Nick Hornby’s newest novel, SLAM, is now published by Guanda. (The paperback, just out from Penguin, is now in the top 20 on the UK bestseller list.) Rights are sold in 26 languages.
It was good seeing Alan Bennett prominently featured at the Adelphi stand. His two essays about a visit to The National Gallery, “Going to the Pictures”, are now published by Adelphi as a miniature book that was one of their top sellers at the Turin Book Fair. THE UNCOMMON READER is also a bestseller for Adelphi in Italy with over 70,000 copies sold, and rights are sold in more languages than Alan Bennett has ever been translated into before - 22 to date. I’ve heard that THE UNCOMMON READER is also selling well in Spain (Anagrama) and in Holland (Mouria).
The Newton Compton stand featured posters for their edition of THE END OF MR. Y by Scarlett Thomas who was at the book fair having even more interviews than I had meetings. I did have several productive meetings with European editors who I was not able to see at the London Book Fair, but I did not envy Scarlett having to answer questions from one Italian journalist after another. She told me some of the questions were quite bizarre like “If you could eat your book, what would it taste like?” Italian sales of MR. Y have taken off since a notoriously difficult critic, D’Orrico, compared Scarlett Thomas in a review to Umberto Eco. Scarlett is represented by Simon Trewin at United Agents, but her foreign rights are controlled by Canongate who has sold THE END OF MR. Y in over 25 languages. Newton Compton’s stand also had a poster for Sophia MacDougall’s second book in her Rome trilogy, ROME BURNING, and they also are now publishing Fiona Neill’s bestselling debut THE SECRET LIFE OF A SLUMMY MUMMY.
Also at the book fair, Bompiani was launching the Italian edition of BURMA BOY, the stunning novel about a 14-year-old Nigerian boy, Ali Banana, and his surreal experience of jungle warfare after he enlists with other Nigerians to fight for the British in WWII. BURMA BOY was published in hardcover by Jonathan Cape last spring and is coming out in paperback from Vintage in June. The hardcover drew extraordinary praise from Wole Soyinka, Giles Foden in the Guardian, Ronan Bennett, and in the Times, Observer, etc; and it is Biyi Bandele’s international break-out with publications coming this year and next year in France/Grasset, The Netherlands/de Bezige Bij, Sweden/Leopard, Israel/Kinneret, HarperCollins/USA, Brazil/Record, and even Poland/Rebis. Biyi Bandele is really one of the most incredibly talented authors I’ve ever met or read. He wrote his first novel, “The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond”, when he was only 14 and he has since written award-winning plays, three novels, and in 2006 was named by The Independent as one of Africa’s 50 most important artists. Bompiani invited Biyi Bandele to Turin and my only regret of the weekend was that I missed seeing Biyi and his event which was on Sunday evening, after I had to fly back to London.
