<![CDATA[My Bookshop Backstory by Tom Rowley]]>https://tomrowley.substack.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!c3cO!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1eea93ab-5f17-4764-971b-5e094e9554a6_1280x1280.pngMy Bookshop Backstory by Tom Rowleyhttps://tomrowley.substack.comSubstackWed, 02 Sep 2026 09:26:09 GMT<![CDATA[Headline here]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/headline-herehttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/headline-hereSat, 29 Aug 2026 07:01:52 GMTBank holiday: open all hours

We’re open as usual this bank holiday weekend, so pop in from 9am-6pm today and 10am-6pm Sunday and Monday.

And, of course, we’re always open online…

WE’VE HAD SOME SUCCESS recently with a slim hardback book that makes me smile every time a customer brings it to the counter. It is called The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances, which I reckon is the best title we have yet sold at Backstory. So good, in fact, that I confess to choosing to stock it based on that alone.

For what it’s worth, the plot of Glenn Dixon’s book sounds as intriguing as its title, featuring the antics of a sentient vacuum cleaner which (who?) calls itself Scout after hearing its owner read To Kill A Mockingbird to his dying wife. But I didn’t know this at the time I decided to order a few copies: I just wanted it on our shelves. And so, it seems, do you.

Which got me thinking: why are books given the titles they are? And what makes a good one?

A great title can make a book just as surely as a dud one can doom it. As with the appeal (or otherwise) of the cover artwork, the title is probably more important in determining whether or not it will sell than the quality of the book itself.

As with the cover, a good title signals in just a handful of words the kind of book a reader will be dealing with: is it light or heavy, what’s the genre? A reader not easily won over by whimsy should obviously steer clear of The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances, and might instead head for the cynical, world-weary titles often given to books about journalism: If No News, Send Rumours, say, or even the intentionally horrific Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English?

Comic, offbeat novels can have comic, offbeat titles: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Mass-market novels designed to be read as quickly as they fly off the shelves can’t afford subtlety: the gay ice-hockey romance Forbidden Puckboy is never going to get mis-shelved in the philosophy section. (Other books in the series seem to take the Ronseal approach, too: Irresponsible Puckboy, Clueless Puckboy and even Bromantic Puckboy.)

Each of those titles nods to the texture and tone of the book’s contents. Better still, they elicit a reaction.

That is perhaps less true in non-fiction, where titles often appear optimised for internet search keywords. Puns or literary allusions may delight a reader, but they are no use in finding that reader in the first place: there it is all about concision and clarity. Although I do regret the rather short response I gave on a busy day last Christmas when I was asked what I thought Test Cricket: A History might be about.

Still, a publishing pal reckons that the biggest selling non-fiction books often have “a weird magic” to their titles. “It’s at once extremely obvious what they’re about while also feeling a bit clever or confounding.” He cites as examples Prisoners of Geography, This Is Going To Hurt and, “the best book title of the 21st century”, The Body Keeps The Score.

What are your favourites? And have you ever read and loved a book in spite of its off-putting title? Comment below or hit reply and I’ll share any gems in a future newsletter.

Happy reading,

Tom

Upcoming events at Backstory

]]><![CDATA[‘Do you have a pocket guide to pigeon watching?’]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/do-you-have-a-pocket-guide-to-pigeonhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/do-you-have-a-pocket-guide-to-pigeonSat, 22 Aug 2026 07:01:59 GMT
Choose from 500,000 titles from our website available for next-day collection or home delivery when you order by 4pm. (Sunday orders arrive Tuesday.)

CUSTOMERS ARE OFTEN DISTRACTED when they come up to the till to pay. Often one or more children will be pleading for less — or, encouragingly, more — time in the bookshop. A forceful dog will be pulling its owner behind the counter in search of treats. Or the customer will be rummaging through their purse in search of a book token, only to triumphantly hand over a Waterstones voucher.

More often that not, though, a customer will stare straight past us, their attention caught by the bookcase behind the counter where we keep customer orders waiting for collection. As a recovering journalist, I can hardly fault such nosy behaviour. And I can see why they catch the eye: these books are every bit as diverse, individual — and sometimes downright eccentric — as our customers themselves.

When we are unboxing our daily deliveries from publishers and wholesalers, we can predict much of the contents. Another dozen of this or that current bestseller; top-ups of books we always keep in stock and reliably sell one every week or so, like The Secret History; this week’s new releases.

The element of surprise comes from whatever it is you decided to order in (niftily, orders placed in store or online by 4pm are delivered the very next day, except for Sunday orders which arrive on Tuesdays). One day, it’ll be the 12 volumes from the Skulduggery Pleasant series currently awaiting collection. The next, a £40 book about dubstep that weighs as much as a bag of potatoes.

Then there was the customer whose request for The High Growth Handbook I somehow contrived to hear as The Highgrove Handbook: “As in the King’s garden?” (you can take the boy out of The Telegraph…). One (charming) customer always orders another copy of the same book by Muhammad Ali.

The choices have become broader still since we introduced the ability to order any of 500,000 titles from our website to click-and-collect at the bookshop the next day (or have delivered to your home).

In the shop, a sizeable minority of our sales at any one time are accounted for by just a handful of bestsellers. Online, orders are radically more diffuse. Our old website had a range of 50,000 books, which I thought would keep you going for quite long enough. But it seems it wasn’t nearly broad enough. Every day, orders come through for books I would never have dreamed of stocking on our shelves.

In the last few months, customers on our website ordered a pleasing number of Backstory favourites (Charles Cumming spy novels, A Waiter in Paris, A Little Trickerie, The Safekeep) as well as travel guides to Morocco, Bucharest, Finland, Vietnam, Stockholm, Scotland, Wales, south-west England and… South London.

But we also fulfilled your requests for Japanese Tattoos: Meanings, Shapes and Motifs, The Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching, Crafting with Cat Hair, How to Draw Manga Furries: The Complete Guide to Anthropomorphic Fantasy Characters, The Cheese and The Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller and a broad array of highly specific editions of graphic novels and comics, including Batgirl: An Origin Story. Then there was the impressively organised customer who ordered The Hairy Biker’s 12 Days of Christmas on 20th June.

One of you wanted The Feminine Mystique, another was after Jeremy Hunt. And I am sorry to report that the customer who requested The Oxford Handbook of The Egyptian Economy is not the same one who ordered, a few weeks later, an “Egyptian-inspired enemies-to-lovers fantasy”.

There’s something life-affirming about all this: that whatever you’re into, there’s a tribe — and a book — out there for you. Long may this variety continue.

So I raise a glass to you, with all your diverse interests and occasional oddities. Perhaps we could find something suitable for a toast from another excellent recent customer order, The Knackered Mother’s Wine Guide.

Cheers… and happy reading!

Tom

Upcoming events at Backstory

]]><![CDATA[What you took to the beach]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/what-you-took-to-the-beachhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/what-you-took-to-the-beachSat, 15 Aug 2026 07:02:04 GMTEVERY YEAR IN MID-AUGUST I envy those Parisian shopkeepers who lock their doors and put handwritten signs in their windows around now, promising customers they will return in the autumn. Sadly we can’t do likewise: our rent is the same in the quietest months of the year as in the busiest, so we take every sale we can make.

Still, we can sit in the comfort of our air-conditioned bookshop safe in the knowledge that we have supplied most of Balham with ample summer holiday reading material before it decamped en masse to the beach.

Some of you are still jetting off and will no doubt be calling in or popping online for some last-minute reads, but I now feel safe to call it: here are the Books of The Summer 2026, based on our bestsellers from June to the middle of August.

10 Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

If you’re in London, you’ll have spotted this one on the tube. It’s everywhere! A film is already in the works, starring Anne Hathaway.

Darby says: This book is wild! It's the story of a “trad wife” influencer who gets stuck in an 1800s version of her life. It’s also a deeply disturbing and relevant look into being a woman in today’s society.

Read on

9 Esme Pepper by Jacqueline Wilson

We were extremely lucky to host this legendary children’s author for a signing at Backstory this week. It was very special to watch a mix of kids and grown-up fans (including several sporting “Jacqueline Wilson raised me” merch) queue up to meet their idol. Wilson, 80, was a delight, taking the time to chat to each reader, pose for photographs and generally spread a lot of warmth about the place.

The signing took Wilson straight into our chart, and there has been a steady stream of readers popping in to buy her latest, Esme Pepper, ever since. It tells the heart-breaking but ultimately hopeful story of a girl taken into care after her mother is caught stealing a present for her daughter.

Read on

8 So Good To See You by Francesca Hornak

University friends are reunited 15 years on for a swanky wedding in Provence. As the Champagne flows, appearances slip and tensions bubble to the surface.

Read on

7 Heart the Lover by Lily King

Francis says: Shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Lily King beautifully portrays all the complications of love, from university to adulthood. Witty and heart-wrenching.

Read on

6 The Accidental Soldier by Owain Mulligan

I loved this one, which was our Non-Fiction Book of the Month in June.

Who knew that the diary of a British soldier in Iraq could be so funny? Disillusioned with life as a teacher, Mulligan quits to enlist and soon finds himself on the frontline. The result is as informative as it is entertaining.

Read on

5 The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery

Zoë and I both enjoyed this light and quirky crime novel, which we picked as our Fiction Book of the Month in June.

Zoë says: Featuring a blaspheming octogenarian, a disputed inheritance and plenty of secret passageways, this locked-door whodunnit set against the Halley’s Comet Panic of 1910 completely charmed me. A perfectly moreish beach read.

Read on

4 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

This one has been flying off the shelves. Its high spot in our summer chart is without even counting the sales for Patrick Radden Keefe’s signing, back in May.

It hardly need be said that I loved this true story of a London teenager who posed as an oligarch’s son only to fall to an untimely death. In non-fiction that reads like a novel, Radden Keefe humanely investigates his final hours and exposes the city’s criminal underworld.

