Super Thursday indie-style: is that the sound of Summer Reading we hear?

Sometimes in the Autumn, it seems like every Thursday is "super-Thursday", a day when huge numbers of books are published, and bookshops up and down the land struggle to cope with the number of boxes coming in.

Generally speaking the book trade loves these events - it generates huge interest in books, and creates a real buzz about the big-hitters that are going to bring customers into the shop in the crucial Christmas period.

Independent bookshops tend to have a more mixed feeling about these days (particularly those checking books into stock!). We are much simpler folk, tending to mistrust the pile 'em high philosophy of traditional retail, and prefer instead a steadier stream of great titles that we can sort through, curate, and introduce to readers by placing a book into someone's hands.

But here's the curious thing. Inevitably, about six months later, many of these big titles get published in paperback. On the same day. Along with quite a few big-hitting new titles. And yet - not a peep it seems from the publishing world?

Now there may or may not be a few other things happening next Thursday, but - in the spirit of independent retail, and on the basis that the majority of readers prefer paperbacks and wait for them eagerly to be published as paperback (particularly fiction, particularly bookgroup books, particularly as the holiday reading season approaches) we're having our own 'Super Thursday' in the bookshop next week.

We can't promise scantily-clad publicity assistants (of either gender). Or features on Start The Week. Although Mark may bare his knees if you are unlucky...

But we can promise some great reading to fire the gun on some of favourite reads ahead of Summer...

Kate Atkinson's dazzling 'Life After Life', explored the possibility of infinite chances, as Ursula Todd lived through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. In 'A God in Ruins', Atkinson turns her focus on Ursula's beloved younger brother RAF bomber pilot Teddy.

This is a highly engrossing and often heartbreaking journey though post-war Britain from the point of view of someone who witnessed so much death in his young life, his greatest challenge becomes to face living in a future he never expected to have. It manages to be a story about death, about life and also about narrative and story itself and certainly deserves to be considered a masterpiece and to be treasured as such.

One of our favourite books when it was published back in the Autumn (and with a much friendlier picture of Alan for the paperback cover!) 'Not My Father's Son' by Alan Cumming is part memoir, part family-history mystery, and part whodunnit as an appearance on Who Do You Think You Are sets off a landslide of family secrets and half-truths that make for a genuine page-turning read with a hugely satisfying ending.

You cannot help but get sucked into the entwined tale of two strands of Alan's family and the revelations at times are jaw-dropping. An uplifting, effortless read that's also an unexpected meditation on the shadows - and light - cast on us by our ancestors. 

We love Louise Levene - her debut 'A Vision of Loveliness' brilliantly evoked the dark-edged realities and possibilities of being a young woman in 60s London. So it's appropriate the we've moved into the 1970s with 'The Following Girls' (and we love that cover!)

Amanda Baker is part of a school gang 'the four Mandies', girls who are constantly in trouble at school. Stuck in the 1970s, where there is still a fight over woman having jobs and not being bound to the house all day, they have the teenage mindset of hating everything; from school to their parents rules. A funny, sharp story about growing up, life and friendship that could be more dangerous than good. This is one of Imogen's picks for the Summer.

One of Mark's favourites from last year is 'The Axeman's Jazz' by Ray Celestin. A killer is on the loose in New Orleans at the end of World War. A letter to the police promises to kill on a specific date, but also to spare anyone in whose house ‘a jazz band is in full swing’. Thus starts a frenetic jazz-fuelled race against the clock in the sultry, swampy, racially-charged state of post-war Louisiana. Corruption is rife, but it’s in everyone’s interest – politicians, police and Mafiosi – to catch the killer. But just who is responsible for the Axeman’s Jazz? Original, suspenseful and based on true events, this is cracking entertainment.

The death of Terry Pratchett was widely - and fittingly - mourned throughout the reading world, so it's very appropriate that Julia has voted for 'A Slip of the Keyboard', published in paperback on May 7. This collection of the best of Terry Pratchett's includes observations on subjects as diverse as animal rights, Gandalf's love life, banana daiquiris - and the disease that eventually killed him. With a forward by Neil Gaiman (with who he collaborated on the book 'Good Omens') this is a fine way to honour one of our greatest writers. 

A few times a year, a book is published that isn't just a bestseller, but a literary phenomenon. David Nicholls' book 'One Day' certainly fell into that category, but the tone is altogether darker in 'Us' which arrives in paperback ready for one of our big Summer reading picks.

