Twenty years ago, I was single, 27 years old, and very ready to meet the man I would hitch my life to. My friends had all had readings with a celebrated clairvoyant, who, they claimed, was spookily accurate. So, one Saturday morning, a little hungover, I found myself in this clairvoyant's garage hunched over a camping table having my future told by a lady wearing a Dubai Sevens rugby shirt.
Links of the week May 13 2024 (20)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
20 May 2024
I find my belief in the suspension of common sense utterly compelling. I like to think of myself as pretty intelligent, and yet I was willing to let a random woman chart my life for me. I know many other people who have done the same, whether it be believing an arbitrary fortune teller or a horoscope.
In my new book, The Second Chance, Nell gets told the date on which she will die, and this affects every decision she makes thereafter. When she doesn't die on this date, she faces the enormous task of starting her life again from scratch. If you too were given a 'death date', even if you were the most hardened cynic wouldn't you experience a little flutter of unease each year when the date rolled round? And if you did know that you'd be knocking on the pearly gates at the age of 38, or 54, or 107, how might that affect the way you live?
Conspiracy, manipulation, misplaced patriotism and bombs: Chasing America's dark side in 'Hunted'
In the immortal words of Monty Python's Flying Circus, "And now for something completely different..." For Abir Mukherjee - the author of the award-winning, immensely popular procedural series that takes place in post-World War One Calcutta featuring Captain Sam Wyndham, a former detective from Scotland Yard with a taste for opiates, and Surendranath Banerjee, an Oxbridge-educated sergeant and first Indian member of the city's police department's criminal investigation department - this means a change of venue to North America, a change of century to the 21st, and a change of genre to a thriller. But, while these elements may be different, what drives Mukherjee's fiction remains consistent: a desire to stretch his writer's chops and a desire to "write something punchy, up to the minute, and dealing with the issues that we face today."
"Scripts are about doing. Books are about being."
For me, the difference between writing for TV and writing books comes down to the difference between me and my father. Not in a Freudian sense - which applies to every writer in every discipline - but in the pursuit of my writing-as-sports-analogy as applicable to my early writing career when I had to choose between putting the bulk of my writing efforts into scripts or books.
My natural inclination (long distance swimmer) suggested books, but ... my wife, Brigitte, and I had a baby on the way and, in theory, script writing promised to generate income faster. So, I asked Dad what internal judo move he'd utilized on his team-player mentality that allowed him to triumph in a string of solo efforts to heroically win State.
Dad said, "Ah, it's all athletics. Just throw your body at it as hard as you can."
As Little, Brown's SFF imprint Orbit celebrates its 50th anniversary, publisher Anna Jackson reflects on its current record-breaking run and on building the brands of the future.
There is probably no better way to ring in a 50th anniversary than how Orbit is poised to do it: with a record-breaking year, and that stacked on top of a run of best ever results.
Little, Brown's dedicated Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) imprint has had 52% growth in revenue since 2019, with last year up 8.5% versus 2022, and 2024 already "definitely set to beat" 2023's sales, publisher Anna Jackson tells me as we talk in Orbit's offices. A number of factors are contributing: some acquisition and publishing schedule serendipity, a booming SFF market - but perhaps the main ingredient is the work put in by the small but mighty team, which has expanded under Jackson's leadership.
Jackson succeeded Tim Holman as publisher in 2020 and has spent her entire publishing career at Orbit, first joining as an editorial assistant in 2008. Holman, also an Orbit-lifer who started as Orbit's editorial assistant in 1991, now oversees the US arm after 13 years leading the combined Orbit UK and US businesses, following the American imprint's launch in 2007.
We must ensure that the next generation - the readers of tomorrow - are given every possible opportunity to plot their own future.
Since the sector I work in is in the business of telling stories, let me start with a chapter from one of my own.
It starts with my grandparents, who embarked from the vibrant fields of Punjab, India, to the bustling streets of west London in the 1960s. Not far from here, in Southall, they planted our family roots. I was raised in the warmth of a tight-knit Indian community, one of eight siblings. Imagine the chaos, the laughter, the endless conversations!
Those early memories are happy ones. The comfort of our community wrapped me up like a security blanket. We lived and socialised with Indians. We hadn't made a conscious decision to live like this, but on my street, we all ate similar food, wore similar clothes and faced similar issues. And we faced them together. Money was always tight. We couldn't afford to go on family holidays. And so, I spent my summers lost in stories.
A short walk away, the local library became a portal to other worlds. Books allowed me to dream - they opened my eyes to other people, other cultures, to opportunity. They built me up bit by bit from the inside out. They gave me hope.
Shimmr AI, an artificial intelligence start-up that aims to help publishers promote more of their list, has recruited a host of high-profile advisers from across the books industry, signalling the firm's plans to "deploy globally".
Launched in September 2023 by entrepreneur Nadim Sadek, Shimmr uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create automated marketing material for publishers. "During our R&D process, we found that at best, 5% of all published titles had ever been advertised," Sadek told The Bookseller. Ultimately, he hopes that Shimmr will "liberate the value in publishers' catalogues, give authors better care, currency and discoverability, and [help] readers find books that would better fulfil their psychological needs".
The organisation - which this week won AI Startup of the Year at the UK Startup Awards - is currently based in London, but has teams in the US and South Africa. Revenues are "pretty well equally split" between the US and the UK at present, Sadek said. However, he anticipates the US eventually eclipsing the UK "because of the scale of the market".
A new survey revealing that three-quarters of readers of books for teens are over 18 has one message: read anything you like - but read.