Read on

3 I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder

Not to be confused with I Want You To Be Happy, the book of the same name by Pope Francis.

Denise says: A funny, and at times toe-curling, story that starts when Joey and Chuck, 12 years apart, meet in a bar. It’s a book about trying to find meaningful connections when work and relationships aren’t going to plan.

Read on

2 Sunstruck by William Rayfet Hunter

Our Fiction Book of the Month in July continues to trouble the tills.

Isobel says: This is Brideshead Revisited with a dose of Saltburn. There’s a French chateau, a rich, eccentric family, love and lust, swimming pools and day drinking. But things take a deeper turn when the characters return to London with the class and racial dynamics back in reality.

Read on

1 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

A genuine word-of-mouth hit. It was a real slow-burn in hardback… until it wasn’t. Now in paperback, it is the undisputed Book of the Summer. One indicator of quality is that people keep coming to the counter having already read the book, buying another copy for a friend.

Denise says: Sybil writes letters to keep people at arms length — her brother, best friend, a customer service rep at an ancestry website. Her manner is to the point and often full of unintended humour. She’s hard to like but you will probably love her by the final page.

Read on

Happy reading!

Tom

]]><![CDATA[The books that should have made the charts]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/the-books-that-should-have-made-thehttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/the-books-that-should-have-made-theSat, 08 Aug 2026 07:01:59 GMTNew events announced

Check out our full line-up of events and signings for the next three months, including a Jacqueline Wilson signing at Backstory this coming Monday.

Browse our events

I WROTE LAST WEEK about the overwhelming odds any author faces when publishing a new book. They will be competing for attention against a thousand or more titles released that month alone, let alone the millions already published.

As promised, this week I’m sharing a round-up of just a few of the titles we think have been unfairly overlooked in recent months and really deserve your attention. “Overlooked” is of course a relative term: some will have earned rave write-ups in newspapers or on Goodreads, others will have sold reasonably against expectations. Even so, for whatever reason, they haven’t troubled the bestseller charts — and we think that should change.

So, for once, maybe avoid the temptation to pick up that book everyone’s reading on the tube and give one of these a go. Who knows, perhaps your fellow commuters will soon be copying you.

Bookseller recs

Fiction

Voyagers by Meg Charlton

Isobel liked this under-the-radar July release so much that she successfully petitioned for it to be our current fiction book of the month. She writes:

Two children go missing under mysterious circumstances around New Year's Day, 1998. Alex thinks they were lost, maybe even kidnapped; Ana thinks they were abducted by aliens. Decades later, a phenomenon called the Signal brings the estranged friends back together to face their past. Brilliantly written, smart, and gripping, it’s an intelligent meditation on memory and friendship.

Read it

Frida Slattery as Herself by Ana Kinsella

Zoë and I both really enjoyed this debut novel. I would also highly recommend her previous book of non-fiction, Look Here, a wonderful and sharply observed series of vignettes and pen portraits of London and Londoners.

Here’s Zoë on Frida Slattery:

What should great art cost us? This compelling novel follows the relationship between an actor and director from Dublin to London to LA and back again. For fans of Sally Rooney and Gwendoline Riley.

Read Frida Slattery

Read Look Here

The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart

Lots of readers (including me, if I’m honest) are still a bit scared of graphic novels. But they are increasingly hooking new readers, persuading them of their literary chops as well as beautiful illustrations. Come on, be brave, and start with this one: it was the first graphic novel Denise has read, and she loved it as much as Zoë, our in-house graphic novel expert.

Zoë writes:

When two couples move in together in a beautiful old house, it seems like all their problems have been solved. Soon, however, old wounds of envy, class and desire begin to resurface. Addictive and deeply human.

Read The Wreck

The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin

Darby writes:

A beautiful, sparse novel about a woman returning to her childhood home with her estranged sister to prepare the house for sale. Reminiscent of Claire Keegan.

Read The Old Fire

To The Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage

This one was big in the States, where it was picked up by a major book club. But for whatever reason, on this side of the Pond it has yet to — ahem — land.

Darby reckons that should change:

A beautiful, wide-sweeping novel about a Cherokee woman who wants to become an astronaut. Highly recommend for book clubs or for anyone who likes very character-driven, "life" stories.

Read To The Moon and Back

Non-fiction

We Are Not Machines by Sarah O’Connor

This is a fascinating book that deserves to find a wider audience than it has thus far. The FT’s Sarah O’Connor is one of my favourite journalists. In We Are Not Machines: The Fight For The Future of Work, she questions her initial conviction that increasing automation and adoption of AI would free up workers to spend more time on the most fulfilling of tasks. Through humane reportage, and some fascinating factory-floor history, she examines the impact in practice thus far and ponders the future. This book is all the better for being nuanced and deeply researched, not polemical.

Read We Are Not Machines

Between the Waves by Tom McTague

It probably shouldn’t shock us that another book about Brexit wasn’t an instant bestseller. But this one really does deserve your time. Not least because it’s not really about Brexit, so much as it’s about the soul and psyche of the country — or at least its political and intellectual elites. This deeply researched, admirably nuanced book charts the intellectual history of Euroscepticism from the ashes of the Second World War to the eve of the referendum, giving us the, well, backstory to the vote. I learned so much.

Read Between The Waves

Is This Working? by Charlie Colenutt

I’ve told you about this one before, but it merits another mention. This one should have flown everywhere, and I’m delighted to have made that happen at Backstory at least. In 60 short interviews with British workers — from sex workers to derivatives traders — Colenutt weaves a fascinating patchwork of our country today.

Read Is This Working?

King of Kings by Scott Anderson

This one was big in America, but has sold more steadily over here. It deserves the rave write-ups newspapers gave it, turning the reign of the Shah and his eventual toppling into a colourful page-turner that also serves as timely background to current events in Iran. Brilliantly done.

Read King of Kings

For And Against A United Ireland by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride

Okay, so publications by think-tanks don’t often fly off the shelves, but this one deserves to. It’s a great approach to one of the big political questions of our time, with both authors — one from a nationalist background, the other from a unionist one — making the most compelling case they can for both sides of the argument. A really detailed, nuanced book that will make you appreciate the strong arguments both ways, whether you have a strong inclination already or not.

Read it

Happy (alternative) reading!

Tom

]]><![CDATA[How many books find an audience?]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/how-many-books-find-an-audiencehttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/how-many-books-find-an-audienceSat, 01 Aug 2026 07:02:16 GMTJacqueline Wilson at Backstory

10th August, 2.15pm

The beloved children’s author will join us to sign copies of her latest book, Esme Pepper. Spots must be reserved in advance (no need to book a ticket for parents/guardians or siblings).

Meet Jacqueline Wilson

AFTER THE HEATWAVES of the last month and a half, customers and colleagues have been stumbling into the bookshop sweaty and downcast, lapping up our air conditioning and iced coffees like water in a desert. So I’ve felt particularly guilty this week at the repeated visits of our very friendly UPS courier, as he has lugged dozens of heavy boxes of books out to his van.

Returns season always makes me feel a little guilty, though. Every quarter or so, we have a more or less rigorous rootle through the bookshelves and the “overstock” downstairs, asking “do we really need five copies of this?” and “why on earth did I ever order that?”

I won’t deny that there are some books I’m very glad to see the back of. Worse are the books that, no matter how hard we try to return them, never seem to actually go, haunting the shelves downstairs as a reminder of dreadful buying decisions past.

It’s also true that returns are vital and tough love is imperative: we’re a small business and cash that is tied up in stock that isn’t shifting prevents investment in something else that might fly out the door. That’s why publishers, who have a strong interest in our success (and on our taking a punt on their latest titles), offer sale or return.

But it is dispiriting to see new titles that bounded into the bookshop just a few months ago, eager to impress browsers and find a cherished place on a customer’s bookshelves, herded back into a box, taped up and promptly dispatched to the warehouse from which they came.

In the rush to get everything packed up (and here I must thank Francis, who wrangles returns with the long-suffering efficiency of a teacher counting recalcitrant teenagers back onto the coach at the end of a school trip), it can be easy to forget that every single one of these books was the product of sometimes years of effort and love from the writer, and then a great deal of work from, at the minimum, an agent, editor, copy editor, publicist, cover designer, marketer, sales reps, printers, warehouse workers and, yes, couriers.

The process underscores just how difficult it is for a new book to find an audience. But how difficult exactly? The weight of boxes provides ample anecdotal evidence, but in search of a more conclusive answer, I ran the numbers on all of the new books that arrived in our bookshop this January.

That month, we ordered a total of 149 new titles from publishers, roughly a tenth of the books they tried to persuade us to stock. So nine in ten books fall at the first hurdle, never getting onto our shelves at all.

Of the 149 that made it past the door, 23 (or 15%) failed to sell a single copy. A further 26 only sold once. Enter Francis, wielding spreadsheets: any remaining copies of those books have now been returned to the publisher. In total, we no longer stock 40% of the titles we added to the shop for the first time in January: the stock either sold slowly and therefore was not replenished, or it was returned. (Since we order 100 copies of some books but only one of others, the overall proportion of books we return is much lower than these figures suggest.)

Nor is the prognosis much rosier for many of the books we’ve kept in stock. Less than a fifth of January’s new arrivals have sold any copies at all this month, demonstrating just how short-lived any buzz around a release can prove.

What sets apart the books that overcome these odds? First, they are paperbacks: only three of the January releases that have sold ten or more copies so far this year were hardbacks. And they are overwhelmingly likely to be by an author with an existing track record: only six of the 32 books in this “relatively strong seller” category were by debut authors, of which only one was hardback debut fiction, a corner of the market pretty much pre-packaged for returns.

