Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger's Child limited editions

Further to my previous post, The Stranger’s Child has received very positive reviews, so I thought it would be of interest to provide some further information on the limited editions. There seem to be two of these in the UK. The first is a signed, numbered slipcased edition of 500 copies available exclusively from Goldsboro books. I have not seen this as yet, so I am not sure if it is the trade edition with a tipped in page in a slipcase, or if there is some other variation. I will provide an update on this when I have seen a copy*.

The second limited edition, which I have seen, is 40 leather bound copies (in green) from Colm Toibin’s Tuskar Rock press - signed, numbered, dated and in a slipcase which I think is linen. In addition, there are 10 hors de commerce copies. This is a beautiful though relatively expensive book, but is likely to be a good investment for a serious collector.

*I have now seen the Goldsboro Books limited edition - this is in a green board slipcase, with silver lettering to the front.  The book itself is in black boards and green endpapers without dustwrapper, and appears to the trade edition with a tipped in limitation page in front of the titlepage.  The numbering (out of 500) is on the limitation page, and Hollinghurst has signed to the title page in blue pen.

Haruki Murakami - IQ84 limited editions

It is now a couple of years since IQ84 by Haruki Murakami was released in Japan, to great acclaim.  It has since been published in a couple of other countries, and the UK edition is due in October this year.  The book was originally published in three volumes - the UK edition will come in two parts, with volume 1 and 2 combined in a single book, and volume 3 separately. There will be both paperback and hardcover editions.

All of Murakami's recent books have also come as limited editions in the UK, sometimes more than one (see my bibliography for further details). Initial indications are of an unusual format for the limited edition on this occasion - an issue of 100 copies of three separate volumes in a single perspex slipcase, with the title and design printed on it. Each book will be handsewn with exposed binding and coloured thread, and will have an individual hand printed cover design. The third volume only will be signed by Haruki Murakami on the back page, and this will be visible through the Perspex slipcase. These details may, of course, change - and the price is to be confirmed, although initial suggestions are £750, which if confirmed would make this by far and away the most expensive Murakami limited edition to date.***

If there are other UK versions I will confirm these as and when I get details. At the moment I am also aware of a leather bound Australian edition from Random House, at 500 AUD, which will postdate the UK edition, but I do not have any further details*.

*As of 9/9/11, Random House Australia are saying that the leather bound edition will now not be available, and are listing a deluxe signed limited edition 3 volume set. I believe that this is the UK edition, which is now being advertised worldwide, but will keep this under review.

**1/10/11, Foyles are releasing an unsigned variant  of the UK trade edition with red edges, limited to 1500 copies.

***6/11/11, For final details of the perspex limited edition please see here.

Book of the Week and Bibliography - Andrew Miller, Pure

Pure is the sixth novel from Andrew Miller, and is set in 18th century Paris around a cemetery. Miller is a good example of a novelist who has attracted considerable critical acclaim and success, including winning the IMPAC prize, but probably without reaching a huge readership. I have enjoyed several of his previous books, all of which can still be picked up very cheaply as first editions.

Miller was born in 1960 in Bristol, and has lived and worked in several countries, including Spain, France, Holland and Japan. He studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 1991 and finished a Ph.D. in Critical and Creative Writing at Lancaster University in 1995. His first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published in 1997. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Italian Grinzane Cavour Prize. Set during the eighteenth century, it tells the story of surgeon James Dyer and his extraordinary inability to feel pain. It was followed by Casanova (1998), a fictional portrait of the infamous libertine and writer. Both novels are currently being adapted for film. His next novel, Oxygen (2001), set in England in 1997, was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award. The book narrates two loosely connected narratives, those of a dying mother attended by her two sons and a Hungarian playwright living in Paris. The Optimists (2005), is the tale of a photojournalist who returns to Britain from Africa where he was involved in reporting on an atrocity, and One Morning Like a Bird in 2008. Pure is available now.

“A year of bones, of grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love...A year unlike any other he has lived. Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.”