With their teenage son all grown up, is there any reason for Connie and Douglas to stay together? Unwisely they plan an elaborate last family holiday – taking in the whole of Europe. What follows is a well-observed, sometimes hilarious, often painful bittersweet story of a marriage.

A new No 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel from Alexander McCall Smith is a cause for shouting for huge numbers of readers (and a celebratory pot of redbush tea), so we're delighted that 'The Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe' arrives in paperback on May 7. 

This is Mma Ramotswe's fifteenth adventure (can you believe that?) and this time the focus is fully on Mma Makutsi, Ramotswe's enthusiastic, ambitious business partner (although officially she's only 'an assistant full partner' of course). Launching her own new enterprise, the 'Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe' ("only for the fashionable people") she's soon up to her neck in grumpy chefs, drunken waiters. So who's she gonna call? Mma Ramotswe, of course.

One of our favourite children's authors, Frances Hardinge, is riding high at the moment with her novel 'Cuckoo Song' being read across the country by children shadowing the Carnegie Award. And 'The Lie Tree' is another blistering original piece of storytelling that seems destined for awards.

In Victorian England, Faith knows she has no future as a scientist like her father. But when he is murdered she discovers women can be good at influencing and manipulating behind the scenes and she sets about trying to uncover the truth, even though no-one will believe it. Another thought-provoking, imaginative tale that weaves science and fantasy - Frances Hardinge is definitely at the cutting edge of YA writing.

(Frances had some cracking writing tips for aspiring authors when she came to Abingdon a few years ago - if you are interested about her writing process, our interview with her is well worth reading)

Back to non-fiction, and this was a giant of a book last Autumn - and a book we recommended a lot (and even spoke about on the radio). As far as themes go, they don’t get much bigger than the entire history of our species. Yuval Harari’s ‘Sapiens’ is one of those monumental works that gives a dizzying perspective on how we came to rule – and threaten – the entire planet. It starts with changes in our brain that allowed us to tell stories, imagine alternative scenarios, and out-manoeuvre other species (notably Neanderthals). From there we became farmers, developed religion, invented money, harnessed technology and threatened widespread extinction.

The writing is superb – fresh, brazen – and never afraid to come off the fence in areas that are controversial: did we domesticate wheat, or did it domesticate us? Did stockpiling food lay the psychological seeds for consumerism? Are we happier now than *any* of our ancestors? And what is going to replace our species, as surely as we replaced earlier species?

Another incredible book from one of Imogen's favourite authors - particularly relevant because two of our staff (no names!) will be travelling down to London later in May to a big event with author Sarah J Maas...

'A Court of Thorns and Roses' is a unique retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Follow Feyre as she is dragged from her home to live in a world dangous for Mortals. Filled with fey and magic, nothing is ever as it seems, and as the time she spends there lengths, she realises that the fey she lives with are hiding more than just their faces under the masks that they wear. Perfect for any fairytale loved, the magic of this book will not leave you even after finishing the last page...

With a highly prolific career - including a fictional retelling of the battle of Waterloo - it may surprise you to learn that 'Waterloo : The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles' is Bernard Cornwell's first ever non-fiction title.

Cornwell combines his storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history to give a riveting account of every dramatic moment of the battle of Waterloo, from Napoleon's escape from Elba to the smoke and gore of the battlefields. Through letters and diaries he also sheds new light on the private thoughts of Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, as well as the ordinary officers and soldiers. Published to coincide with the bicentenary this year, Waterloo is a tense and gripping story of heroism and tragedy - and of the final battle that determined the fate of Europe...

Finally, mystery stories are big at the moment for children, and we are big fans of Lauren Child and her undercover, wisecracking, teen sleuth Ruby Redfort. With funky new jackets for the whole series, book 3 arrives in paperback on Thursday: 'Catch You Death'. Ruby finds herself in a survival situation, with tigers and other wild animals on the loose. But if anyone can solve the mystery, it's going to be Ruby...

So - twelve of the best for Super Thursday. The odd one not (strictly speaking) published on that day, but near enough. And with other hardback titles from Mostly Books favourite Jeffery Deaver (Solitude Creek, the new Kathryn Dance novel), Kathy Reich's latest on paperback ('Bones Never Lie') and Wilbur Smith's 'Desert God' there will be a lot of activity in the shop next Thursday...

Our Favourite Books of 2013 Part 1: Nicki's Picks

It’s a head-to-head this year for my ‘favourite book of the year’, which is always a good sign that it has been a year of great reading, with some wonderful titles coming through in adult fiction, crime fiction and children’s books. 