It’s worth saying that we are probably particularly efficient/brutal at our bookshop. We can only squeeze in about 3,000 books in total, so we can’t afford to hang on to books that aren’t shifting. Bigger bookshops can be a little more forgiving of slow-moving titles.

But the overall picture is the same, even in the largest bookshop: most new books will never make it to “core backlist”, the domain of books kept in stock year in, year out. Many struggle to sell even a few hundred copies.

This reality is obviously sobering for writers, particularly those working on their first book. To those outside the industry, getting a publishing deal can often seem like the end of the journey. In fact, it marks the moment when the battle — for space in bookshops, for readers’ attention — begins.

But there is also some hope to be found in these numbers, if you look hard enough. Most obvious is the remarkable fact that, despite these odds, anyone is writing, publishing or selling books at all.

Big publishers come in for a lot of stick, but they choose a harder life than they need to. A good proportion of what they publish is a gamble, something that might or might not pay off: they need these in order to reap the rewards when a title does break through. But a fair number of new releases are pretty obviously never going to be bestsellers, just as surely as the latest cosy crime by a celebrity author will be. Despite a tough market, they publish both, the latter offsetting the former. More impressive are the indie publishers who publish only the former, in spite of overwhelming commercial odds, for the sheer love of these books.

Bookshops, too, take more risks than they really need to. That’s because they tend to be run by readers rather than accountants. There were definitely some real duds among the returns we sent off this week, but mostly they were books I was happy we took a gamble on. I’d hope my buying gets sharper over time, thereby reducing the proportion of new titles that are ultimately returned, as has been the case over the last four years. But I’d never want that proportion to be zero, or anywhere close: that would be a sign of conservatism where there ought to be enthusiasm, excitement, and just a dash of daring.

Second, these figures illustrate just how miraculous it is when a new book does find an audience. That instead of the millions of books published over centuries, instead of the Christies and Dickenses, the Tartts and the Baldwins — before even accounting for the distractions of work, family and endless social media scrolling — these readers have chosen to spend time with that book right now. The odds against that moment of connection, of communion between author and reader, were so overwhelming, and yet it happened.

Finally, if anything, it encourages me. That is because, by demonstrating the cacophony of competing voices, it highlights the difference just one bookshop — and ultimately just one reader — can make by championing a particular title. By picking it out of the mass of paperbacks shouting for attention on a bookshop table and pressing it into a reader’s hands. By being so won over by a debut novel that you force the rest of your book group to read it. By posting some lovely words about a new release on Instagram and tagging the author: you may have been one of thousands of their readers that week, or one of only a handful; either way, that author knows that their work has struck a chord, has made a stranger laugh or cry.

In next week’s newsletter, then, let’s shout about some great books we’ve read recently that, for whatever reason, have flown under the radar. We’ll suggest some, but I’ll share your recommendations too. Hit reply to this email or comment underneath, and we’ll try to make sure those hidden gems don’t end up in the returns box next time around.

Happy reading,

Tom

Upcoming events at Backstory

]]><![CDATA[Overheard at Backstory #9]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/overheard-at-backstory-9https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/overheard-at-backstory-9Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:01:17 GMTIT’S SUMMER! Thanks to the bookshop’s excellent AC we’ve been keeping pretty cool. We’ve also been keeping our ears to the ground, as ever, for the perplexing, the profound and the profane, collected here by Isobel Lawrence for your reading pleasure.

Come to Backstory’s Music Night!

This Thursday, 30th July, 6:30pm

Back by popular demand! Grab a drink at the bar and soak up the atmosphere at Backstory’s music night. We’re lucky to be visited by Luce, who writes songs from the heart of the countryside — stripped-back acoustic sets that weave warm harmonies and sing-along choruses into songs that are gentle, lifting, and easy to fall for.

No tickets; just turn up. The music starts at 6.30: come early to grab a spot and a drink.

TOO KIND “Can I have some almonds? I’m happy to pay.” Oh, well if you’re offering!

MORAL MAZE A man at the bar says earnestly, “I just don’t know who I hate more, Hitler or Stalin.”

NOMINATIVE DETERMINISM The latest from the excellent Douglas Stuart came out in May, and on publication day Darby served two customers, both named John, who came to pick up their John of John pre-order. John of John of John and… John.

SCHOOL’S OUT FOR SUMMER A woman brings her daughter to pick up her click and collect order, which turns out to be How to Stop Snapping at the People You Love. “Let’s hope it works,” she says. “I needed it in time for the school holidays.”

TWO FOR ONE A customer rang up to ask, “Have you got a copy of Conversations with Normal People?” Sally Rooney should think about bringing out a double-decker special edition.

BASEMENT DERANGEMENT #1 My desk has recently started literally groaning under the weight of miscellaneous books, enough stationery to see us through the decade, and a medically necessary fan. Every time I type it produces acoustics of complaint. I pointed this out to Zoë, who said, “Oh. I thought that was Tom.”

ABC, EASY AS 123 One of our younger customers: “Oh my gosh, Daddy, Chapter Two literally comes straight after Chapter One!” Thrilling, isn’t it?

TRENDS IN PUBLISHING A customer at the bar complains, “Every book title is just a phrase now. You know, like Really Good, Actually.” We can’t think where he got that idea: there’s only So Late in the Day, So Good To See You, So Thrilled For You, I Want You To Be Happy, What A Time To Be Alive… Well, I guess all we can say is I’m Sorry You Feel That Way.

BIFF, CHIP, AND NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON A customer approaches the till with 85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist’s Argument Against Rearmament. “Is this one for adults?”

I JUST WORK HERE A potential customer approaches the counter and spots Tom, latte in hand: “Are you good with your books? Or are you the coffee man?”

BASEMENT DERANGEMENT #2 It can all get a bit much when you’ve been cooped up downstairs during the bright summer days. Succumbing to the insanity, Denise serenaded us to the tune of Run the World (Girls): “Who Reads the World? (Tom!)”

… Tom does, in fact, Read the World. Once a month he picks a work of narrative nonfiction about a different place: from Turkey’s political crisis with Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself to China’s migrant worker population in Xiao Hai’s Adrift in the South. Or if you prefer exciting new fiction, I choose a novel or short story collection from an independent publisher for our Indie x Indie subscription.

Have a look at our subscriptions here!

PENGUIN CHIC We’re currently giving out a free Penguin tote bag when you purchase a Penguin book. A customer tries on his new accessory, to which his mother says benevolently, “It makes you look very metrosexual, darling.”

NOW HIRING A customer begins his email: “Morning, Book Ninjas.” I should put that on my LinkedIn.

DREAM COME TRUE One of our very favourite regulars Betsy recently graduated Year 6 and was eager to share her yearbook with us. To say we’re touched is an understatement!

We’re taking a break with events in August, but there’s enough coming to make up for it!

Upcoming events at Backstory

Happy reading!

Isobel

Thanks for reading My Bookshop Backstory by Tom Rowley! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[Signed, sealed, and delivered]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/signed-sealed-and-deliveredhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/signed-sealed-and-deliveredSat, 18 Jul 2026 07:01:48 GMTMany publishers offer bookshops the chance to order signed copies of new titles, writes Denise, hoping that this added extra tempts a potential reader into making a purchase.

Unsurprisingly, at Backstory, we like to go one better. We have a growing selection of books available to be pre-ordered online that are not only signed but also individually personalised to the recipient.

Once the pre-orders are in, authors come to sit at our bar in the bookshop. Fuelled by caffeine, alcohol, or in some cases both, they dedicate copies of their books to readers which we then post out across the UK and around the world (or you can choose to collect at the shop, as always).

I thought I’d share some of this autumn’s highlights, all of which can be personalised by the author. We’re very excited for Marina Hyde’s sideways look at the madness of the last few years in What A Time To Be Alive!, Jay Rayner’s recipes inspired by his visits to some of the finest restaurants in Nights Out In The Kitchen and Tim Spector’s new cookbook Good Mood Food.

Caitlin Moran tries to seek out the goodness in every day in her new book How To Be Hopeful, while (perhaps less hopefully) Anthony Scaramucci explores US politics in All The Wrong Moves. And bestselling author Victoria Hislop will be dedicating copies of her new novel, The Wine-Dark Sea.

Then there are authors whose dedicated online fanbase lap up their reels — and now, hopefully, their books. From self-styled ‘wine-wanker’ Tom Gilbey (Thirsty is out in paperback in September) to satirist Cody Dahler (The State of This! A Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb’s Guide to British Politics) and the extraordinary Maclean brothers, who rowed the Pacific non-stop and unsupported (Three Brothers In A Boat), we’ve got you covered.

Step into the world of rituals and folklore in a seasonal guide from Serena Hawley-Plows (The Ancient Ways) or marvel as Dr Tom Crawford (How Many Pikachus Would It Take To Power A Lightbulb?) takes real world maths and applies it to fantasy universes from The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars.

Sky’s Economics Editor Ed Conway will be signing copies of his latest, Trade World, and Michael Cragg writes about all things Kylie in Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. And you can heal heartbreak with Ana Sampson’s poetry anthology You Can Do It With A Broken Heart.

We’ve got children covered, too. Jacqueline Wilson will personalise copies of her latest, Esme Pepper; Chloe Dalton will sign a children’s version of her hugely successful Raising Hare, with beautiful illustrations by Denise Nestor. And Balham-based debut kids author Steve Blackman is on hand to dedicate copies of his thrilling adventure featuring a group of young hackers, Zero Override.

Whatever you pick, a signed and personalised book makes for an extra special gift. When I left Backstory (albeit briefly) last summer, Tom and the team arranged for my favourite author, Curtis Sittenfeld, to sign and dedicate a copy of each of her books for me. It was great.

Scroll on for a reminder of our upcoming events. But for now — happy browsing!