Bibliography

Ingenious Pain Sceptre, 1997. Under £15.
Casanova Sceptre, 1998. Under£15.
Oxygen Sceptre, 2001. Under £10.
The Optimists Sceptre, 2005. Under £10.
One Morning Like a Bird Sceptre, 2008. Under £15.
Pure, Sceptre, 2011.

Book of the Week and Bibliography - Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst is not a prolific author, and The Stranger’s Child is his first novel since A Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004. He was born in Stroud in Gloucestershire, England in 1954 and his early publications were mainly poetry. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), gives an account of London gay life in the early 1980s through the story of a young aristocrat, William Beckwith, and his involvement with the elderly Lord Nantwich, whose life he saves. It was followed by The Folding Star in 1994, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The narrator, Edward Manners, develops an obsessive passion for his pupil, a 17-year-old Flemish boy, in a story that was compared by many critics to Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice. Spell (1998) has been described as a gay comedy of manners, which interweaves the complex relationships between 40-something architect Robin Woodfield, his alcoholic lover Justin, and Justin's ex, timid civil servant Alex, who falls in love with Robin's son Danny. The action moves between the English countryside and London where Danny introduces Alex to ecstasy and clubbing. The Line of Beauty (2004) traces a decade of change and won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

The Stranger’s Child spans almost the whole of the 20th century, tracing the intertwined stories of two families. Advance notices suggest a very strong book, which will certainly come into consideration for the Booker Prize again. Amazon list both a hardcover and a paperback (as well as the now ubiquitous Kindle edition). I would expect a fairly large print run, and signed copies should be fairly easily available if you look around. A 40 copy leather-bound edition is  available, from Tuskar Rock press, and there is also a numbered and signed edition of 500 copies in slipcase availale from Goldsboro Books.

“In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at ‘Two Acres’, the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change forever.

Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance.

At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. As in The Line of Beauty, his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, The Stranger’s Child is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.”



Bibliography

Isherwood is at Santa Monica, Sycamore Press Broadsheet, 1975. £125-150
A Florilegium for John Florio, Sycamore Press, Oxford, 1981. £125-150.
Confidential Chats with Boys, Sycamore Press, Oxford, 1982. £125-200.
The Swimming-Pool Library, Chatto & Windus, 1988. Under £20.
The Folding Star, Chatto & Windus, 1994. Under £10.
The Spell, Chatto & Windus, 1998. Under £10
The Line of Beauty, Picador, 2004. Under £15.
The Stranger's Child, Picador, 2011. At cost.

Book of the Week - Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

Some of the finest writing in English comes from Indian authors, who seem to me to value and champion an elegance of style which has become uncommon in native English writers. There are many fine young Indian authors, some of whom I have highlighted previously – Amitav Ghosh should now probably be considered a senior statesman among Indian authors writing in English, and has increasingly been recognised internationally as an important literary figure.

Many years ago, when I had a little more time, I taught a module on medicine and literature to undergraduate students which featured one of Ghosh’s earlier novels, The Calcutta Chromosome, which dealt with the tension between western and traditional Indian views of science. His previous novel, The Sea of Poppies, was the first in a trilogy set against the background of the Opium wars. It was a blockbuster of a novel, with a rich cast of characters, and was both an exciting and entertaining read. In addition, it managed to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a tribute to the elegance of the writing. The second novel in the trilogy, River of Smoke, is published by John Murray this week and will be high on my list for the summer. This is a simultaneous hardcover and paperback release – collectors should pick up the hardcover, signed as usual if possible.

Ghosh was born in Kolkata, India in 1956 and attended Delhi University and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was awarded a D.Phil . in social anthropology.His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. His wife, Deborah Baker, is a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company and they have two children, Lila and Nayan. He has been a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature. He has also been a visiting professor to the English department of Harvard University since 2005. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

“In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured labourers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Canton? And what fate befell those aboard the Redruth, a sturdy two-masted brig heading East out of Cornwall? Was it the storm that altered their course or were the destinies of these passengers at the mercy of even more powerful forces?