Childhood has meant many different things over the centuries. The transitional years of adolescence, in particular, have come a long way since they just meant smaller, cheaper, more biddable adults capable of factory work and helping out on family farms. It is only in the last 80 years or so that the teenager has come into existence, as a demographic with whole industries devoted to serving its interests %u2013 and mopping up its pocket money. One of those industries was publishing, which responded in the 1960s by developing a market that had been identified by librarians more than two decades earlier: young adult (YA) literature. This highly profitable sub-sector, aimed at filling the gap between childish and grown-up reading, has been around long enough now to offer valuable insights into shifts in social attitudes.
Acclaimed for her accounts of the darkness and desire found in everyday life, ‘the Canadian Chekhov' has died, having suffered from dementia for more than a decade
The Canadian short-story writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro, who examined everyday life through the lens of short fiction for more than 60 years, has died aged 92 at her care home in Ontario. She had suffered from dementia for more than a decade.
Once called "the Canadian Chekhov" by Cynthia Ozick, Munro's body of work was founded on forms and subjects traditionally disregarded by the literary mainstream. It was only later in life that Munro's reputation began to rise, her understated stories of apparently plain folks in undramatic, small-town Canada amassing a raft of international awards that included the 2013 Nobel prize in literature.
Margaret Atwood once called her "among the major writers of English fiction of our time." Salman Rushdie praised her as "a master of the form" while Jonathan Franzen once wrote: "[Munro] is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion."
In April of this year, Timothy Garton Ash collected his reward money for winning the prestigious 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize.
Today, in Kyiv, the Oxford University professor presented what he bought with it - a new set of reconnaissance drones for immediate use in the war against Russia.
"We've built the best Europe we've ever had, the most free, the most prosperous, the most peaceful, and most united ever for millennia. But now it's really seriously under attack," Garton Ash told CBC IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed, explaining his decision on how he'd spend the prize money.
He said he chose the particular items to buy after consulting with the Come Back Alive Foundation, a non-profit Ukrainian organization dedicated to identifying the specific needs of particular troops and pairing them with international donors.
"Come Back Alive has been going since the beginning of the Russia-Ukrainian war in 2014," said Garton Ash. "And unlike the sort of big, unwieldy charity organizations, they know exactly which unit requires exactly which kit. You know, it's 'pick up trucks for these guys' or 'reconnaissance drones for these guys'. And for me, it was kind of important to know exactly what it was and where [the money] was going."
'My theatre background has probably helped me be a braver writer and maybe more rigorous, too: the theatre can sustain bold and abstract ideas, but not slow or sloppy storytelling'
Theatre producer Ellie Keel's debut novel, dark academia thriller The Four was published on 11 April by HQ.
At its heart, The Four is about three things: friendship, hope, and survival. It follows four gifted 17-year-olds who win full scholarships to an elite boarding school in Devon, where they encounter a hostile world of loyalty, honour, and revenge. The four quickly form a close friendship which comes to be threatened by a dark secret that could save one of them, or destroy them all. I had the core idea for the book when I was about 8, but the main inspiration came from my experience of going to Oxford University from a very ordinary state school, and the incredible friendships I formed there.
'I'm an accidental author - I never intended for my work to be published'
Where did the inspiration for The Stranger at the Wedding come from?
Without wishing to give too much away, many years ago I stumbled across a thoroughly harrowing Guardian Long Read about a true crime case that had haunted Germany. The image of the victim's traumatic demise stayed with me, and inspired the finale of The Stranger... Once I had that initial brainwave, I worked backwards, then forwards again, until I had some semblance of a novel. Weddings are events of such heightened tension - harried brides, nervous groomsmen and emotional guests - that it struck me as the perfect setting for a thriller.
'You can't be best friends with a dragon in the real world. So writing fantasy is the next best thing'
Could you tell about your inspiration behind Someone You Can Build a Nest In?
Before there was a plot or a title, there was the relationship between Shesheshen and Homily. I got fascinated one night playing with the dynamic of this fearsome monster who was trying to maintain her disguise so she wouldn't blow her date with a wholesome, kindly girl. Every time I put them on the page, they filled it up with personality and humor and aching context. Theirs was a story that wouldn't fit in most fantasy books. So the big inspiration to write their story? Was to write a book where they belonged.
Roxie Key knows what it's like to feel you're not good enough - and how to get over it
Ever have the feeling that you're just not good enough? No matter how many books you publish, you're overwhelmed by a relentless fear that one day, someone will find out you're a total fraud. Sound familiar? Reader, meet our (not so) good friend Imposter Syndrome. How Imposter Syndrome threatened my career as a writer I'm pretty well-acquainted with Imposter Syndrome - it comes with the territory of suffering from anxiety. Therapy helped me deal with it. But in 2019, everything changed.
Debut author Alina Khawaja on writing seven books in five years, and what she learned from it
The beach is one of my favorite places in the world. I love the open waters, and how they extend into places beyond what I've seen. I love the way my feet sink into the sand. I love sitting on blankets with my family, eating cold burgers while the hot sun dries my damp hair.
So, I guess it's fitting that it's the place where I received the best news of my life.
But let's back up. My debut novel, Maya's Laws of Love, came out this year, but I've been in the publishing sphere for a long time. I wrote my first book from 2017-2018, but I didn't revise or work on it at all because I didn't know how to at the time. I didn't know much about what it meant to actually work on a book. Also, it just wasn't very good, and I can admit that!
Did I let it get me down? Absolutely not!
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