Denise

Your holiday reads, with next day delivery

A reminder that we’re making it very easy to pick your perfect holiday reads this summer. You can choose from 500,000 books on our website, for next-day delivery in the UK or click-and-collect from the bookshop.

And to make things even easier, why not browse our summer reads catalogue, with 48 books read and vouched for by our booksellers?

Backstory Summer Reads Guide
1.84MB ∙ PDF file
Download
Download

Upcoming events at Backstory

]]><![CDATA[Nicola Sturgeon at Backstory]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/nicola-sturgeon-at-backstoryhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/nicola-sturgeon-at-backstorySat, 11 Jul 2026 07:01:53 GMTWhen the bookshop existed only in my head and I was still figuring out what to call it, the name ‘Backstory’ appealed to me for a few different reasons. One of them was the idea that it would be a meeting place where we could delve deeper into the stories behind not just the books we stock but the world around us, the stories of our times.

For some, reading is about escapism. And that can be great fun: I wrote last week about the joys of rattling through a bunch of spy novels. But for me, reading is at its best when it does not shut out the world but leans into it. Hence my taste in realist character-driven fiction, giving us a better understanding of who we are and what we are doing here. And of course my first love, non-fiction.

So, although we’ve been lucky enough to host some top-drawer novelists at Backstory, I’ve been particularly proud of our current affairs events. In an era of shouty social media (and politicians), cancel culture and non-existent attention spans, it’s been a joy to bring dozens of people together in a room for a whole hour to hear from someone shaping the world around us. To hear different points of view, sometimes to allow yourself to be challenged and to reflect, to go home feeling enriched, not depleted.

I think of our events with Lyse Doucet and Jeremy Bowen, our screening of documentaries about Putin and about the Salt Path controversy, of hearing from an eminent Iranian scholar during the people’s protests that preceded the war and from Nobel Peace Prize-winner Maria Ressa about her fight for free speech in the Philippines.

And so I am delighted to announce that we will be hosting Nicola Sturgeon this September for her only London event marking the paperback publication of her memoir, Frankly.

You don’t have to agree with her politics to be intrigued to hear from her directly. Of course, recent events have brought Sturgeon unwelcome publicity, but there is much more to her story than that. In a time of increasing turbulence and churn at Westminster, Sturgeon, her mentor Alex Salmond and the SNP have shaped events north of the border for the last two decades.

Social media can offer all flavours of opinion on the controversies of this year and the more substantive question of Scottish independence. This, though, promises to be a fascinating opportunity to hear directly from one of the key players. I can’t wait.

Book your tickets

Get your tickets now — and read on to get involved in our kids’ bookmark competition this summer.

Tom

Launching our kids’ bookmark competition

Denise writes:

Attention all budding artists and designers, our annual kids’ bookmark competition is back.

Forget lively debate about which new release should be our Book of the Month, one of the more fiercely fought “discussions” we have each year is which design from our kids’ bookmark competition should be the winner.

Do we choose the simple, understated typographical design, do we go all out with a riot of colours and monsters or do we choose a more abstract route? Once all the entries are in, the office wall resembles the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

We love running this competition as it gives our younger customers the chance to be creative and be part of Backstory. The winner receives three months of books chosen just for them and the chance to see their design as Backstory’s kids’ bookmark for the next year. We’ll be printing thousands of copies just in time for the Christmas rush.

And, as the competition runs over the summer, we hope that it gives parents and carers a moment’s peace while their mini Picassos, Hockneys and Emins spend a few minutes (hours if you are lucky) coming up with their designs.

All you need to do is download the form below or pick up a copy in the shop. You can submit as many entries as you like to us by Sunday 6th September (just drop them back at the bookshop, or you can post them to us). We’ll announce the winner by the end of September.

Kids’ Bookmark 2026
143KB ∙ PDF file
Download
Download

Good luck!

Your holiday reads, with next day delivery

A reminder that we’re making it very easy to pick your perfect holiday reads this summer. You can choose from 500,000 books on our website, for next-day delivery in the UK or click-and-collect from the bookshop.

And to make things even easier, why not browse our summer reads catalogue, with 48 books read and vouched for by our booksellers?

Backstory Summer Reads Guide
1.84MB ∙ PDF file
Download
Download

More upcoming events at Backstory

]]><![CDATA[The joys of a book binge]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/the-joys-of-a-book-bingehttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/the-joys-of-a-book-bingeSat, 04 Jul 2026 07:02:34 GMTI’VE HAD A HOLIDAY ROMANCE. His name is Lachlan Kite, and, like any good summer fling, there are so many ways in which he’s unsuitable. He’s married, for one, albeit somewhat unhappily. He’s a spy, with a flexible approach to the truth and a troubled past that keeps returning to haunt him. Oh, and he’s fictional. None of that has tempered my obsession.

As a reader, I tend to be promiscuous, hopping from author to author, alighting on whatever catches my eye. A meaty book about AI one week, a crime novel the next.

This is a helpful habit for a bookseller to cultivate. Customers are forever asking what I’ve been reading recently, and it’s useful to have something up my sleeve to recommend that suits that particular reader’s tastebuds. (I do have blind spots, such as fantasy, but luckily Darby, our bookshop manager, keeps me well supplied with excellent suggestions there.)

I think this approach means I read a greater quantity of books as well as a greater variety. I love history, but a chapter a night of a 500-page tome packed with statistics is probably quite enough. Useful, then, to be able to dip into a character-led work of literary fiction on the side.

Or sometimes I’ve read a few too many heavy novels in a row. Something short and sweet (The Fortnight in September by RC Sheriff, say, or A Month in the Country by JL Carr) serves as a palate cleanser to get me ready for the next course.

The last few weeks, though, I’ve rediscovered the joys of a binge. I took Icarus 17, the newly-released fourth instalment of Charles Cumming’s Lachlan Kite series, away with me, fully intending to dip into it before moving on to other proofs, mostly “worthier” literary fiction that I felt I really ought to read.

Box set

But Kite pulled me in and wouldn’t let me go. Having started at the end, I quickly raced back to the beginning, devouring Box 88 before gobbling down its sequels, Judas 62 and Kennedy 35. Colleagues raised their eyebrows as they saw yet another home delivery order coming into our website from me. Why was I having the next instalment sent up to me in Northumberland when I could have been combing through any manner of proofs for September that I’d taken with me?

Partly, it’s the writing. Thrillers are thrilling, and Cumming masterfully employs all the usual tricks. Short, pacy chapters abound, as do cliff-hangers and tantalising flashbacks. The premise – that Kite works for Box 88, an off-the-books joint venture between MI6 and the CIA, a secret world within a secret world – is neat.

So too is the way each book yo-yos between the present day and Kite’s early career, affording the reader a window into the birth and growth of a spy and Cumming plenty of scope to mine interesting moments of real-life history and politics for the plots.

But it’s also about how comforting it is to allow yourself to sink fully into a different world. A series immerses you, and holds you there, in a way that only the most exceptional standalone novel can match. In my case, I also felt the comfort of rediscovering an old friend: in my early twenties, I raced through the entire back catalogues of Robert Harris and John le Carre, but – until recently – have rarely read thrillers since.

So take this as permission, if you need it, to put that worthy book you feel guilty about not reading to one side and pick up something you truly fancy, perhaps re-embracing a genre you’ve left behind. (There’s lots to tempt you in our summer guide. And if it’s spy fiction you’re after, start with the first in Cumming’s series, Box 88.)

Just beware: you may be gone some time.

Whatever you choose, happy reading!

Tom

Upcoming events at Backstory

]]><![CDATA[Robert Harris, a Backstory run...]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/robert-harris-a-backstory-runhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/robert-harris-a-backstory-runSat, 30 May 2026 07:02:35 GMTPASSPORT, SUNGLASSES, Robert Harris. There was a time in my twenties when those were pretty much all I needed for a good holiday.

From Fatherland to Conclave (better than the film, for my money), the Cicero trilogy to his often overlooked non-fiction thriller on the Hitler diaries hoax, Harris always knows how to tell a tale.

So I’m thrilled that, hot on the heels of a Patrick Radden Keefe signing queue that spilled down Balham High Road, Denise has somehow wangled for Robert Harris to come to Backstory to sign copies of his latest, Agrippa.

It’s not until October, but it’s well worth snapping up your spot in the queue now. This is a signing rather than an event, but a great opportunity to meet the man himself — or snap up a present dedicated to the history buff in your life.

Come to the signing

And that’s far from the only attraction coming soon to a bookshop near you. Here’s a round-up of everything we’ve got lined up for the next couple of months. It’s always worth booking in advance if you can, as our events often sell out.

So yes… just a few things on the horizon.

I very much hope to see you soon at one or more of these events.

In the meantime, happy reading!

Tom

]]><![CDATA[Backstory in bloom]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/backstory-in-bloomhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/backstory-in-bloomSun, 24 May 2026 17:01:45 GMTAnnouncing two new events

Go running with Backstory: Soph’s Plant Kitchen x Backstory run 6th June, 9.15am

This one’s a bit different. Celebrate the launch of Soph’s Plant Kitchen 30 in 30 with a 30 minute run from Backstory, led by Sophie. Sign up now, as spaces are limited.

Sign me up

I love this book: Owain Mulligan, The Accidental Soldier 29th June, 7.30pm

Who knew that the diary of a soldier in Iraq could be so funny? I lapped up this book when I read it last year, so I’m delighted that — now it’s out in paperback — Owain is coming to join us to talk about his experiences in Iraq and all thing soldiering.

Come to the event

Browse all events

Hot reads, iced coffee…

We’re open as usual this bank holiday Monday. See you at Backstory from 10am-6pm!

