Coming up at Backstory
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Thursday 20th July, 7.30pm, Backstory
Visiting from across the pond, Booker-longlisted author Karen Joy Fowler talks about Booth, which tells the story of the ill-fated Booth family and their attachment to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
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Free live music resumes on Thursday 27th July
No need to book, just turn up at our bar from 6pm on Thursday evenings (except Thursday 20th July, when we have Karen Joy Fowler!)
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Oliver Franklin-Wallis - Wasteland
Wednesday 2nd August, 7.30pm, Backstory
When we throw something “away”, where does it go and who deals with it when it gets there? In this age of climate crisis, award-winning journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on an eye-opening journey through the global waste industry.
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Isabel Hardman and Stephanie Snow on our NHS
Wednesday 9th August, 7.30pm, Backstory
Marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS, The Spectator’s assistant editor Isabel Hardman talks with Stephanie Snow, a Manchester University expert in healthcare history, about the past and future of the beloved and beleaguered institution.
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Wednesday 16th August, 7.30pm, Backstory
Tom's favourite non-fiction book of the year so far, ‘This is Europe’ is a masterful portrait of a continent, told through pen sketches of dozens of its ordinary citizens.
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Live poetry at Backstory: Michael Pedersen and Hollie McNish
Wednesday 30th August, 7.30pm, Backstory
Two dazzling poets bring their words to life live at Backstory. Michael Pedersen will be reading from his new collection, ‘The Cat Prince,’ in conversation with Hollie McNish, author of ‘Slug’ and ‘Nobody Told Me.’
Team pick of the week
Tom recommends: Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
This book has nothing to do with Huw Edwards but I happened to be reading it as I digested the recent news. And goodness is it a much better analysis of human frailty, of fame and infamy, and of the power of - and responsibility on - the media than anything we have read or heard in recent days.
This account of all the characters caught up in an imagined 1990s tabloid scandal could so easily have resorted to caricature. But the family at the centre of the scandal, the others on their estate, even the tabloid hack are written with understanding and empathy, with an attempt to explore how the thwarted ambitions and “ordinary human failings” of each led to something awful enough to capture newspaper headlines. I think it will stay with me well beyond the next scandal, and the one after that - Tom
Buy Ordinary Human Failings now
I WENT SHOPPING YESTERDAY and spent £10,000. Don’t tell anyone.
This monthly binge is in line with the business plan and remorselessly tabulated in Excel, of course, but rather thrilling nonetheless. Like the time I went to a tapas joint with a dozen friends and ordered one of everything on the menu, there is fun to be had in shopping with a really big trolley.
The publishers hawk their new releases in catalogues two or three months ahead of publication, so every few weeks Rory, Denise and I “go shopping”, compiling wishlists from each brochure before swapping notes. Just like toddlers nearing the checkout, rather than rejecting anybody else’s choices, we largely throw even more goodies in the trolley. Denise tells me it’s her favourite part of the job.
I love it, too, picking up on trends and scouring for jewels, hidden or otherwise. There are occasional big reveals: “Oh My God there’s a new Zadie Smith!” Or, “oooooh, the 55th novel about Japanese cats”.
But since the biggest catalogues run to hundreds of pages each month, I will admit to playing a sneaky game of New Release Bingo from time to time. Typically the catalogues devote a page to each title, with a brief summary of the plot or argument, an author bio and a picture of the cover. The game, though, is really about the brief, bold “sell” at the top, in which the same words and phrases are bound to crop up.
Novels are usually either lyrical or page-turners (“meditations” are always lyrical). They can be “cosy” or “powerful”, the plots of the latter type so frequently “heart-stopping” as to occupy a cardiology convention.
Non-fiction meanwhile is “timely” or “urgent” (one recent catalogue offered books that were, variously, enthralling and urgent, touching and urgent, or in one case “desperately urgent”). Very occasionally it is “timely and urgent”. The writing inside so often resembles a thriller that one wonders whether the putative reader would be better off browsing another section. (Bonus points to the title “as urgent as a thriller”.)
Fact or fiction, every book is a “must-read”. One volume is “a must-read for all clubbers past, present and future”… will nobody think of the exhausted printers. All books, too, are “unique” (one catalogue offered no fewer than 17 “unique” titles), unless the book in question is “uniquely timeless”.
Unique, but not to say incomparable. The work is almost certainly “perfect for fans of” another unique author, who just happens to have sold rather more books. One crime title was boldly pitched as ideal for fans of Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Lucy Foley and Anthony Horowitz. In fairness, they omitted to throw in the top crime “comp”, a certain Richard Osman. Books written by, for or featuring anyone vaguely millennial, meanwhile, are “perfect for fans of Sally Rooney”. Top marks to the publisher who managed to get her full name into a single-page pitch four times.
Setting their sights slightly closer to Earth was the sales type who asserted that a particular author’s latest would be “perfect for fans of his first book”. You’d hope so.
“Bestseller” is always a good word. Better, anyway, than the slightly needy “bestseller potential”. You can always lob in a reference to another bestseller: Since my bookshop features a convenient bar, I really can drink every time The Secret History is mentioned.
Some might argue that new phrases are, ahem, “much-needed”. But in this passionately-argued polemic, I beg to differ. To this devoted reader, these catalogues are the true page-turners.
Tom
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