Publishing must be the next place to set books as there seem to have been a few recently. Anyway, here goes. 5 that I have read.
I don’t know if it is cheating to choose two books that are in the same series but Less and Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer are both very enjoyable stories about a rather accident prone author who has ‘adventures’. In Less, the eponymous author Arthur, tries to escape his former lover’s wedding by going on a tour as an author to speak at conferences. He is a little like Mr Bean and so has many incidents on this low-cost tour and there is some wonderful play on words. In Less is Lost, Arthur’s first lover dies and Less discovers that he has been living rent free in one of his lover’s houses and now rent is due. Less sets off to earn money and of course has all sorts of ‘adventures’ this time with another author, a camper van and a cast of weirdos. Both books are about aging and loss and are funny. Very funny.
Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang is a book that is having a moment. It is about author rivalry where one author steals a manuscript from another and then spends the rest of the story trying to avoid being caught out. And you just can’t. Not only is this book set in the publishing world but it also looks at the role of social media in promotion and the dangers that lurk out there. You never get caught the way you expect. In fact in this element it seems as if Kuang is drawing on her own experiences. The book asks the question: Whose story is it? What right do you have to use it and how much should you change it? When does a story stop belonging to someone else and become your own?
In the end, it is all about money, who is in and who is not. This book is a page turner and reads like a thriller/heist.
Book Lovers by Amy Henry is a romance based around two people who work in publishing. It sets out to buck the trend of romances by saying at the start that the main protaganist is not the sweet little woman, smiling and quietly attracting her man but is the career, go-getting girl who is a little bit of a hard-ass at work. The story does then follow a will they, won’t they pattern set in a small town but allows the main characters in it to find their own place in the world. City vs. small town, children vs no children. They’re all in there. I am not a massive fan of this type of book but the hype over social media has been quite extensive and I fell for it thus proving what Yellowface was all about.
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris is an unusal, genre defying debut: a little bit sci-fi, a little bit of suspence and a lot of horror. Nella is the only Black woman working in her publishing house until Hazel-May joins the company. Bit by bit, Hazel-May starts to edge Nella out of the company in quiet, hard-to-detect ways. The book focuses on racism in micro and macro ways with the book providing a spotlight on a work space where diversity is seen as something that has to be done rather than welcomed for its own sake. A remarkable book.