WITH LONDON’S HEATWAVE upon us, those who haven’t been lingering in Backstory to drink in the air conditioning with their iced lattes have been dropping by to pick up a paperback on the way to the common. Luckier still are those with a garden, preferably with a shady patch in which to stretch out with a good book.

It was a delight, then, to help to bring one such garden to life this week — and at no less prestigious venue than the Chelsea Flower Show. Backstory customer and talented garden designer Christina Cobb invited us to put together a mini library for her garden at this year’s show, Clearly Gottlieb: Time for Creativity, which is supporting the National Literacy Trust.

Picture: @joannakossak

Denise, who makes an annual pilgrimage to the show, jumped at the challenge, pulling together a mix of inspirational art and design books with some bloody good reads to curl up with.

Christina told us that the inspiration for her garden came from her own experience of feeling addicted to her phone and therefore not making enough time for her creative hobbies.

“Every time I sat down and tried to sketch an idea for a Chelsea garden, my phone would be back in my hand before I knew I was reaching for it,” she says. “The only thing that stopped me from picking it up was leaving it in another room, so the garden is a physical embodiment of that idea.

“There is a dedicated space at the garden entrance to leave a phone, before entering into a walkthrough oak glasshouse filled with materials for creative pastimes. The visitor then walks through into the main part of the garden where they can give themselves over to creativity in an environment free from distraction.”

Unsurprisingly, Christina’s garden attracted floods of visitors, including royalty. The Queen, herself a big reader, apparently cast a keen eye over the book selection, and was particularly taken with the Ann Patchetts. Hard to disagree: Tom Lake is a gorgeous summery novel, and I am currently entirely caught up in her latest, Whistler, which comes out on June 2nd.

Congratulations to Christina, whose garden won a very well-deserved gold medal. And a big thank you to her for the chance to collaborate on such a lovely project.

So put down that phone right now and get out there into nature — with a good book to hand, of course.

Happy reading,

Tom

]]><![CDATA[48 books to pack this summer]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/48-books-to-pack-this-summerhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/48-books-to-pack-this-summerSat, 16 May 2026 07:02:38 GMTLONDON MIGHT NOT HAVE got the memo — with this week’s hailstorms and unseasonably nippy days — but summer is still, apparently, on its way. And, as always, the whole Backstory team have been racing through dozens of books to pick out the gems that will make great holiday companions.

If you’re local, pop in to grab a copy of our gorgeous summer books guide, designed by our art director Dario Verrengia and our very talented in-house illustrator Zoë Dutton:

If you’re further afield, we’re posting out a copy with every online order. So why not browse the collection online, order a few choice titles, and then browse the rest of the guide when it hits your doorstep?

To celebrate the launch of the guide, we’re offering free UK postage on all online orders this weekend — just use the code SUMMERPLEASE at checkout.

Browse our picks

Here’s the introduction:

When I was preparing for my first overseas assignment as a newspaper reporter, a veteran foreign correspondent gave me some wise advice. “Count how much underwear you’ll need to pack,” he wrote, “then double it. The world makes more sense in clean pants.”

Now that I run a bookshop, I take the same approach to holiday reads. Just as you might throw in a jumper for Tenerife in case of nippy evenings, or a rain mac that will probably stay in your case the entire week, so you won’t know exactly which books you’ll need until you get there.

And while you can usually source a cheap beach towel if you forget to pack one, the same doesn’t hold for books. English-language bookshops tend to congregate in major cities, rather than by the beach. And even if you’re staying in a hotel that has thoughtfully provided a bookcase for you to browse suncream-splattered tomes left by previous guests, there is a significant risk you’ll be forced to choose your favourite from Lee Child’s entire back catalogue.

I was once caught so short when a reporting assignment on a small island extended unexpectedly that I ended up reading an edition of Prospect magazine cover to cover, twice. By the time I got back to the mainland I was so starved of entertainment that I gleefully fell on the battered copy of a Jojo Moyes by the hotel front desk and raced through it in a single sitting.

As surely as a beach holiday can be upended by a sudden sandstorm, your mood is hard to predict when you’re stuffing another paperback into an already bulging suitcase. In my experience, the clever book I’ve been meaning to read for a year continues to be a clever book I mean to read, enjoying a view of the hotel room from my bag but going no further. When a sunlounger beckons, spies racing to foil a terrorist plot or Jazz Age musicians suddenly seem more suitable companions than that weighty tome about medicine in the Middle Ages.

Other times, I’ve felt the need for a little bit of substance after a morning tearing through a page-turner, much as too many holiday meals with chips leave you craving a fresh salad. Then, I’m very grateful to have had the foresight to pack something with a bit more crunch: a non-fiction narrative, say, or a witty diary to dip into between dips. Throw in a long queue at passport control or, dare I say it, a plane stuck for hours on the tarmac, and you’ll be glad of that chunky history you wrestled into your case.

As we’ve been whittling down the ultimate summer reads over the past couple of months, the Backstory team have borne in mind all these scenarios and more. In our summer guide, we prescribe only books that at least one of our booksellers has read and loved. Whatever your reading tastes, we’re confident you’ll find plenty to pique your interest. So much so that several of you are going to have to find a bigger suitcase. Just remember to leave room for all those pants.

Happy reading!

Tom

To celebrate the launch of the guide, we’re offering free UK postage on all online orders this weekend — just use the code SUMMERPLEASE at checkout.

Browse the picks

Upcoming events at Backstory

]]><![CDATA[Two's company]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/twos-companyhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/twos-companySat, 09 May 2026 07:02:54 GMTFree coffee!

A little reminder that if you live locally, we reward every click and collect order via our website with a free cup of coffee. It’s our little thank you for choosing to support us.

And if you live further afield, you can still shop with us: we offer next-day delivery in the UK, which is free over £25.

Check out our website

FIRST, A WORD OF WARNING. Never arrange too good a leaving present for a departing colleague: they might never leave.

That, at least, seems to be the moral of the tale of Denise Wallin. Denise was part of the original team of booksellers that I assembled shortly before opening Backstory. She started off working at the bookshop just a couple of days a week, but it quickly became apparent that she could offer a lot more to Backstory — and not just by her habit of buying enormous packs of Yorkshire Tea to feed our shared addiction.

With a specialism in events and entertainment marketing, including stints at UK TV and heading up marketing at Madame Tussauds, Denise quickly assumed responsibility for getting the word out about Backstory. Before long, Balham tube station was plastered with our ads and our reading guides were dropping on locals’ doormats.

More recently, she dreamed up a clever stunt to mark the publication of the Heated Rivalry ice-hockey romance series, arranging for players from the Streatham Redhawks to be pictured in full get-up at Backstory, glued to the book (and each other).

Back at the helm

So it was a blow when, about this time last year, Denise decided it was time to move on.

We obviously needed to go all out to recognise her contribution to Backstory’s success. Her favourite author, Curtis Sittenfeld, gamely agreed to sign a complete collection of her books. Since Denise had once remarked that she would read anything by Sittenfeld — “even her shopping list” — we persuaded the bemused author to supply us with just that, too. We nervously tracked the FedEx parcel’s journey back across the Pond as the date for her leaving party approached.

All I can say is it must have gone down too well. A few months on, Denise and I went for a drink and, as is typical, it didn’t take us long to talk shop. Soon we were saying how much we missed working together.

Awake later that night, a thought struck me. I knew Denise was keen to run her own business. But what if that business was… Backstory?

Fast forward a few months and I’m delighted to say that Denise is now officially my business partner. She’s heading up our ever expanding line-up of events and our partnerships with publishers on signed and personalised editions of books.

More than that, she is back to being a wise sounding board for me on matters big and small, doubling down on some of our plans and offering a helpful occasional check on others. We share a gallows humour and, after each spending years working in big companies, a love of implementing ideas straight away, tinkering here and there and seeing what works.

For me, it’s a joy finding someone who cares about Backstory as much as I do, who is literally bought into its continued flourishing. I’m still really glad that I set out on this adventure on my own, and against (sensible and well-meaning) advice: it’s been great to test myself and to build something from the ground up, with more than a little help from all my colleagues and with the warm embrace of our community.

Now that the business is maturing, it’s lovely to have someone join me for the next steps of the journey — and to share the responsibility. Selling some of my shares was a milestone, too. Of course, I realised that we have created social value in Backstory: quite apart from lots of nice messages from many of you over the last few years, it’s hard to walk in to a packed bookshop on a Saturday afternoon, several different generations perched on every available bar stool and many more mooching about the tables of books, without clocking that.

But it was quite a moment to see in black and white that something that four years ago existed only in my head now has an economic value too: that what was an idea has become a business.

Mostly, though, I’m just glad to have Denise back. Apart from anything else, I’d missed the gossip, her hearty cackle about something or other announcing her imminent arrival from the shopfloor.

So please raise a glass to mark this new chapter for Denise and me. Actually, scratch that: it better be a good mug of Yorkshire.

Happy reading,

Tom

Upcoming events at Backstory

]]><![CDATA[Overheard at Backstory #8]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/overheard-at-backstory-8https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/overheard-at-backstory-8Sat, 25 Apr 2026 07:01:31 GMTTHE DAYS ARE getting longer, the common is getting busier, and Aperols are appearing outside the pubs on Balham High Road. Spring is here — bringing with it World Book Day, the British Book Awards, and of course, most hotly anticipated of all, this season’s edition of Overheard, compiled by gossiper-in-chief Isobel Lawrence.

NO BOOK TOO BIG… World Book Day is always a chaotic delight at Backstory. Usually, the highlight is a fantastic costume, but the star of the show this year was a child trying to exchange his £1 book token for the hefty hardback Made in America: The dark history that led to Donald Trump. Not exactly age appropriate, Darby thought… he seemed to take the “no” quite well and exchanged it for Bunny vs Monkey.

… OR SMALL. A teenager picks up the World Book Day Peppa Pig special and bristles pre-emptively, “It’s not for me.”