Out in paperback this week is ‘Life After Life’ by Kate Atkinson, which has already marked itself out as a must-read by scooping the first award of the year - taking ‘best novel’ at the Costa Book Awards (nearly 20 years after her debut ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’ triumphed in the same prize).

‘Life After Life’ is a feast of a narrative structure – being not so much the story of Ursula, but her many stories.

Ursula has many different imagined futures, from circumstances that means she dies within the first few pages, to ones where fate deals her a different hand and she grows and marries.

But whatever life path Ursula follows, it’s a life fraught with lurking danger, as Ursula dies frequently – but the upside to this is that this is literature, so she gets a chance to do better each time. 

There is lots to love about this unusual and complex story – such as characters who appear in different versions of Ursula’s life, moving from bit-part to central role. One of the most satisfying is the narrative on Ursula’s role in World War II as this would have made a satisfying enough story on its own – the heartfelt descriptions of London bombings, each death given as much weight and significance as each of Ursula’s untimely ends.

How often have you wondered how differently things might have turned out if you had just done this, or not done that? I love the literary premise to play with this whole idea and allow one character to have many chances to do it better next time around. What a brilliant concept – and also fun to read, which is a remarkable achievement given that the repeated sections of Ursula's life become quite familiar.

When you’ve waited more than a decade for Donna Tartt to write another novel, it was very satisfying to finally read ‘The Goldfinch’ and it’s hard not to join all those saying how special it is, head and shoulders above everything else I’ve read this year and predicting this will be the one to scoop all the awards over the coming year.

In ‘The Goldfinch’ you can discover a dazzling, Dickensian read, akin to Pip’s journey in ‘Great Expectation’. A modern fable about the highs and lows and essential randomness of modern life, with success just one slip away from failure and any number of people living lives of quiet desperation, just hoping that things will just somehow all turn out all right.

Theo’s journey into much-admired gloss and success is swift and spectacular. But without a centre to his world (the grief at the loss of his mother in the early pages is always present), his judgement and moral values are utterly adrift. His life empty and inexplicable and steering closer and closer to the criminal.

With dips into philosophy about the human condition, philosophy on the value of art, instruction on the forging of antiques; even the detail of the effects of serious dependency on prescription drugs, the journey leaves you feeling in awe of Donna Tartt’s ability to be so precise and so compelling and to make you want to stay with her for every word, not even drawing away or skipping ahead when she’s simply describing a room. It’s also, simply, a good story.

The plot twists its way through unexpected reversals of fortune, unexpected kindnesses and equally devastating let-downs. It cranks up into being a fully-fledged edge-of-the-seat thriller. You hope friends won’t let Theo down again, but you fear the opposite.
It may be tangled and complex and about lots of very big things. But fundamentally, I was left with a feeling that it’s about friendship. And that if you have one person in your life who’ll take a bullet for you, in the end, you haven’t done too bad.

Please don’t make us wait another eleven years to read another.

From one big-stage thriller to another that’s a bit more slow-burn and a very pleasurable read and a romp, Mick Herron’s ‘Dead Lions’ was this year’s perhaps surprise winner of the Crime Fiction Gold Dagger for best crime book of the year.

It centres on a disparate team of spies who have been put out to grass (and has been likened to the hit television show ‘New Tricks’). There is much fun in a bunch of characters who are bickering over whose career is the most derailed and seeing them slowly return to life as they realise they may be right in the centre of something big. As they start to sniff a chance to claw their way back to glory - can they work as a team and remember those skills they used to have?

This is fun writing and a really complex, well-thought through plot, where lots of seemingly random threads only slowly build up to make a coherent picture. It reminded me a lot of the late Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series, with trails going all over the place until you start to wake up yourself to what is actually happening. It’s also got that trademark of Hill’s – witty, intelligent writing and prose that is just really enjoyable to read. Great stuff.

In all the circus surrounding the revelation that Robert Galbraith was none other than JK Rowling, it was easy to overlook the fact that ‘The Cuckoo's Calling’ was a terrific crime novel in the traditional style – a private eye taken on to challenge the police conclusion that a model committed suicide.

Never taking no for an answer, former military man-turned gumshoe Cormorant Strike, navigates the unfamiliar world of fashion, making for a likeable sleuth in his determination to look past her wealth and success and to bring justice for Lula Landry, a successful, yet troubled woman.

His investigation is a dogged round of interviews, sieving for inconsistencies, getting under the skin of vividly drawn suspects and witnesses and never giving up, and makes for an intelligent, intriguing and satisfying read.

