AUTUMN PAPERPACK PREVIEW
This is the story
of outsiders:
women in a
patriarchal
society and
migrants in an
unfamiliar
environment.
Xinran’s wideranging
media work should
assist the marketing push.
Terry Wogan
Wogan’s Twelve
Orion, £6.99, 24th, 9780752894140
Fifteen years on BBC Radio 2
and his audience figures are
still climbing—now to more
than eight million listeners a
week. With the cartoons by
Telegraph cartoonist Matt, I’m
surprised this hasn’t been held
over until gift season.
Kerry Cohen
Loose Girl
Ebury Press, £6.99, 3rd,
9780091922719
A promising
melting pot of
memoir genres—
addiction, sex
and teenage
angst. Has support from WHS
Travel, although supermarkets
won’t be so keen.
Graham Robb
The Discovery of France
Picador, £8.99, 4th,
9780330427616
A fantastic account of French
culture informed more by
folklore than historical fact. In
hardback it’s sold 25,000.
Mark Tully
India’s Unending
Journey
Rider, £8.99, 4th,
9781846040184
About 20,000
hardbacks have
been sold of this
enlightening
journey through perhaps the
most complex culture in the
world.
ONES TO WATCH
Ronnie Howard with Tim
Fennell
Ronnie’s Looking for Trouble
Mainstream, £7.99, 3rd,
9781845963514
A News of the World
serialisation helped this
account of a Birmingham cop
who definitely didn’t do things
by the book to C-format sales of
nearly 9,000.
Thomas Glavinic
Night Work
Canongate, 17th, £8.99, 9781847670519
Jonas awakes in Vienna and
finds he is alone in the world.
A literary tour de force which
delivers on its ambitious
premise. Glavinic is one of
Austria’s most talented young
writers whose only previous
UK release, Carl Haffner’s Love
of the Draw, is also exceptional.
Julian Clary
Murder Most Fab
Ebury Press, £6.99, 3rd,
9780091914486
The same eyewatering
colour
scheme that
attracted nearly
25,000 hardback
sales is retained and the
filthy laughs that fans of his
80,000-selling memoir would
expect are just as at home in
this surprisingly fine piece of
storytelling.
Charles Martin
Where the River
Ends
Ebury Press, £6.99, 24th,
9780091927004
This classic tearjerker
is Ebury’s
biggest fiction
acquisition so far.
It will be backed by a massive
advertising campaign and then
the next two titles will come at
six-month intervals for rapid
brand building. There’s already
an industry buzz about it.
Justin Kerr-Smiley
Under the Sun
Reportage, £7.99, 2nd, 9780955830280
Sparsely written, this absorbing
début about an airman taken
prisoner by the Japanese
in unusual circumstances
explores the commonalities
and dichotomies of Eastern
and Western values with great
sensitivity.
Damian
Thompson
Counterknowledge
Atlantic, £7.99, 1st,
9781843546764
Beating
Panicology to the
paperback punch,
this 10,000-seller
in hardback is an engaging and
witty guide in differentiating
between fact and opinion,
looking at conspiracy theories,
medical quackery and other
areas of fierce contention.
www.thebookseller.com The Bookseller Autumn Paperback Preview | 6 June 2008 13
Sid Waddell
Bellies and
Bullseyes
Ebury, £6.99, 7th,
9780091917562
The paperback
is being pitched
more as a
memoir than
as a history of darts and
since Waddell’s iconic image
reaches well beyond the
sport, that seems pretty canny.
Supermarkets are on board.
Andrew Bridge
Hope’s Boy
Hodder, £6.99, 10th, 9780340952368
The author’s enduring love
for his schizophrenic mother,
despite the consequences to
his childhood, make this a
superior misery memoir. It’s
already been a top 10 title in
the US.
Penny Smith
Coming Up Next
HarperFiction, £6.99,
21st, 9780007268894
A paperback
original début
novel from the
GMTV stalwart
in which a TV
presenter has to cope with
making way for a younger
model. Full of celebrity
glamour.
Steve Martin
Born Standing Up
Pocket, £7.99, 7th,
9781847391483
The hardback
sold more than
20,000 in the two
months before
Christmas.
Unlikely to be a big paperback
hit, but a future classic worth
adding to core stock lists.
Judith O’Reilly
Wife in the North
Penguin, £7.99, 3rd,
9780141033433
Accounts of
escaping the
pressures of
city life can be
insufferable but
this paperback original, based
on the splendid blog of the
same name, is big-hearted and
wittily self-deprecating.
Lisa Lutz
The Spellman Files
Pocket, £6.99, 3rd, 9781416526407
Simon & Schuster has had a
rethink on the jacket for this
PRODUCT PREVIEW
smart chick lit featuring a
mystery for a family of private
eyes to solve. It sold 20,000 in
trade paperback.
Lola Jaye
By the Time You
Read This
HarperFiction, £6.99,
1st, 9780007266555
An ersatz Cecelia
Ahern, as the
cover treatment
reveals.
Widespread media coverage is
intended.
Sharon Griffiths
The Accidental Time Traveller
Avon, £6.99, 14th, 9781847560902
A wonderfully warm romantic
comedy, whose heroine is
transported back to the ’50s
and finds she rather likes the
traditional values of the time.
One of the débuts most likely to
be an instant hit that I’ve seen.
Judith Lennox
Before the Storm
Headline Review, £6.99, 10th,
9780755331345
An excellent jacket and
samplers in women’s glossies
are part of Headline’s
determined efforts to appeal
to the Maeve Binchy/Kate
Morton market.
Duncan Campbell
The Paradise Trail
Headline Review, £7.99, 24th,
978075342471
My reader was very impressed
by the absorbing sense of time
in this multi-stranded story
of travellers in early 1970s
India who find the real world
intruding rudely on the hippie
ideal.
Robert Ellis
City of Fire
Pan, £6.99, 4th,
9780330450553
This début
in a series to
feature detective
Lena Gamble
is thoroughly
unpredictable, which is what
thriller readers want, according
to The Bookseller’s Reading the
Future survey.
Robert Edric
The Kingdom of Ashes
Black Swan, £7.99, 14th, 9780552774178
My reader was utterly
entranced by this story of
life in post-war Germany and
Transworld intends to stick
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