Noughtie omissions ... some of the bestsellers-that-weren't
My bookseller friend, Kit, and I were just talking about how we own a lot of books that no one else buys or notices. This piece features some very good books that have just, for some reason or other, failed to sell.
I've only read The Spare Room by Helen Garner. Eric Forbes got it for me after I told him that I'd heard a podcast interview with the author and thought the book sounded interesting.
I really enjoyed The Spare Room. It was painful to read, but, at the same time, liberating. As someone who has cared for the dying, I appreciate the honesty of Garner's story. I would call it a brave book, and a beautifully written one too.
Here's the podcast of her interview on The Book Show, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio programme:
Helen Garner, about The Spare Room
Posted via web from daphnelee's posterous
While people are busy ranking the hit books of the last 10 years, many a publishing insider is quietly mourning a volume that unnaccountably never made the 'best of' or bestseller lists, but should have. Here publishers, agents and translators speak up for the ones that really shouldn't have got away
Jamie Byng, Canongate publisher and managing director
The Spare Room by Helen Garner, published 2008. This deceptively slight novel is as good as anything Canongate has ever published. Or will publish. It's deceptive in many ways and I think its great subtlety is one of the reasons that it will only get fully appreciated over time. I've read it three times now and on each occasion my awe at what Garner has achieved increases. The Spare Room is a brutally honest novel about death, friendship and emotional dishonesty, written in prose that manages to be both delicate and visceral. It was overlooked by all the judges of the literary prizes in this country and these prizes are key for a book like this to sell in any serious quantity. But I still remain confident that this exceptional book will be come to be widely regarded as a modern classic. Because that is what it is.
Anthea Bell, translator
There's a novel by Robert Löhr called The Secrets of the Chess Machine about the famous chess-playing automaton that caused a sensation at the court of Maria Theresa. Löhr's flight of fancy is that there was a dwarf who supposedly operated the machinery. It's a very funny book, and I spent a lot of my time trying to persuade the English-speaking public that, contrary to popular opinion, the Germans do have a sense of humour.
Margaret Jull Costa, translator
There have been at least 14 translations of Cervantes' masterpiece Don Quixote, the earliest in 1612. Two more translations were brought out in 2005, in time for the 400th anniversary of the book's first publication in Spain. Oddly, one of them got all the attention and the other was virtually ignored. Don Quixote makes huge demands on the translator: there is comedy, broad and subtle, poetry, good and deliberately dire, there are proverbs and puns, and, above all, there is Cervantes' own wry, playful voice as narrator. Both of those "anniversary" translations were good, but it seems to me that John Rutherford's translation (the one that was largely ignored) most satisfyingly meets the challenge to the translator and does what all fine English translations should do, breathing English life into every sentence. If you don't know Spanish and have never read Don Quixote or are thinking of reading it again, then this is the English translation I would recommend, recreating as it does the novel's vibrant (and, to the modern sensibility, sometimes cruel) humour, and doing equal honour to its pathos.
Victoria Hobbs, literary agent, AM Heath
Mutiny was published in 2001. It was Lindsey Collen's fourth book and, we thought, her break-out novel. She had previously won the Commonwealth Writers' prize for the Africa region and been longlisted for the Orange. There was a sense that appreciation of Lindsey's work was growing and we were getting somewhere – John Berger called it "a break-out and a breakthrough". She was published with great energy and commitment by Bloomsbury. She came to London (from Mauritius) to promote and there could be no better advocate for her work – she is an extraordinary woman whose own experiences of an oppressive political system and incarceration as a result of that system fed directly into the writing of Mutiny. The few reviews she received were excellent. And somehow it just never quite took off. The novel is not an easy or comforting read; it is fierce and challenging but is utterly compelling.
Mark Lucas, literary agent, Lucas Alexander Whitley
Barefoot Soldier by Johnson Beharry VC, published in 2006. It was a Sunday Times bestseller, but should have gone on to take the world by storm. And never did, quite. Johnson was the first living recipient of the Victoria Cross for nearly 40 years. He saved the lives of at least 30 of his fellow soldiers during two separate ambushes within weeks of each other in Iraq in 2004. Little, Brown published it in 2006 with considerable passion, a major marketing campaign, and utter devotion to this most charming and courageous of young men. He's an example to us all. So why isn't Barefoot Soldier up there with Bravo Two Zero? Part of the problem, I fear, is that a huge number of people under the age of 40 have no idea what the Victoria Cross stands for. Perhaps the public got confused, and saw him as more victim than hero. Perhaps their antipathy to the conflict itself coloured their response to his experience. Perhaps there wasn't enough gunfire. And maybe the BNP played a part ... I don't begrudge Jordan her megasales. But I'd prefer to live in a world where Johnson Beharry VC's astonishing, selfless bravery is more vigorously cherished.