How great to find gems where the plot didn’t descend into gratuitous violence, a serial killer story thread, or a credulity-stretching conclusion, or expecting us to be satisfied with ‘oh the killer was actually completely insane, but no-one noticed.’

Give me a cerebral plot with a satisfying, properly thought-through ending you couldn’t see coming purely through the strength of the storytelling and I am a happy woman.

It was also a good year for children's books, notable in a welcome increase in the number of illustrated books for older children. Hear, hear for this. A book that is a joy to look at and hold, as well as to read? What a good idea.

Chris Riddell’s ‘Goth Girl’ is enhanced by it’s eye-catching design; even so it’s probably the glorious literary references that will have parents fighting over whether they get to read this with their children.

Ada Goth lives in Ghastly-Gorm Hall with its Secret Garden, its Even-More-Secret Garden, Unstable Stables and a host of literary visitors (Mary Shellfish, the distinguished lady novelist, arrives to stay at a house party) who come to visit poet Lord Goth. Is there a dastardly plot to foil his literary career?

Chris Riddell’s drawings are as generous as the literary references (even the ghost mouse gets his own version of 'Gulliver’s Travels’) and the whole thing is an absolute joy.

It probably won’t be an enormous surprise to learn that one of my favourite children’s reads of the year was actually a mystery story.

In Rebecca Stead’s ‘Liar & Spy’ Georges moves house and meets a new friend, Safer, who has suspicions about one of the neighbours. The pair get involved in all sorts of surveillance trying to work out what the neighbour is up to.

It’s all very intriguing, and then things start to get a little darker, motives and friendships questioned. There is more going on than meets the eye in this short, yet quirky story, which is also a great lesson about standing up for ourselves. Why do we let the bullies make up the rules and why do we play them, is the central question of this really delightful and intriguing tale which is never short on surprises.

Finally, Tom Moorhouse's 'The River Singers' is another book with high production values, wonderful illustrations and a great story set in the modern day with endangered water voles as its main characters.

This unusual but exciting story manages to draw attention to the genuine plight of a threatened species by turning the story into a thrilling adventure and a quest for safety in the shadow of a real-life threat.

And that, in the end, is what storytelling is all about.

3 4 Friday: Choice or no choice, one life or many: Kate Atkinson, Tracy Chevalier and Margaret Forster

Today's '3 4 Friday' #fridayreads is an embarrassment of riches, three fantastic new titles from three of our finest women novelists.

Kate Atkinson’s ‘Life After Life’ is a bravura examination of life (or rather, of one life in particular, that of Ursula) who lives a spectacularly unconventional life (even for a fictional character). Kate Atkinson is one of Nicki's favourite authors, and here is what she thinks of the book:

"Ursula’s life is exceptional because it doesn’t exist in a linear strand, but is more like a game of Monopoly, where Ursula keeps passing ‘Go’ and has to go around it all over again. Can she do better this time?

Kate Atkinson is enjoyed hugely as a writer, known for her literary novels (award-winning ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’) and her Jackson Brodie detective series, which was made into a television Sunday night drama. But whatever Kate Atkinson's starting point, there is always a lot of death in her books.

‘Life After Life’ is as complex as her detective dramas, but plays much more with the whole idea of narrative – and, basically, about how a life might have turned out differently if we had the chance to try it again. And to make the point she kills off her main character over and over again (I lost count of the times). For Ursula, Darkness Falls quite a lot when she doesn’t get things right.

Ursula’s life could have turned out so differently. From being born with the cord around her neck, Ursula could have died as a baby, or in the accident on the beach if that man hadn’t been there to see it happen. If she had died, her siblings might also have died if she hadn’t been there to alter the course of events. That boy, that pregnancy, that isolation, that violent husband. She lives it all.

As a reader we see all the possible permutations, the events that start to stack up, the small selection of seemingly unimportant happenings, which, if they had turned out differently could have meant Ursula living out an utterly altered life – and death. Happy marriage, disaster marriage, it all rests on a knife edge. (We wait, each time, poised, for the next horrible demise.)

But ‘Life After Life’ isn’t simply a clever-clever examination of whether we are a product of environment, or fate, or circumstance. Ursula gradually survives what the world throws at her and in later versions of her own life grows to have a family of her own (or not – yes, you do have to stay on your toes to follow the action with this one).

Yet even as she succeeds at each attempt to grow stronger, the Ursula who survives into adulthood – dodging childhood accidents and not being victim to one of life’s random tragedies – has one major factor she can’t beat – one in which everyone she might have saved once, dies. She always, always comes up against the Second World War.

