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Previews Paperback Preview


Paperback Preview May


May sees a healthy flow of late spring titles including Booker winners, literary fiction and commercial perennials


Will Smith @likewinterblue


A


healthy, verdant glow of late spring paperbacks arrives in May. Literary


fiction flowers forth abundantly, with eagerly awaited paperback arrivals including Booker winner Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, Paul Murray’s acclaimed The Bee Sting and Rebecca F Kuang’s sharp publishing satire Yellowface. Vigorous growth in romantasy is apparent too, with Carissa Broadbent’s The Serpent and the Wings of Night and Evelyn Skye’s The Hundred Loves of Juliet at the forefront. New instalments of commercial perennials should also see return custom (Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before We Say Goodbye and Deborah Rodriguez’s Farewell to The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul). Sporting books are in season,


with vintage football stories spanning fiction (Jilly Cooper’s Tackle! and Billy O’Callaghan’s


Submissions Paperback Preview is a monthly summary of second-edition fiction and non-fiction paperbacks. Contact paperbackpreview@gmail.com for submission guidelines; for deadlines, visit thebookseller.com/ publishing-calendar.


Next week 40


The Paper Man) and non-fiction (John Preston and Elton John’s Watford Forever and Julian Dicks’ Hammer Time). Lauren Fleshman’s William Hill Sports Book Award winner Good for a Girl looks at how to support female athletes, The Extra Mile from Rugby League’s Kevin Sinfield is sure to encourage possession and the sound of willow on leather echoes strongly from cricketing volumes (Mike Brearley’s Turning Over the Pebbles and Stuart Broad’s Broadly Speaking). Reissues of note continue the


sporting theme with an updated 20th anniversary edition of Richard Askwith’s cult fell-running classic Feet in the Clouds leading the pack. Anne Enright’s backlist receives fresh atention to accompany the paperback release of Writers’ Prize (formerly the Rathbones Folio Prize) shortlisted The Wren, The Wren. Vintage spoils us with three Rosemary Tonks novels available half a century aſter they were first published and C J Sansom’s Shardlake series are all reissued ahead of a Disney+ adaptation featuring Arthur Hughes and Sean Bean.


BookScan ratings accompanying titles are based on TCM sales (excludes e-book, export, direct, library and other sales) of the author’s most recent original work in a similar format with at least six months’ sales through Nielsen BookScan, using the notation left.


50,000+ 25,000+ 10,000+ 5,000+ 3,000+


The next edition of The Bookseller (1st March) will feature New Titles: Fiction covering titles released in June


23rd February 2024


Book of the Month Sandgren serves up a delicious detective thriller


Literary


Lydia Sandgren, Agnes Broomé (trans)


Collected Works Pushkin Press, 2nd, £10.99, 9781782278009


Début A cleverly structured, cinemati- cally told long novel thrusting


readers into the past and present of publisher Martin Berg. Martin was once, decades ago, an aspiring writer who had half-finished writing a novel,


his girlfriend was the beautiful, intelligent Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the up-and-coming artist Gustav Becker. But Martin’s manuscript is still half-finished, stowed away in the attic, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia vanished, missing for years, leaving him to raise their two young children alone. One of those two children, Rakel, is passed a manuscript to read for her father’s publishing house which accidentally sets her on a search for the truth about her missing mother. Funny and self-referential throughout, there are some


excellent nods to length and editing with Martin admitting his thoughts amount to the “stuff you cut for the sake of pacing”, or wondering if cutting 25% of a novel would offend the author and one of Rakel’s friends noting women who write long texts are “censured and decried as self-absorbed”. But this is a careful, expansive tale. Pushkin reports sales of over 100,000 copies in Sandrgen’s native Sweden, where the novel won the August Prize. “A delicious combination of a detective thriller with an achingly beautiful extended look at the way youth washes over a group of compelling characters”, said the Guardian.


© Emelie Apslund


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