THE BOOKSELLER BUYER’S GUIDE | PUBLISHERS’ AUTUMN TITLES
AUTUMN NON-FICTION Highlights
Caroline Sanderson, non-fiction previewer for The Bookseller, selects her non-fiction highlights of the season
Eyes down for the all-important autumn season, and it’s as varied a picture as one could wish for, with some notable 2016 traits. Autobiographies by celebrities continue to cede
Ey it n
territory to Instagrammers and YouTubers with the diverse personalities of Estée Lalonde, Jack & Jack, Niomi Smart, Danny MacAskill, Zanna Van Dijk, Chaz Hutton, Dan Bilzarian and Deliciously Stella all attempting to
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transition their appeal into book form. i i h
Instagram is also the inspiration for one of the likely illustrated hits of the season Life on Instagram. Wonderfully, this is altogether a golden age for the book as beautiful, covetable object, and there are many other lavishly illustrated delights, among which some of my favourites are The History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen by David Hockney & Martin Gayford; Un-Discovered Islands by Malachy Tallack; and Meetings with
Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel. In a year which began with the sad loss of David Bowie, there are a number
of biographies of the Thin White Duke; alongside another strong offering of musician memoirs including I am Brian Wilson by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys; and Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, the book I am most itching to get my hands on this autumn. However, there is no doubt about the trend of the season. There are numerous
books with a distinctly Nordic flavour, as publishers jump on the Scand- wagon. And amid this log roll of titles, which encompasses lifestyle, cookery, craft and more, one word dominates: hygge. A Danish word of Norwegian origin it is variously defined as: “the art of creating intimacy”; “cosiness of the soul”; and perhaps most evocatively of all, “cocoa by candlelight”. So that is what I wish for you when the Christmas hurly-burly is done. Cocoa. And candlelight. And a cosy level of sales.
THAMES & HUDSON
THE HISTORY OF PICTURES: FROM THE CAVE TO THE COMPUTER SCREEN DAVID HOCKNEY; MARTIN GAYFORD SEPTEMBER, HB, £29.95, 9780500239490 “The art book of the decade” is the ambitious billing for this fetching collaboration between the world-renowned artist and the author of Man with a Blue Scarf, in which they discuss the 40,000-year history of pictures as a single narrative. It takes in an amazing range of art, from cave paintings and Rembrandt to Walt Disney and Martin Scorsese, with each chapter designed to answer an important question; from “Why is the Mona Lisa beautiful?” to “What makes marks on a flat surface interesting?”. Hockney himself has designed the jacket.
JOHN MURRAY
ELIZABETH JANE HOWARD ARTEMIS COOPER 22 SEPTEMBER, HB, £25, 9781848549272 Probably the literary biography of the autumn is this authorised life of Howard by the biographer of Elizabeth David and Patrick Leigh Fermor. It “explores a
12 | Autumn 2016
woman trying to make sense of her life through her writing, as
well as illuminating the literary world in which she lived”. Cooper draws on numerous interviews with the woman herself, but also with family, friends and contemporaries, and has had full access to her papers. Ultimately it tries to answer the question of why such a brilliant and sympathetic woman who wrote with such subtlety and perception get herself entangled in such a web of emotional disasters.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
BORN TO RUN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN 27 SEPTEMBER, HB, £20, 9781471157790 Partly self-indulgence (I am a huge Springsteen fan) but I have high hopes for the quality of this music memoir which tells Springsteen’s inspiring story: growing up in Freehold, New Jersey “amid the poverty, danger and darkness that fuelled his imagination”; the seminal moment when he saw Elvis Presley’s début on “The Ed Sullivan Show”; his relentless drive to become a musician; and the many other personal struggles that inspired his best work. Written with “the lyricism of a singular songwriter”, Simon & Schuster promises
TITLES NOT TO MISS
10 PARTICULAR BOOKS
LIFE ON INSTAGRAM 01 SEPTEMBER, HB, £20, 9781846149092
us that this will be revelatory for anyone who loves Springsteen, and much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. Baby, this was born to run.
PENGUIN LIFE
THE LITTLE BOOK OF HYGGE MEIK WIKING 29 SEPTEMBER, HB, £9.99, 9780241283912 Among the many Danish- flavoured books being published on the theme of hygge this autumn, Meik Wiking, arguably has the most interesting qualification to write a book on the concept. He is c.e.o. of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, and believes that along with its everyday congenial pleasures—good coffee, delicious cake, congenial company, red wine poured into hearty stews, and books read curled up by the fire while the rain hammers down outside—hygge, along with high welfare spending, might also provide part of the reason why Denmark is consistently ranked the happiest nation in the world.
This “powerful expression of contemporary culture” which “tells the story of the world as the world wants to tell it” unites in a lavish single volume, thousands of beautiful, original and creative photographs from around the world, selected from the seventy million posted on Instagram every single day. Particular is pitching it as an exciting new annual for younger audiences, to rival The Guinness Book of Records and Ripley’s.
LITTLE TOLLER BOOKS
that small Dorset-based indy Little Toller Books produces. This beautiful landmark anthology—“a collection of words from the woods”— reminds us why woodlands matter in essays on the subject from a sterling list of contributors who includes Ali Smith, Alan Garner, Kathleen Jamie, Simon Armitage, Helen Dunmore, Paul Kingsnorth, Germaine Greer, William Boyd. Tobias Hill, Richard Mabey and Evie Wyld.
ICON BOOKS
ARBOREAL, A WOODLAND ANTHOLOGY 06 OCTOBER, HB, £20, 9781908213419 I admire every single book
JANE AUSTEN, THE SECRET RADICAL HELENA KELLY 03 NOVEMBER, HB, £20, 9781785781162 “We don’t read Jane Austen properly—we haven’t been reading her properly for 200 years”. That is the contention of this début book which introduces the reader to a “passionate woman living in an age of revolution; and to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects”. Published in good time for the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death in July 2017, its “chuck out the tea-cups and embroidery” approach to uncovering a “radical, spirited and political engaged Austen”,
www.thebookseller.com
Caroline Sanderson
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