Ursula can improve on some of her own possible worst-case scenarios, but never manages to live the life she seems intended for – a life of privilege and ease, daughter of a banker, living in a large family in a home with domestic servants and ox-eye daisies in the garden. Because all that idea of Englishness ended with the Second World War.

One of the strongest narratives is when she grows to be a Warden in London during the Blitz, crawling through blown-apart houses to find anyone alive, administering last-moment-easing morphine and attaching labels to body parts. She finds the strength to be useful, to hold it together so she can offer comfort.

In to-ing and fro-ing through the last century, going over the same events, meeting the same characters, Kate Atkinson finds a way of making the same story told again and again a tale worth the re-reading – and that’s what’s so clever and compelling about this novel.

It is a brilliant and complex novel of ideas and characters – some met fleetingly, but still embued with personality and understanding, some meeting again like old friends, woven into the strands of Ursula’s alternatives lives.

But there is also Kate Atkinson’s trademark wit among the bodies to be enjoyed and savoured among the devastation. She has such humanity, every bomb victim is humanised and individualised.

Her ideas are delivered in delightful slivers, whether describing The Fuhrer’s taste in films and women, or the destruction of homes blown to bits and the growing normality of death.

‘The Great icy crags and the rushing waterfalls, the endless pine trees – nature and myth fused to form the Germanic sublimated soul, German Romanticism, it seemed to Ursula, was writ large and mystical, the English Lakes seemed tame by comparison. And the English soul, if it resided anywhere, was surely in some unheroic back garden – a patch of lawn, a bed of roses, a row of runner beans.’

Even though she has the chance to try again and again, Ursula always runs into the Second World War, although, this is a fictional narrative, so maybe it’s even possible to do something about that . . .

A stunning novel, effortlessly readable. Of course as we didn’t get a Jackson Brodie this time I am now desperate for that. Write faster Kate Atkinson."

Back in the real world, of course, we only have one life. And thus the choices we make are imbued with the full gamut of human qualities, from cowardice and shame through to to bravery, courage and loyalty. In Tracy Chevalier's latest book 'The Last Runaway' the choices are faced by Honor Bright, who at the start of the book is a young, naive Quaker girl, setting off to start a new life in the new world with her sister, Grace.

After a terrifying crossing, and a tragedy that strikes upon arriving on American soil, Honor ends up in the wide-open expanses of the lowlands of Ohio. But this is the 1850s, only a few years before Abraham Lincoln's presidency, and slavery is coming to an end. Honor gets involved with the 'Underground Railway', a network of anti-slavery campaigners and sympathisers, delivering runaway slaves out of the American south and ultimately into Canada.

Tracy Chevalier is another of our favourite authors, her best known book being Girl with a Pearl Earring, and fans are going to be delighted that this book definitely reaches those heights. In slow, measured and at times very spare prose, Chevalier paints an extremely vivid portrayal of a frontier life about to undergo fundamental change. There is a cast of great characters, particularly the matriarchal, flamboyant milliner Belle and her brother Donovan, who represents a brooding paradox of the heart for Honor: a professional slave-hunter who nevertheless seems to match Honor in terms of his principles and faith.

This book has a very contemporary feel to it, and just as our society is currently looking back 80 years to the 1930s, to a time of depression and the rumblings of war, so the 1850s in America - 80 years before that - were similarly times of great change, oppression and a  looming Civil War. But none of this gets in the way of what is a wonderfully told story, one that only afterwards has you thinking about issues of religion, faith can how they both provide important firebreaks to the relentlessness of powerful forces. This is a joy of a book from an author on absolutely top form.

(And an Abingdon aside: we're very fond of Tracy, not just because she was the author who presented us with our Nibbie five years ago! Given our town's reputation for quilts and quilt-making, the description of the pioneer Quaker's quilting traditions is an unexpected treat - read an interview with Tracy here)

Finally, another mention for a book that was first recommended on our Mother's Day recommends - 'The Unknown Bridesmaid' by Margaret Forster. The story charts the unravelling of the life of Julia, a child psychologist, who has skeleton's in her closet which cast a subtle but increasingly significant shadow over her life.

Moving back and forth between her childhood and different points in Julia's life, Forster teases out details of Julia's life and character, and the choices she has made.

This is classic Forster, full of compassion and taking the ordinary and unexceptional and elevating them with sublime writing.

Riches indeed...