It records a journey taken across England’s moors from Bodmin and Dartmoor to North Yorkshire and Northumberland. Our book that deserved to do better: William Atkins’s The Moor was written about by Blake Morrison in this paper as Review’s book of the week.
The book frames Ian’s handwritten lyrics – which remain some of the most powerful in the rock’n’roll canon – as a literary journey, with a visual appendix presenting the books that survived from Ian’s library: Kafka, Eliot, Ballard, Burroughs. Two months ago we published So this Is Permanence, the lyrics and notebooks of Ian Curtis, a beautifully and lovingly assembled book put together with the help of his band, Joy Division, Jon Savage and Ian’s widow, Deborah Curtis. The book that made my year: Over the last few years there has been a definite shift in publishing towards making books beautiful again. One for Nigel Farage’s Christmas stocking? It took familiar tropes from dystopian fiction and did something adventurous and imaginative with them (not least the creation of lovable, yet distinctly unlovely, aliens) to create a serious, morally questioning novel about our attitudes to the “other”. I wish I’d published: I thought Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things was superb. We are hoping our spring paperback publication will awaken British readers to its immense charm.
Our book that deserved to do better: Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of AJ Fikry has been a huge success in hardback everywhere in the world apart from the UK. Last Friends, the final book in her brilliant trilogy which began with Old Filth, was shortlisted for the Folio prize and her Collected Stories was rightly showered with praise. The book that made my year: The resurgence of Jane Gardam’s books has given me as much pleasure as anything this year. Richard Beswick MD, Little, Brown and Abacus To me this is the first fictional nature writing to match the qualities of its much lauded non-fiction counterparts. I then went back to his first novel, The Long Dry, a beautiful, melancholic meditation on farming life. I wish I’d published: I was overwhelmed by Cynan Jones’s The Dig, a novel that somehow transforms the unlikely raw material of badger-baiting and the death of a spouse into a shocking, brutal yet poetic novel. This makes it far from fashionable, and all the more to be applauded.” Claire Messud’s review in this paper perhaps explains why it hasn’t yet broken out: “It is at once quiet and memorable. I believe it is a masterpiece – a novel about two creative spirits whose narrator, Gus, is one of the most arresting women in recent fiction. Our book that deserved to do better: We published a first novel, Life Drawing, by Robin Black, that united its readers in awe and admiration.