ALL FEEDBACK WELCOME Though we pride ourselves on our insightful recommendations, it can happen that we fall short of the mark. One customer recently reported that while reading a book Denise had backed, “I was silently resenting you… and now I’m vocally resenting you.”

CREATURE COMFORTS A glamorous older customer tells Zoë about a bookshop in the Wandsworth of Yore. “It was wonderful, so ramshackle, and there was a parrot who totally fancied me. In fact, he used to bonk my arm. It’s lovely here too, though.”

SEX, DRUGS, ROCK N ROLL A couple of Gen Zs are sat at the bar, planning a party. “Just say to them ‘you might not know anyone, so bring your knitting’ — we’ll have cheese and do some crafting.”

PARTNERS IN THE STRUGGLE Two young women browse the shelves while they catch up. “You know what’s crazy about working in the library is how adults don’t know how to put away books. Like… it’s the alphabet. It’s not that hard. It makes me rage.” … No comment.

DENISE ON THE DOOR At a recent event, Denise is checking names as people file in. On telling one customer that she likes her bag, the customer holds it open towards her — and then looks confused. A brief stand-off ensues. “Oh, you like it?” the customer finally clocks. “I thought you said you wanted to search it!” Despite recent unrest, not yet a policy of ours!

FLYING VISIT

Customer: “I don’t get to pop in often.”

Tom: “Oh, do you live far away?”

Customer: “Clapham.”

LONDON CALLING A man approaches the counter with the new Patrick Radden Keefe. “I was going to call ahead to see if you had any copies but…” He trails off, gesturing behind him to a table groaning under the weight of about a hundred hardbacks. In the window, maybe fifty more are arranged at various heights and angles. The glass has LONDON FALLING written on it in multicoloured letters. Little does he know, there’s maybe twice as many in the basement.

Window design by Zoë Dutton

Come to the signing!

CHEERS TO THAT The week after we were named London’s indie of the year, we celebrated with you all by offering a complimentary glass of cava with every (afternoon!) purchase. This led to a customer informing her baby: “Mummy’s going to have some fizz.”

WORDS, WINE, WIDE-LEG Francis recently told a woman unprompted that if she was wearing that shirt she should go for a baggier trouser. Another customer looked over in horror, before being reassured that she was in fact his mother.

PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL A woman shows her friend the copy of The Odyssey she’s just purchased. “I’m going to look so superior on the tube.”

LADS NIGHT OUT Our new hire Emma worked her first Friday evening shift a couple weeks ago. Anything to report? Just the usual — a trio of drunk men who came in intent on finding books about Weimar Germany.

BEHIND ENEMY LINES Tom’s in Northumberland to celebrate his mum’s birthday this weekend. This was waiting for him on the doorstep. It’s safe to say our messaging might not quite be getting through close to home!

***

We offer free next-day delivery on orders over £25, and a complimentary barista coffee when you click and collect! Even Jeff can’t beat that…

If you’re local, scroll on to hear about our upcoming events.

Happy reading!

Isobel

Upcoming events at Backstory

Browse all our events

]]><![CDATA[Five books to read right now]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/five-books-to-read-right-nowhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/five-books-to-read-right-nowSat, 18 Apr 2026 07:02:05 GMTWELL, that caused a stir. I was worried last week’s 3,363 word epic was a teeny bit too long. A bit inside baseball: of interest to a handful of industry types, maybe, but not the stuff of Saturday morning scrolling.

I needn’t have worried. It went a very 20th-century kind of viral, prompting dozens of email replies in my inbox. Then The Times made me the paperback pin-up of Balham High Road, and The Spectator weighed in “in praise of the paperback”.

That the piece has prompted such strong reactions just goes to show how much readers care about their books. (Even the Times reader who observed that hardbacks are “a pig to read”.)

Booksellers have been in touch too. Some agree with my preference for hardback-first non-fiction and paperback-original fiction, but others are less convinced. At least one reckons he would lose out if such a model was adopted, with hardbacks accounting for more than a third of sales at his shop last Sunday. Clearly, one size doesn’t fit all.

Anyway, in an attempt to put our money where our mouths are, here are five brilliant books that we think you should read right now… that all just so happen to have been released in paperback recently.

As a reminder, you can order any of these books to click and collect from the bookshop or to be delivered anywhere in the world (free UK delivery over £25).

History

King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran by Scott Anderson

I’ve been tearing my way through this over the past few weeks. At a time when Iran is in the headlines every day, it’s been fascinating to immerse myself in another turbulent time in the nation’s history: the last decade of the Shah’s rule, culminating in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that ushered in the theocratic Khomeini dynasty.

It’s a riveting tale of a lavish and out-of-touch monarch, meddling (and often blundering) Western diplomats and a revolution that caught the world unawares. There’s a fascinating bit early on about British connivance in Iranian attempts to control the Strait of Hormuz in the 1960s.

Get your copy

or some more recent history…

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert

Helen Lewis interviewed the author at a very fun sold-out event at Backstory this week.

My colleague Emma says: A feminist reading of modern popular culture. This book spans three turbulent decades, from 90s magazines to noughties reality television and the 2016 US presidential campaign.

It examines female empowerment against a misogynistic mediascape. Sharp, searching – brilliant!

Get your copy

Politics & society

Is This Working? by Charlie Colenutt

One of my favourite non-fiction books of last year, now in paperback.

This is a brilliant compilation of interviews with 60 Britons — from sex workers to bakers, teachers to couriers. What do they do all day? And are they happy?

It all adds up to a fascinating patchwork of Britain. This hasn’t hit the charts elsewhere, but it should have done: it’s the #2 bestselling book of the last month at Backstory.

Get your copy

Historical fiction

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

Our fiction book of the month for April.

My colleague Darby says: Amid a sweltering summer, extraordinary whispers overtake an 18th-century Oxfordshire village. The Mansfield sisters are turning into dogs, or so the rumours go.

This delightfully readable feminist novel explores societal expectation, speculation, and the power of fear.

Get your copy

Crime

The Grapevine by Kate Kemp

My colleague Denise says: Set in an Australian cul-de-sac in the late 70’s, this is an entertaining whodunnit led by 12-year-old Tammy, delving into the secrets of the neighbourhood where prejudice and suspicion are rife and the hidden lives of the women on the street are exposed.

Get your copy

If you live in London, scroll on for a reminder of some great upcoming events.

Happy reading!

Tom

Upcoming events at Backstory

Browse all our events

]]><![CDATA[What's the point of hardbacks?]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/whats-the-point-of-hardbackshttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/whats-the-point-of-hardbacksSat, 11 Apr 2026 07:02:56 GMTNew events at Backstory

We’ve just announced eight more events, with authors including Helen Lewis, Rachel Parris and Jem Calder and the FT’s excellent Sarah O’Connor and Soumaya Keynes. In the next fortnight we have graphic novelist Lizzy Stewart, as well as Adrian Wooldridge on the future of liberalism.

Browse the line-up

IT’S A JOURNEY I MAKE so often I count it in my PT’s regime. A customer tentatively approaches the counter enquiring if I have a new book in stock. They break into a broad smile when I confirm we have plenty. I cross the shopfloor to pick one up or, if it has been out a little longer, rush downstairs to the stock room, rummage around for five minutes, and then triumphantly return to the counter.

The customer does not return my look of triumph. In fact, they are now looking distinctly unimpressed, perhaps even wondering if I am trying to pull a fast one. “Oh,” they say. “Do you not have it in paperback?”

I briefly summarise publishers’ near-universal attachment to a hardback-first-then-paperback-after-12-months model. I explain we don’t like it any more than they do. Customer looks either resigned, baffled or sceptical (“I’m sure I’ve seen it in paperback.”) Customer leaves. No sale is made.

Variations of this routine happen several times a day. After a while, the other two FAQs — “do you have a toilet?” and “would you stock my book?” — count as a blessed relief. At least it’s not a reader who has performed the minor miracle of selecting one book out of the millions of titles they could decide to read only to be told they’d better choose something else because it’s not available in the format most readers actually want. Come back in a year?

Too big for the suitcase? (Illustration: Savannah Sullivan)

You might, by now, have formed the impression that I’m a little baffled by this particular tradition. And you’d be right. But, four years in, I thought it’d be worth trying to find out why this model actually exists, rather than just grouching from the sidelines. (Though a good grouch can be cathartic. Especially on a slow Monday afternoon.)

So I spoke to readers, authors, editors, bosses of publishers small and big, publicists, newspapers’ literary editors, the head of Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, agents, printers and industry data analysts.

I asked them all the same question. What is the point of hardbacks?

Four answers emerged, along with some tentative glimmers of hope for those of us who prefer a paperback.

But before we get to the explanations, let’s have a look at the data. Is Backstory an anomaly? Are hardbacks secretly beloved everywhere but Balham?

The numbers

I started by asking newsletter readers. Of the 623 readers who responded to my question, 46% said they hardly ever or never buy hardbacks, compared with the 9% who said they always or mostly buy them.

This undersells the strength of feeling in the paperback-only crowd. “I loathe hardbacks,” one respondent wrote. “I never take them on holiday, and I never read them out and about.”

This strong preference plays out at the till, too. 72% of the books we sold at Backstory last year were paperbacks. Uncannily, this mirrors the national trend exactly: according to the data wizards at Nielsen, of all the books sold last year in the UK, 72% were paperbacks. (This data is © NielsenIQ BookData 2026.)

There are, though, a couple of caveats.

The first is a biggie: non-fiction. I’d be willing to bet all our “dragon porn” profits that the 9% of my survey’s respondents who prefer hardbacks are non-fiction readers.

While the bulk of our hardback fiction sales are just a handful of buzzy books people can’t wait to read, we sell one or two copies each of a wide range of non-fiction, with customers often unfussed about the format. Only 19% of the novels we sold last year were hardbacks, whereas at least a third of history or politics books were.

