Christmas. Presents. Books are even easier to wrap than bottles. See the home page of the website and bear in mind the Season Tickets: 6 books for £50, 10 for £75. Within the UK, free postage. This is the best of these deals on offer, it really is.
Buying a book for X can be tricky. X might not just not like the book, they might decide that if you thought they would like this then even after all these years you haven’t really understood who they are, and your whole relationship is on the line. You could buy X a book that won one of the big prizes but that’s outsourcing your choice to random panel of judges and is just bland. The point of the Season Tickets is that you choose which books; and if you’re buying for X you’re spreading your bets – X is unlikely to dislike all of the books you’ve chosen. Or you could let X choose for themself: ask them to, or buy the Ticket and send me their email and I’ll take it from there.
There are around 80 titles on the website to choose from. Some are available exclusively from the website – books with only a few copies left may be officially out of print at the distributor, and so not in bookshops, but are still available from the website.
These are the first two books out of the block for next year:
Farah Ali’s Telegraphy, which will publish in January, is available from the website now. Erin Vincent’s Fourteen Ways of Looking, which will publish in March, is now printing and will be available in January. Both books, not through any effort of my own, already have US publishers (and Erin Vincent’s in Australia too). A little later, Axholme by Mike Bradwell (1948–2025), who founded the Hull Truck theatre company in the early 1970s and ran the Bush Theatre (my local) from 1996 to 2007: voiced by a nine-year-old boy in a village in Lincolnshire in the 1950s, it’s a wonder.
My last day in an office (which I’d gone into at 9.30 each weekday for fourteen years) was the last working day before Christmas 2005, twenty years ago. Quitting the day job has turned out to be one of my better decisions; I’ve made worse.
A first for me: attending a Leicester Square premiere screening. I went because I’m more than a little obsessed with the actor Billy Bob Thornton, and I’ve written about this on the CBe blog, Sonofabook: here.
