this long for his first collection to be published is beyond
me but I, along with anyone with even the vaguest interest in looking at
modernism anew, will be queuing up for a copy."
Following last
weekend’s offering in the Mail
on Sunday (which was in turn a focus of The
Andrew Marr Show’s paper review), part two of the serial for Geoffrey Robertson QC’s new book, Rather His Own Man: In Court with Tyrants, Tarts and
Troublemakers (£25, hb, 978 1785903977)
is due to run this weekend. Hailed as the “exception’
to the ‘rarely memorable’ world of legal memoirs”, according to Lord
Pannick QC who reviewed the book in The Times,
this is “a legal autobiography that
entertains, informs and inspires.” Linking in with the many columns in the
wake of the BBC’s A Very English Scandal,
Geoffrey wrote about his experiences defending the New Statesman in the aftermath of the Jeremy Thorpe case in The
Guardian. He is also due to be featured as the subject of next weekend’s News Review profile in the Sunday Times, alongside a review in the
books pages, and further reviews expected in the Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review and Law Society Gazette.
"My story is reaching readers who
then create their own experience of it. Each reader interprets and reacts
emotionally to characters and events in the book and no reading experience is
ever exactly the same"
says Tracey Warr whose superb Conquest series is published by Impress.
Daughter of the
Last King (978 1907605819, £8.99) and
The Drowned
Court (£8.99, 978 1911293088),
recount the story of a Welsh noblewoman caught up in the struggle between the
Welsh and the Normans in the 12th century and is a highly readable weave of researched
history and imagined stories.
Refugee Tales (£9.99, pb, 978-1910974230) was
featured on Clare Balding's Ramblings
programme on Radio 4 this week; she
was walking in Surrey with a group of asylum seekers who are former detainees
of the Gatwick Immigration Removal Centres. You can listen to the programme here.
It's Men’s Health Week 11-17 June, and there’s
lots of publicity linked to this for Dave Chawner’s witty and practical memoir Weight Expectations:
One Man’s Recovery from Anorexia (£9.99, pb, 978 1785923586). The Telegraph Men Channel has You Don't Look Anorexic – a written
feature from Dave on how anorexia is not always physically obvious, and how he
used his anorexia as a coping mechanism to combat his anxiety. The Independent is running an interview with
Dave about the book, his experience of anorexia and the misconceptions that
surround men and mental health/eating disorders. And the Sun will have an interview with Dave about his anorexia and
anxiety. It’s published by Jessica
Kingsley on 21 June.
A really
interesting piece here
by Anthony
Burgess, on LitHub where
he asks “If A Clockwork Orange Can
Corrupt, Why Not Shakespeare and the Bible?” It is taken from a new compilation
of unpublished and uncollected material which has just been published by Carcanet. The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism 1961-1993 (pb, £19.99, 978-1784103927) is a selection of
reviews and articles which are provocative, informative, entertaining, savage
and extravagant. Burgess’ journalism has fallen somewhat into neglect in recent
years, but his writing – as this article proves – is always very readable and
was often crucial in establishing new writers, new tastes and trends. There’s a
super review of it in the Manchester Review
of Books here.
And if you
haven’t seen or read A Clockwork Orange
then do watch this one-minute trailer – it gives you a very good
idea of just how extraordinarily powerful and provocative a writer Anthony Burgess
was.
Tis the season
for a large glass of something cold or warm (depending on whether you’re more
of a Crocodile Dundee or a John Major type of drinker), and The Pocket Guide to
Beer (£7.99, pb, 978 1780274898) which
was launched this week by Birlinn will
point your tastebuds in the direction of something new. This handy, fun and
informative guide to beer takes the reader on a journey using the BeerTubeMap,
a unique flavour map that links beers by flavour and style. It comprehensively
shows how beer styles from around the world relate to each other and includes
both traditional and new wave beers, along with some practical tips on keeping
up with the ever-changing world of beer! The no nonsense, un-geeky style makes
it a great starter guide for beer newbies whilst providing inspiration for more
seasoned drinkers. It’s by bar manager Joe Dick and industry
expert Nikki
Welch.
I LOVE it when
publishers and authors create little films to promote their books! Have a watch
of this dramatic
video trailer for Drugs To Forget (pb,
£8.99, 978-1910453513) a new thriller by Martin Granger just
published by Red Door. CrimeTime Magazine said “If you hanker for fast-moving adventure
novels look no further. Clearly Mr Granger is a name to watch” and this
suspenseful race against bio-terror, where a foreign chemical agent is found on
British soil sounds great!
That’s all for
now folks! More next week!
This weekly
blog is written for the UK book trade. If you would like to order any of the
titles mentioned, then please talk to your Compass Sales Manager, or call the
Compass office on 020 8326 5696. Every Friday an e-newsletter containing
highlights from the blog is sent out to over 700 booksellers – and if you’d
like to receive this then please contact nuala@compass-ips.london
thanks for sharing information....
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