The bookseller: Jan 13 (original) (raw)

If you couldn't face ploughing through all those newspaper "books of the year" lists, don't feel guilty: Booktrust has done it for you. The reading charity has counted up 1,300 critics' picks of 2006, finding that the favourite title was Irène Némirovsky's rediscovered second world war masterpiece Suite Française (Chatto). The other favoured fiction of 2006 included Sarah Waters's Booker-shortlisted The Night Watch (Virago), Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land (Bloomsbury), Martin Amis's House of Meetings (Cape), and Philip Roth's Everyman (Cape). In non-fiction, Jenny Uglow's biography of Thomas Bewick, Nature's Engraver (Faber), was plugged most, followed by Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man (Viking), Rupert Everett's Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins (Little, Brown) and former publisher Carmen Callil's Bad Faith (Cape). The Booktrust exercise shows that, despite the wilful obscurity and back-scratching that can bedevil "books of the year" features, there's a clear critical consensus on the truly outstanding work. The imprint that can boast the most selections is Faber - thanks largely to Seamus Heaney, Andrew O'Hagan and Peter Carey - followed by Cape, Bloomsbury and Chatto.

· Calling them the Costas doesn't quite feel right - but people probably felt the same way about their predecessors, the Whitbread book awards, when they were launched in 1971. William Boyd won't care: his second world war espionage thriller Restless is surely now the frontrunner for the overall Costa book of the year, with the Richard & Judy boost still to come. Boyd's win in the novels category put a smile back on the face of Bloomsbury, which was accused of over-paying to poach him from Penguin. The other publishing story of the Costas was a first novel win for Stef Penney, whose murder mystery The Tenderness of Wolves was one of the first books to be released by Quercus, the new company set up by Anthony Cheetham.

· Ben Okri, winner of the 2001 Booker prize, is moving publisher from Weidenfeld to Random House's Rider imprint, which is known as a mind, body and spirit specialist. Okri is not turning his hand to meditation or diet books; rather, Rider is being reinvented as a broader list, encompassing politics, biography and literary fiction. Okri's Starbook, due in August, is described as "a fabulous, poetic novel, with all the style and imagination that gave The Famished Road the Booker".

· If you can't bear to hear more talk of muggles or Hogwarts, you'd be advised to take a holiday for most of 2007 - ideally on the moon. Within eight hours of JK Rowling revealing that her seventh and final Potter tome will be called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, frenzied customer pre-orders pushed it to the top of Amazon's chart, where it has stayed since December 23. WH Smith is offering a free copy of a Garth Nix novel with all orders, while Waterstones.com is giving away Wizardology. Meanwhile, a group of independent bookshops, anticipating savage discounting on the book by supermarkets, are threatening not to stock it. All this without any firm promise that The Deathly Hallows will even be published this year.

· The Arts Council initiative Decibel, which promotes literature by and for black and minority ethnic groups, has had a rap on the knuckles from the Commission for Racial Equality. At issue was the Decibel Penguin prize for short stories, which Tory MP Philip Davies complained discriminated against white authors. After consulting with the CRE, Decibel and Penguin will open the 2007 award to all new writers addressing the theme of personal stories of immigration to the UK. It is doubtful that the change will pacify the far-right activists who have been bombarding Penguin with hate mail - presumably they're disgruntled that their own carefully wrought manuscripts are languishing in the slush pile. Meanwhile, a Decibel pilot scheme to increase bookshop space for British black and minority ethnic writers will run as planned this June, with support from Borders, Waterstone's, WH Smith and Foyles.

Joel Rickett is deputy editor of the Bookseller