Not coincidentally, fiction skews female and non-fiction readers are more likely to be men. There is a certain sort of bloke who wants a weighty book for weighty ideas — a five-volume account of the Hundred Years War, for instance. In one of my old newspaper jobs, a (male) officemate contemptuously said that my side of the bookcase was full of “unread paperbacks”. (There are, of course, loads of women who read history, politics and current affairs, and plenty of men who prefer reading about aliens. When we ran a non-fiction book group, women were in the majority.)

The other caveat is books bought as gifts, such as cookbooks: 89% of the food & drink titles we sold last year were hardbacks.

All of which is to say: steady on! I certainly wouldn’t be in favour of ditching hardback history or beautiful gift books, which account for a good share of our Christmas sales. I don’t want to know why those books are published in hardback. That much is obvious: publishers like them like that and so do readers.

The question is: why is fiction still usually published in hardback, despite readers’ stated and revealed preferences?

Reason one: review coverage

The four major publishers alone publish several hundred novels each month. Dozens of these are by debut authors, with no established fanbase queueing up to buy their book. One obvious way to make a debut stand out is to persuade a critic to give it a good review.

Newspaper readership is in serial decline, but book publicists still crave such coverage. Even if a potential punter never buys the paper in question, they might well see “the best debut novel this decade — The Times” plastered on the front cover in a bookshop.

And there’s a perception that newspapers will only (or at least prefer to) review hardbacks. The boss of one of the world’s biggest publishers raised this as an argument in favour of hardbacks when we spoke for this piece, as did both of the literary agents I interviewed and some of the publicists.

But this is not what the journalists themselves say.

“They do make that argument: that we won’t review them,” says Robbie Millen, literary editor of The Times and The Sunday Times. If anything, he says, “I’ve got a prejudice against hardbacks…they’re hard to read. I much prefer paperbacks with flaps.

“We’re covering many more paperback originals than we used to, so I reckon publishers are stuck in old think.”

Frederick Studemann, Millen’s counterpart at the Financial Times, agrees. “I’m not fussed about the format,” he says. “Other countries publish first in paperback form… and no one gets sniffy about those.”

What newspapers want is novelty. They favour hardbacks, then, not because they like the format but because it is the first format. This is why Millen says he reviews more “paperback originals” than he used to: journalists don’t want to review a book that was published in a different format last year, but would happily consider a book published straight into paperback.

The other problem with publishing in hardback in order to get review coverage is that it means a positive review — in effect, a free full-page advertisement for a book — appears at a time when the reader can only purchase in a format most of them don’t actually want. By the time a paperback is available, they may well have forgotten the reviewer’s words, however complimentary.

Reason two: awards

And now to another red herring. Several publishers argued that printing a hardback first was important for prestige. Literary awards, they reckoned, favour weighty hardbacks.

Not according to Gaby Wood, chief executive of the foundation that runs the most prestigious of Britain’s literary gongs, the Booker.

“It makes absolutely no difference at all,” she says. “Judges don’t judge based on the format. Publishers always assume judges care who published the book. They don’t. They barely even look at who wrote the book: they judge the words.”

Besides, she points out that judges are often reading books in proof form before they are officially published. As proofs are almost always printed in paperback, she is “unaware of the extent to which I’m reading a hardback in paperback”.

The Booker exists to reward great writing, not to sell books. Even so, Wood points out that the books that benefit most in sales terms from being on the Booker shortlist are the ones that are already in paperback.

This is definitely the case at Backstory: of the six novels on last year’s Booker shortlist, the four that were still in hardback only shifted between four and seven copies in the month before the prize was awarded, despite the hoopla. The two paperbacks sold 37 and 42 copies respectively.

Reason three: marketing

When I spoke to the bigwig publisher, they opened by observing that the hardback-first-then-paperback “model looks pretty resilient from where I’m sitting”, especially for literary fiction. “You have no choice for debut fiction,” they argued. “Putting a literary novel straight into paperback would be the kiss of death.”

They readily conceded that the hardback edition may only sell 1,000 copies. (In reality, it is often even fewer.) Nonetheless, they thought of the hardback as an important “marketing vehicle”.

This refrain was echoed by others I spoke to. It’s not about selling the hardback, the argument runs: the hardback sells the paperback.

“I can see why we need to do them,” says Jim Gill, a literary agent at Felicity Bryan Associates. “It comes off for two or three books a month (or so) — books that really sell in hardback and then get another chance in paperback and become bestsellers all over again.

“With most books, though, it’s sort of a PR/limited-theatrical release of some thousands (let’s be honest, some hundreds) of hardback copies. The real volume is in paperback or audio.”

If a book generates buzz, hopefully that will rub off on consumers. But the real intended audience is major retailers, whom publishers are hoping to persuade to stock the paperback in volume.

“For an unknown book — i.e. most literary fiction — you’re unlikely to get significant support” from bookshops, explains Mark Richards, co-founder of indie Swift Press. “So if you go straight into paperback then you’ve often lost your chance of getting it into the shops in good quantities at all. Whereas if you publish a book in hardback then get good reviews etc., you have more of a chance of persuading bookshops to take it in significant quantities when the paperback comes round.”

For most literary fiction, therefore, “the hardback has become more or less a glorified marketing tool”.

Publishers pitch for paperback “book of the month” slots at major retailers that can add thousands of sales. But in order to secure these, they need to show that the hardback stood out from the crowd. In VC-speak, the hardback is therefore “proof of concept”.

This “offers the market a chance to do its research and development that in many industries happens prior to taking things to the market,” says another publishing boss. “In books the relatively low cost of getting something into the market (compared to film or chocolate bars or cars) means that the consumer and media markets are given a chance to make choices that winnow the mass market choices.”

This makes sense, particularly from a publisher perspective. At Backstory, it is certainly true that we are more likely to take relatively big bets on paperbacks if they have already performed well in hardback. Our first order for a paperback we want to put on a table would usually be five copies; for Evenings and Weekends, we ordered 200, for The Correspondent, which comes out in paperback in June, 100.

The current vibey hardback is Yesteryear. We sold six copies last week and 10 this week: a small portion of our overall book sales, but enough above the (very low) hardback benchmark for us to know already that we’ll probably take a lot of paperbacks when the time rolls around.

There are, though, two flaws in this argument. The first is from Backstory’s perspective. We are a small bookshop: we can only stock 3,000 or so titles at a time. A handful of fiction hardbacks might sell decently, but the rest won’t. Do we want to devote a significant portion of our limited space to providing publishers with a sampling exercise for consumer demand? (That sounds like something we should charge for!)

Indie bookshops (and Waterstones) are more likely to take a punt on a literary debut; supermarkets and airport bookshops will shift volume, but only once others have taken that risk.

Second, publishers can (or at least should be able to) deliver re-orders within days. Books are printed in the UK and a paperback reprint can be turned around in 48 hours. So there is arguably no need for a different edition and a 12-month delay to test the market.

To take an extreme example, if all debut fiction were published in paperback, indies would still be more likely to take punts. As soon as something began to take off, others could (and would) leap on it. National sales charts are published weekly: if a book is gaining momentum, it is no secret.

Reason four: dosh

Perhaps it won’t surprise you that the argument in favour of hardbacks that seems to be most compelling is: Money.

“On the most basic level it’s about the P&L,” says the retail director of a major publisher. “A meaty hardback will help the numbers work.”

Printing a hardback costs roughly twice as much as printing a paperback. But printing costs are only one among many costs borne by publishers for every book: there’s the author’s advance, then the editor’s, sales reps’ and publicist’s wages, then distribution costs and any marketing budget. Those costs are similar regardless of how the book is printed. The publisher will typically set the RRP of a debut hardback novel 70-80% higher than a paperback, so each hardback sale generates much more profit per unit.

This “maximises value” from any one acquisition, argues the bigwig, meaning that though readers might prefer paperbacks, the hardback model enables publishers to take more bets and thus give readers more books to choose from: “There’s what consumers think they want and what they actually want.”

Contracts are structured so that the same economics apply to authors. “Publishers love the idea because the margin is so much better in hardback,” explains Jim Gill. “Agents and authors because the royalty rates on that bigger RRP are so much better.”

It is not only that authors earn more from their slice of the pie in hardback, it’s that publishers give them a bigger slice of the pie. Royalties for a standard hardback typically start at 10% of RRP, whereas for a paperback it is usually 7.5% (in both cases, the share goes up a bit if a book hits certain sales targets).

“Early adopter pricing is not unique to the book industry,” says Kay Peddle, a literary agent at Colwill & Peddle. “Any product that involves a lot of investment tends to use this strategy. And I think it’s important for authors and publishers to capitalise on the buzz and excitement of a new publication — it’s a very low margins business and it’s important to get return on investment wherever possible.”

And how do the figures look for a bookshop? Unlike authors, we don’t get a bigger slice of the pie for hardbacks. But we do, of course, make more pounds in profit by selling a hardback rather than a paperback.

Here, though, the distinction between non-fiction and fiction is crucial. Last year, sales of hardback non-fiction contributed 35% more revenue for Backstory than non-fiction paperbacks. But the opposite held for fiction, quite dramatically: there, paperbacks generated 148% more revenue than hardbacks.

Where does this leave us?

None of my conversations gave me any more reason to believe that readers want hardback novels. When I asked about their personal reading preferences, even my interviewees weren’t so keen on hardbacks. “I haven’t read a hardback in years,” said Jim Gill. Kay Peddle called paperbacks “the ultimate format”: cheap, portable and with “no pressure to keep it pristine. Sand, grime and dog ears all add to the charm”.

