Welcome to issue 11 of Dust Jackets, where Mr B’s booksellers review great backlist books. This month Soffi unearths a neglected modern classic, Liv swims through the Mermaid Collection, and Tom discovers some more authors everyone else knows…
Soffi on My Death
Lisa Tuttle is somewhat of an unknown powerhouse. Having co-written Windhaven in the ’80s with George RR Martin, she was ultimately eclipsed by his fame.
In My Death, originally published in 2004, she has her narrator – a writer, no less – chronicle the life of the aging author Helen Raston, who is best known (if at all) as the subject of W.E. Logan’s painting Circe and muse for his novels.
Tuttle’s characters are tightly based on the poet Laura Riding and her lover Robert Graves; Raston, like Riding, tragically fell out of a window and suffered severe injuries… or was she pushed? As our narrator investigates this aging author’s life and her historical erasure as a female novelist, uncanny similarities arise that cause spine-chilling and strange repercussions. As fact and fiction being to blur, you’ll question whose biography is she writing, really?
By Soffi James
Swimming with the Fishes… and Mermaids
I grew up on a steady stream of Hollywood Noir. Black and white movies were background noise: slanting lights and slatted blinds, Lauren Bacall lifting a perfectly arched brow, Humphrey Bogart cracking-wise in that classic voice, rolling words around in his mouth like they were marbles. I must’ve seen their version of The Big Sleep a hundred times. How had I never read it?
Cut to: two weeks ago. A yellow spine on my bookshelf. A sudden itch for that familiar tone. Why not? Cut to: right now. I’m halfway through The Lady in the Lake, Chandler’s fourth novel featuring iconic (and laconic) PI, Philip Marlowe. Appropriately jaded, tight-lipped Marlowe only opens his mouth to dispense tough dialogue, nibbles his way through nice bottles of whiskey, meanders from crime scene to crime scene, has a habit of stumbling on dead bodies, and (according to everyone who looks at him) is also sickeningly handsome. Of course, I fell in love instantly.
I’m also a big fan of the Mermaid Collection, a new imprint from Michael Joseph which proudly champions forgotten voices. I fell head over heels for Margaret Kennedy’s Lucy Carmichael last year (it now lives on my favourites shelf!) and have been very kindly sent the entire collection – this bookseller’s equivalent of Christmas morning!
I have my eye on two new releases: Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor, a 1000+ page doorstopper that’s been described as the original bonkbuster (like if Jilly Cooper wrote about the Restoration!), and A Long Way From Home by Rosamunde Pilcher, which I’m currently reading.
Originally published under a pen name for Mills & Boon, A Long Way From Home sees newly-orphaned Katy swap her Scottish Hebridean island for the Mediterranean upon finding out she might be an heiress… Gorgeously escapist, this sun-soaked romance feels like a 60s Cinderella story. Perfect for fans of Eva Ibbotson!
Browse the Mermaid Collection here!
By Liv Burness
Discovering the Already Discovered
It’s a bit of a running joke among my colleagues that I have a habit of discovering big name authors that everyone else already knows about.
I can’t refute it. I came to reading and literature fairly late in life – I was 27 before I really read for pleasure – so I have always been making up for lost time. And, of course, I missed many of the literary touchstones and cults of the 90s and 2000s. The evidence for my discovering of authors who really don’t need discovering is bountiful. I first read Haruki Murakami in late 2023 after a chance encounter with Norwegian Wood: the next 18 months saw me read another 17 of his books. I have read five Karl Ove Knausgaard books just this summer. Han Kang wins the Nobel Prize – I’ll discover her the next year. And who’s this fresh new author Ivan Turgenev everyone’s talking about?
This summer has been no different. On holiday a few weeks ago I took two books by titans of the modern British novel, neither of which I had ever got to before.
First up was Muriel Spark, about whom I had many inaccurate preconceptions. Perhaps it was the name Muriel, perhaps it was the twee sound of some of her novels – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means… it all sounded so light and old fashioned. The Driver’s Seat had been following me around for a while, having seen it pop up on lists and heard customers and colleagues talking about. Well, how wrong I was. What a deliciously nasty piece of work! Opening in a clothing store where our protagonist expresses a strange and uncomfortable outrage at what she sees as an insult from a sales assistant, it descends into a winding, noirish story of violence, mistrust, and manipulation. Disturbing and upsetting in the very best way, it felt barely a side-step from the likes of Jim Thompson, Harry Crews and Charles Willeford. I can’t wait to read more of her work.
Ian McEwan is perhaps the most popular author to be mentioned to me by reading subscribers and customers at Mr B’s, and his books sell by the pile every time a new one comes out. And yet, I had never read one. The Comfort of Strangers was McEwan’s second novel and, following his debut The Cement Garden, emboldened his reputation as a superb chronicler of psychological tension and the sliding doors moments that lead to disaster. The Comfort of Strangers opens in an unnamed European city where British couple Colin and Mary are on holiday. Venturing out one evening into streets they cannot read, they find themselves lost and drawn into the orbit of a dangerous stranger called Robert. What follows is a shocking and disturbing spiral into a world of violence. A perfect short, dark read for the summer holidays and a great place to start with McEwan’s work.
Buy The Comfort of Strangers now!
by Tom Mooney