PRODUCT PREVIEW
saga. The attractive new jacket
treatment should appeal to
younger readers, too.
Kate Muir
West Coast
Headline Review, £6.99, 4th,
9780755325047
Her Paris-set début, Left
Bank, sold 100,000 and, while
the metropolitan adventures
of a lad from a Scottish
fishing village aren’t quite so
commercial, the distinctive
cover gives this every chance
of replicating those sales.
Pascal Mercier
Night Train to Lisbon
Atlantic, £7.99, 1st, 9781843547136
Already a hit across Europe
and with 20,000 trade
paperbacks sold in the first two
months, this superior literary
thriller will appeal to fans of The
Shadow of the Wind.
Shy Keenan
Broken
Hodder, £6.99, 18th,
9780340937440
This is traumatic
even by misery
memoir
standards—it
was the author’s
testimony which lead to the
destruction of a paedophile
ring, which included her
stepfather. Her media contacts
should make this a bestseller.
BUBBLING UNDER
Jo Nesbø
Nemesis
Vintage, £6.99, 4th, 9780099505938
The third Harry Hole title to be
released in the UK, although
the second in the sequence,
which annoyed my reader.
She’s popular across the trade.
Stephen Leather
Dead Men
Hodder, £6.99, 18th,
9780340921722
Hodder is
offering buyers
of this terrorism
thriller from
Leather, who is
now a book-per-year author,
a money-back guarantee on
the back of an Andy McNab
comparison.
Julia Kelly
With My Lazy Eye
Quercus, £6.99, 4th, 9781847247001
Misled by the Cecelia Ahern
jacket quote, I read a
completely
different book to
the one I was
expecting: the
snapshots of
growing up make
for a satisfying
exploration of
family dynamics.
I worry Quercus’ ambitions for
it will be curtailed by a weak
cover.
Douglas
Coupland
The Gum Thief
Bloomsbury, £7.99, 1st,
9780747593829
Bloomsbury
has done an
exceptional job
in packaging
Coupland and will hope to
exceed the 50,000 sold of his
last, JPod. The protagonist’s
novel-in-progress features as
an extra.
Rebecca Shaw
The Village Green
Affair
Orion, £6.99, 18th,
9780752893624
Miss Marple
goes to
Ambridge,
essentially. The
look, including the backlist, is
being spruced up a little.
Peter Temple
Dead Point
Quercus, £6.99, 4th,
9781847245724
Australia’s
biggest crime
writer continues
to win new fans
in the UK. He’s
broken 50,000 now and there
are two new hardbacks in the
second half of 2008 as well.
Julia Williams
Strictly Love
Avon, £6.99, 22nd, 9781847560162
With 60,000 sold of début novel
Pastures New and a new series
of “Strictly Come Dancing” due
in October, I think this, with its
sparkly jacket, is likely to have
the edge over Lucy Dillon’s The
Ballroom Class from Hodder.
Elizabeth Wrenn
Last Known Address
Avon, £6.99, 8th,
9781847560155
Another early success for
Avon.Wrenn’s feel-good second
is spot-on for the Maeve Binchy
market.
18 The Bookseller Autumn Paperback Preview | 6 June 2008 www.thebookseller.com
Santa Montefiore
The French Gardener
Hodder, £6.99, 18th, 9780340840504
The new look should attract
fans of Danielle Steel and
Penny Vincenzi.
Duncan Falconer
Undersea Prison
Sphere, £6.99, 18th,
9780751539509
Having fallen
one spot short
of the Sunday
Times top 10 with
67,000 sold of
The Operative, Little, Brown
is going all-out for the Cussler
market with the latest pacy,
claustrophobic adventure for
agent John Stratton.
John Fenton
Please Don’t Make Me Go
HarperElement, £6.99, 1st, 9780007263783
Abuse at home and at school in
the ’50s. Harrowing stuff.
Clarissa Dickson Wright
Spilling the Beans
Hodder, £7.99, 4th, 9780340933893
Many shops were caught
out last Christmas, but this
distinctive memoir still went
on to sell more than 100,000
copies.
ONES TO WATCH
Jane Beaton
Class: First Year at
Downey House
Sphere, £6.99, 18th,
9780751540604
Malory Towers
Jilly Cooper-style,
with a new one
to follow each
September. We follow the lives
of both staff and pupils, so the
teenage market should also be
keen. Hogwarts seems straitlaced
by comparison: it seems
hockey sticks are jollier than
broomsticks.
Emily Barr
The Sisterhood
Headline Review, £6.99, 18th,
97780755335572
Barr’s sales tick along at
25,000, but Headline think this
will be her breakthrough title.
I concur—it should satisfy
her existing fans, but it has a
darkness which really sticks in
the memory too.
Neil Cross
Natural History
Pocket, £6.99, 1st, 9781416522799
The “Spooks” scriptwriter has
AUTUMN PAPERPACK PREVIEW
a gift for creating a creepy
atmosphere, reflected by the
elegant new jacket for the
mass market. His memoir,
Heartland, made top 10 in
paperback.
Alan Greenspan
The Age of Turbulence
Penguin, £9.99, 4th, 9780141029917
Penguin has missed a trick by
not bringing this out in time
for the significant business
beach-read market—a pity after
20,000 hardback sales.
Claire Seeber
Bad Friends
Avon, £6.99, 22nd, 9781847560483
A character-driven thriller for
the Nicci French market, about
friendship gone terribly wrong.
A great jacket.
Marcus Chown
Quantum Theory
Cannot Hurt You
Faber, £7.99, 4th,
9780571235469
Chown is swiftly
becoming the
face of accessible
popular science,
vital when many hot topics are
so very complex. This has sold
more than 20,000 in hardback.
Paul Kingsnorth
Real England
Portobello, £7.99, 1st, 9781846270420
Once past a wearisome chapter
on real ale, Kingsnorth’s
celebration of English
traditions is far from the
insular rant I had feared—it’s
an impassioned plea to save
the cultural diversity being
suffocated by corporate
homogeneity.
OCTOBER
GIANTS
Josephine Cox
Songbird
HarperFiction, £6.99, 1st, 9780007221158
Given the log jam of big names
out in September, Cox has
wisely been put back a month.
She continues to find new
readers.
Ken Follett
World Without End
Pan, £8.99, 3rd,
9780330490702
The sequel to
Macmillan’s
biggest backlist
title, The Pillars
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