Clear the bookshelves; no, clear the weekend diary until Christmas: the next few weeks are to see one of the biggest traffic jams of big-name, top-flight British fiction in recent publishing history.
A succession of serious novels with the worthiest of pedigrees, some of them already in the shops, will each be attempting to attract the attention of readers, critics and, ultimately, of prize judges.
Ian McEwan, Will Self, David Mitchell and Rachel Cusk will soon be vying for a rosette alongside Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Howard Jacobson and Ali Smith, to say nothing of latecomers to the party such as award-winning authors Colm Tóibín and Nick Hornby, who both have new novels out next month.
The autumn season for major book launches is always a competitive bonanza, as titles are positioned for the maximum number of sales in the long runup to Christmas. Often there is a slew of celebrity autobiographies; sometimes there are confessional diaries, too. This year, however, the spotlight is unusually fixed on literary hard-hitters, as hardbacks are trucked out bearing the names of almost every acclaimed household name in British fiction.
Ali Smith, Howard Jacobson and Will Self. Photograph: Observer
Mitchell, the beloved Worcestershire-raised author of Cloud Atlas, is already being fêted for his latest title, The Bone Clocks, while in Outline Cusk will dissect the emotions of an imaginary woman author who is coping with the aftermath of torrid domestic upheaval. McEwan’s new offering, The Children Act, is a short book about the moral dilemmas facing a woman judge, while Self’s Shark is the avant-garde story of a north London psychiatrist who treats a putative survivor of an infamous American naval shipwreck, the same disaster that is referenced in Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws.
The British book industry is responding with energy to the suggestion that ebooks have dumbed down their business. With a renewed faith in serious print content, the major publishing houses are to put their best men and women out in the field.
As a result ,the editor of the Bookseller, Philip Jones, was concerned this summer that top authors’ sales might be hit by “the large numbers of new books being published”. However, Jones has since agreed that the quality glut is something to celebrate. “The range this year is as breathtaking as it is daunting. If these books don’t get book buyers into bookshops between October and December, then we may as well pack up and open an online catalogue business,” he wrote.
Dan Franklin, the respected publisher at Random House’s Vintage imprint and longtime friend of Amis, said he saw no sign that any of his leading authors’ sales would suffer in the general commercial mêlée this year. “It’s very difficult to generalise,” said Franklin, “but I can say that from this division, where we had Howard Jacobson, Martin Amis, Haruki Murakami and Ian McEwan in pretty quick succession, there is no evidence at all that any of them have suffered. Rather, the reverse.”
This autumn, for the first time, British publishers are officially backing 9 October as “super Thursday”, an annual focus for publicising the key launches. The decision to align behind this one day across rival publishing companies will be highlighted in a new joint promotional campaign to run under the jaunty banner of Books Are My Bag.
Staff at the Bookseller have also identified 25 September and 23 October as key launch dates this year and around 700 hardback books will be released over the three dates, among them a heavy sprinkling of literary stars.
“If one is looking for evidence that publishers are throttling back, thinking outside the box, or making fewer big bets, then these statistics do not provide it – in 2008, the first year we highlighted ‘super Thursday’, we listed 247 new hardbacks; this year there are 315,” Jones said.
Hoping to stand out in the celebrated crowd is Jacobson, who has impressed many critics with his new novel, J. Writing in the Times, John Sutherland called it “subtle, topical, thought-provoking and painfully uncomfortable”. Already a Man Booker winner with The Finkler Question, Jacobson is the only previously anointed writer in contention for this year’s prize.
Absent from the Man Booker list this time, to the annoyance of some critics, is Amis’s new, Auschwitz-based work, The Zone of Interest. It was described as “a nasty, timely book” by Wynn Wheldon in the Spectator, who added that it is “as good as anything Amis has written since London Fields“.
The Paying Guests, the latest from Sarah Waters, is set in the 1920s and has won several enthusiastic reviews. Jane Shilling in the Evening Standard called it a “virtuoso feat of storytelling” and a book tempting the reader to complete it at one sitting.
Also in the fray is How to be Both, a historical novel set in two time frames from Ali Smith, and next month Irish writer Tóibín’s Nora Webster is published, a book which works as a kind of spinoff from his critical hit Brooklyn.
Heading the charge of bestselling British authors is Hornby. His Funny Girl, chronicling the life of a fictional British comic star, is also out next month. British fiction stars Martina Cole, David Nicholls and Rachel Joyce also have new titles.