Saturday Summary #4

If anything, the last week has been mostly dominated by one book, and a book not yet even released. One thing's for sure: Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee will be the biggest release of the year on Tuesday. No surprise then that Foyles has a 'midnight event' planned (see you there?).

Blackwell's Oxford is offering - to us - a slightly less enticing "first person in the queue gets a free copy" set-up, but then we're more London night-owls than Oxford early birds perhaps.

Keeping with fiction, and Paula Hawkins The Girl on the Train saw it's 20th week at number one in the Original Fiction charts, topping 800,000 units in all formats in UK and Ireland and besting the 19 of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

A good week too for Carys Davies, who won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She took home €25,000  for  The Redemption of Galen Pike. Everyone, including Davies publishers, was happy for her...!

https://twitter.com/saltpublishing/status/619039093360599040

One award changed for the better, we'd say, with the new Man Booker International Prize, and Namwali Serpell showed wonderful generosity in winning the Caine Prize and sharing her winnings (bravo!).

Far less lovely, the revelations of Joanne Harris (sexism) and Nikesh Shukla (book world diversity ignorance) but necessary revelations and fully supported by us.

On a musical note, this week we've seen Johnny Marr and Sir Paul McCartney book details revealed. Plus news Tom Delonge, of Blink 182 front-man notoriety, is seeing his sci-fi novel Poet Anderson… Of Nightmares released on October 6th by Simon & Schuster.

What else? A new app in the works to help find your next read, and a tasty 10% discount on books? See here (at the bottom).

A very happy, well-read, Saturday!