Roland Philipps, John Murray managing director
War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres, published in 2005, is one of the funniest books I have ever been involved with – it's about the author's hapless time as an embedded reporter with the US Marines in Iraq. I think the reason it did not take off as it should was to do with the gap between commissioning it in 2003 and it being written and published two years later: by then the war had got so unpopular with the public that every book about it, brilliantly entertaining or not, was struggling. I hope in time it will become recognised as a classic.
Lee Brackstone, Faber editorial director
The book I want to choose is by the late Gordon Burn and it is his final novel, Born Yesterday. An in-the-moment experiment in fictional chronicling of the 2007 summer (Maddy's disappearance; Tony's disappearance; Gordon's arrival), it stands alongside the best of Mailer and DeLillo and should have seen Gordon anointed as their fearless equal. That he is gone so prematurely saddens me, but I remain more committed than ever to finding readers for his extraordinary sequence of books about ghosts of footballers past and ghosts of prime ministers present.
Simon Spanton, Gollancz editorial director
Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, published in 2006: Yes, it was a collection of short stories and yes, the industry wisdom is that it's hellishly difficult to sell short story collections but what a collection this was. It was like having a new Angela Carter on your list. Margo is an award-winning author of fantasy stories of haunting power and beauty which seemed to speak to genre fan and non-genre fan alike courtesy of strikingly beautiful prose and an unflinching eye for truth. Black Juice contained Singing My Sister Down. When this story was circulated in-house it had an unprecedented impact – countless people admitted to being brought to tears by it. We sent that story out to the trade and the response was the same. We had a stunning cover for the book, we published it as a hardback for the price of the paperback, the trade supported us to the hilt, we got a decent number out, got rave reviews ... and 60% of them came back. Crushed. And utterly mystified.
Christopher MacLehose, MacLehose Press publisher
Journal by Hélène Berr, published in 2008, deserves to be read and studied in every school in the civilised world, read and reread for what it tells of the circumstances of the arrest of a young and brilliant Jewish girl in Paris and her eventual murder in Bergen-Belsen, days before that camp was liberated. The story of how the text of her journal came to light so many years later is remarkable enough. The journal, which is a love story too and an account of inescapable horror, is beautiful and beautifully translated by David Bellos, whose Afterword entitled France and the Jews is also essential reading.
Rebecca Gray, Serpent's Tail editor
Boy A by Jonathan Trigell, published in 2004, is an incredibly powerful story, very sad, a very psychological read. It's all about having sympathy for people who do terrible things, about whether people can change. And it's beautifully done – a really fully realised world. It's an exquisite book. We really thought it was going to be big when we published in 2004 but absolutely nobody took any notice. We sold no copies, but come 2008 it all completely turned around. There's been a film, it won the Books to Talk About prize – what I take from this is that sometimes these things take time to come around. There is something very heartwarming about it suddenly becoming a book people were excited about.
Dan Franklin, Jonathan Cape publishing director
Over the last decade Julia Blackburn has written some mesmerisingly original books (as Kate Mosse said on Radio 4, if she were Scandinavian she'd have won the Nobel by now), but the best, her greatest achievement, is The Three of Us, a memoir of her poet father and painter mother and the extraordinary muddle they made of their own lives and thus Julia's too. In other hands this would be a "misery memoir", but she tells her story with such skill and candour, with such a matter-of-fact tone, that we accept the sometimes alarming events she is telling us about without a qualm. The Three of Us got rave reviews and won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for the best memoir of 2008, but I can't help being disappointed that it never quite achieved the sales or recognition of that other remarkable memoir, Bad Blood by Lorna Sage. As Jeremy Lewis said in the Telegraph, "In a halfway sensible world Julia Blackburn would be a household name".
Isobel Akenhead, Hodder & Stoughton women's fiction editor
The one book I would say I felt almost physically heartbroken about not succeeding with in the last decade was The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson. She's the most phenomenally talented (and bestselling) American author, whose unique voice just sings off the page, and this brilliant novel tells the tale of a woman who has to search through her own past to uncover what really happened to a little girl who has just been found dead in her swimming pool. It's as pacy as a thriller, but so rich that you feel you're reading something much deeper. There were a number of reasons it wasn't the success we hoped for – primarily I think that it trod the line between commercial and literary in a way that made the retailers struggle to understand it. But I'd urge anyone to read it – I feel absolutely sure they wouldn't be disappointed.
Would you believe it - Black Juice by Margo Lanagan. Told you nobody wanted the book. I loved the really weird cover, so 'dragon'-like. Well, let's hope Tender Morsels fare better because i'm convinced that she is a good writer.
Posted by: Kit | Friday, December 25, 2009 at 00:39