On the grand scale of an historical epic, River of Smoke follows its storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbors of China. There, despite efforts of the emperor to stop them, ships from Europe and India exchange their cargoes of opium for boxes of tea, silk, porcelain and silver. Among them are Bahram Modi, a wealthy Parsi opium merchant out of Bombay, his estranged half-Chinese son Ah Fatt, the orphaned Paulette and a motley collection of others whose pursuit of romance, riches and a legendary rare flower have thrown together. All struggle to cope with their losses - and for some, unimaginable freedoms - in the alleys and crowded waterways of 19th century Canton. As transporting and mesmerizing as an opiate induced dream, River of Smoke will soon be heralded as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literature.”

Book of the Week - Ali Smith, There But For The

Ali Smith is one of my favourite writers – intelligent, funny and usually with a slightly quirky or experimental approach in her books. “There but for the” is her most recent novel – it is divided into four sections (There, But, For, The), but is a unified whole. Smith has a good track record in the Literary Prizes and I have always enjoyed her work, so I am looking forward to this one very much. There will be hardcover and paperback releases, which tends to mean a relatively modest print run for the former.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. Her first book, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award. Her first novel, Like, was published to critical acclaim in 1997. A second collection of short stories, Other Stories and Other Stories, was published in 1999. Her second novel, Hotel World (2001), won the Encore Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the inaugural Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. It was also shortlisted for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize for Fiction. Set during the course of one night, the narrative follows the adventures of five different characters, one of whom is the ghost of a chambermaid killed in a bizarre accident. Her most recent collection of short stories is The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003). In 2004, her novel, The Accidental (2004), was published, and won the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award. Girl Meets Boy (2007) was published in 2007. She has also published a play, The Seer (2006), and her most recent collection of short stories is The First Person and Other Stories (2008). The Book Lover (2008) is a personal anthology of favourite pieces of writing gathered over the course of her life.

“Imagine you give a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough. Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out. Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever. This is what Miles does, in a chichi house in the historic borough of Greenwich, in the year 2009–10, in There but for the. Who is Miles, then? And what does it mean, exactly, to live with other people?

Sharply satirical and sharply compassionate, with an eye to the meanings of the smallest of words and the slightest of resonances, There but for the fuses disparate perspectives in a crucially communal expression of identity and explores our very human attempts to navigate between despair and hope, enormity and intimacy, cliché and grace. Ali Smith's dazzling new novel is a funny, moving book about time, memory, thought, presence, quietness in a noisy time, and the importance of hearing ourselves think.”

Book of the Week - Chris Morgan Jones, An Agent of Deceit

Anyone who follows this blog will know that while my preference is for literary fiction, I occasionally dip into other genres for a little variety. An Agent of Deceit is probably best described as a thriller, and is a first novel by Chris Morgan Jones. Jones was born in Aberystwyth, and for eleven years worked for the world's largest business intelligence agency (Kroll). During his time there he specialised in dispute work, helping clients win legal battles and corporate contests, and in reputation work, gathering information about their competitors and acquisition targets. He has worked for Middle Eastern governments, Russian oligarchs, New York banks, London hedge funds and African mining companies, but in particular had an interest in Russia. The experience he accumulated in his work has undoubtedly contributed to the realistic feeling of this book. It is well written, with a good plot, and has received favourable reviews. There is a 500 copy signed and numbered edition from Goldsboro Books which is the one to go for from a collector’s persepctive.

“Ten years ago, journalist Ben Webster had his investigation into a corrupt Russian business in Kazakhstan crushed, the cost of his scrutiny a terrible tragedy. Now employed by a private London intelligence agency, Webster’s interest is piqued when a client asks him to expose the dealings of shadowy Russian oligarch Konstantin Malin. Before long Webster finds himself fixated by Malin and by his front man Richard Boot. But how far is he willing to risk the wellbeing of his family? And that of Boot himself? Meanwhile Boot finds himself under pressure to explain to the world how he – a simple lawyer – came to be one of Russia’s largest investors. And when one of Malin’s former protégées is found dead after meeting with Webster, begins to realise that he too may be at risk. Desperate to seek a haven with the wife he lost years before, Boot realises that he must now take action – but his options are fast running out.”