The four bestselling authors I spoke to loved the beautiful hardback editions of their own novels, but mostly preferred to read in paperback. “Hardbacks are a pain to carry around in your bag all day,” said Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam. Still, she admitted she would have been disappointed if her own novel had gone straight to paperback, “which is silly given my own feeling on hardbacks — but there really is something special about them… It feels culturally good and healthy for there to be some books that are beautiful, collectible objects and some books that are cheap and accessible.”

But I did come away persuaded that there are sound economic reasons for the status quo. Publishers, authors, bookshops and readers benefit from the hardback-first model for non-fiction. In fiction, the benefits are much less apparent for readers or retailers, but still clear for publishers and authors — at least for books that sell. (A lot of books lose publishers money, regardless of format. And authors only earn royalties after the publisher has covered their costs: 10% of £0 is worth the same as 7%.)

Is there a compromise here? Readers prefer paperbacks; publishers need to recoup their investment. If publishers are sticking to hardbacks for their higher prices, rather than out of intrinsic preference for the format, might it be possible to increase paperback prices instead?

Interestingly, of the readers in my survey who preferred paperbacks, 61% said that was primarily due to weight, format or portability, compared to 35% whose preference was driven by price. Could a slightly more expensive paperback, timed with the publicity traditionally given to a hardback, sell more copies than both formats combined? It’s surely worth a try.

There are other options, too. A pricier but beautifully produced “fancy paperback”, with flaps, could satisfy the “I-want-it-now-but-don’t-want-to-lug-around-a-hardback” crowd, followed later by a standard paperback for a more price-sensitive reader.

And if a paperback really takes off, a publisher could always produce a beautiful, limited edition hardback as a second format: superfans could line their bookcases with these, and publishers could present them to authors, the publishing equivalent of the golden vinyl that was traditionally given to musicians who sell a certain number of records.

Indies are leading the way. Fitzcarraldo Editions has only ever published (beautifully produced) paperbacks, save for a 10th-anniversary limited hardback run of its greatest hits last year. Economics initially forced their hand (their start-up capital would go further with the lower cost of printing paperbacks), but they have no plans to move away from their model. “No one’s ever said ‘it’s such a shame you don’t do hardbacks’,” says Jacques Testard, its founder.

The bigger indies are beginning to experiment, too. Canongate published Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy straight into paperback last November to capitalise on buzz generated by its US publication. That seems to have paid off: six months on, it is still in our top-10 bestsellers.

Next month Faber will publish a contender for book of the summer, I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder, as a nicely-produced paperback, at £14.99. That seems a good bet for the beach: both a fair bit cheaper than a hardback, and much more hand-baggage friendly.

Faber also provided us with the best experiment I’ve yet seen by simultaneously publishing paperback and hardback editions of Eliza Clark’s third book, She’s Always Hungry. We put them side by side. To be sure, we sold many more copies of the paperback, at £9.99. But we also sold out of our pile of the gorgeous, signed and collectible hardback edition, at £15. That seems a clever approach to pleasing the reader while making a book pay.

I don’t have a perfect answer. And, of course, much as I might try to understand the industry at large, my spot at the till only affords me a good view of one small part of it. But I would like to see bigger publishers being bolder and experimenting, too.

If you’ve got this far — sorry! — how do you think we could please readers, authors and publishers? Drop a comment below.

Happy reading… however you read!

Tom

]]><![CDATA[Just saying]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/just-sayinghttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/just-sayingSat, 04 Apr 2026 07:02:56 GMTYour Saturday coffee

We’re now opening at 9am every Saturday, an hour earlier, so you can pop in for your coffee kick and browse for books first thing. See you soon!

Easter hours

The shop is closing for Easter Sunday; otherwise we are open as normal (so, 9am-6pm Saturday; 10am-6pm Monday). Our website is, of course, open all hours…

Better than Easter chocolates: a new Patrick Radden Keefe

London Falling — the latest from New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain — is out this coming Tuesday. It’s definitely the book release I’m most excited about so far this year.

Here’s a little nugget from a book-industry drinks do I was at a few weeks ago. Three newspapers’ literary editors were in the corner gossiping and I made up the gaggle.

Me: I’m very excited for the new Patrick Radden Keefe.

Lit Ed 1: Oh yes. Brilliant.

Lit Eds 2 and 3 (excited and jealous): So you’ve read it?

Lit Ed 1: No. But brilliant.

Well, I have now read it and can confirm it’s a brilliant tale of ambition, greed and corruption at the heart of London. It is a riveting and forensic investigation of the last days of a London teenager, Zac Brettler, who fell to his death from a luxury Thameside apartment in 2019 after months of posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. I’ve lived here for 15 years, but learned so much about the city’s underworld — and its web of enablers — from Radden Keefe’s typically gripping prose.

Nab your signed copy on Tuesday, or book a spot to meet Patrick in person at our ticketed signing next month:

Get your signed copy

Come to our signing

Boxset of previous Radden Keefes

I’M AWARE THAT IT has now been a fortnight since I promised the second round of survey data “next week”. Anticipation has no doubt been building throughout the nation and perhaps overseas. Balham itself has, of course, spoken of little else.

So I scarcely need to remind you that 492 newsletter readers kindly gave their feedback on all things Backstory. In the first post, I shared what you told us about our website and what we are going to change in response. In this second and final post, let’s look at feedback about the physical bookshop.

Or, very largely, the bar. Backstory is, as you know, a bookshop/bar and I’ve felt for some time that it is the second-half of that equation that has most room for improvement. The survey underscored that and, even more usefully, provided a good deal of specific suggestions.

I’ve written before that, in setting up Backstory, I was inspired by several American bookshop bars — in particular Kramers in Washington DC, which I got to know during a stint reporting in the US capital a decade ago.

I liked that their bar was not an adjunct to the bookshop (as a lot of UK bookshop cafes traditionally were, clattery and carpet-tiled places tucked away from the books), but at its heart. That seemed to me a clear statement: this is a place you want to hang out in, not (only) conduct a transaction in and leave.

More generally, I liked that on reporting trips in the States I could perch at a bar in a restaurant and get chatting to others travelling on their own and to their bar staff. On assignment in a British town, I’d usually be given a table for one. I wanted Backstory to promote spontaneous interactions between readers as much as silent communion between readers and writers.

And that has worked: locals who have lived in Balham for decades have become friends with near-neighbours whom they had never previously met by striking up conversation at our bar. There’s a WhatsApp group of self-styled “bookshop babes” who regularly co-ordinate their trips to Backstory.

But it’s true that — although I had as little (ie, no) experience of bookselling as of hospitality — the former comes more naturally to me than the latter. I’m addicted to tea, like coffee and love wine, but I reckon it’s harder to run an excellent bar than an excellent bookshop. Or at least there’s more competition.

Which brings us to the first survey question:

More than a third of people who live close to the bookshop and read this newsletter have never had a coffee at Backstory. That is startling. When we first opened, our beans were not the best, but for the last two years we’ve served delicious specialty stuff from Volcano, roasted just down the road in Brixton and Norwood. It is now top-notch…. but we clearly need to do more to tempt you to give us a try!

To that end, we’re now offering a complimentary coffee with every order you click-and-collect via our website. I’m pretty confident that once you’ve tried it, you’ll be back for more. We’ve also just hired Emma, another fantastic barista, to join our team full-time. Together with Zoë, who runs our bar and is in charge of our beautiful displays and illustrations, they are upping our game significantly.

But your answers pointed to a bigger reason why many of you have not tried our bar:

This was a particularly helpful finding. When you stand behind the counter all day, it is easy to form the impression that there is plenty of space at the bar: on weekdays there are long stretches where several bar stools are available; at the weekend, the same is true in the lunchtime lull.

And when it’s busy at the weekend, we are so preoccupied by serving customers and making coffee, we don’t always notice whether every seat is taken and whether there are potential coffee or wine drinkers coming in, finding no space and heading straight back out.

So it is useful to know that, although mood lighting and further expanding our drinks list are on our agenda, finding a way to increase capacity should be our priority.

Of course, we can’t just knock through to next door. But there are ways we could make the space more flexible, for instance by pushing back some of the tables and bringing out more stools in the evening to create more of a buzzy bar vibe.

May I ask a couple of follow-ups? Please only answer if you live near Backstory!

Several of you suggested that we should host more informal events around the bar as well as our regular series of author events.

All of the following were suggested by newsletter readers, as well as all manner of other things. If you live locally, which — if any — would you be interested in attending?

The other main feedback from the survey was that you’re desperate for Backstory merch. More on that shortly!

People have extremely strong views on pens (someone requested a “pen which works”; another respondent was only interested in a “REALLY good writing pen”). Other requests hinted at personal experience, as in the request that “if it is a reusable coffee cup, please please [can it be] one that is completely leak proof ie you can turn it upside down and nothing comes out!”

As for “woolly hats — it’s the frozen north up here,” do let us know your details and perhaps we can all club together for a blanket, too.

Thanks again for so much incredibly generous and helpful feedback. Reading it was not only useful but also extremely humbling. It is so wild to me the degree to which so many of you have taken Backstory to your hearts. These were a couple of my favourites:

“You’ve genuinely reignited my love of reading, and I find it such a joyful space.”

“I love Backstory btw. You’ve created something local and wonderful. Thank you. Please never leave.”

We won’t! And we will keep getting better! Although there are probably some areas where we can’t improve. We will have to disappoint the contributor who wrote: “The only way you could improve would be to have Lyse Doucet give a weekly talk!”

One consistent ask was that I somehow find room in your childcare schedules for you to spend more time at our bar or browsing for books. One respondent described herself as “deep in the child-rearing trenches”; another said “I have three young kids so sitting down in a coffee shop is a distant dream”.

A third proposed a solution: “On-site childcare.” It’s a thought!

Happy reading,

Tom

]]><![CDATA[I read the novel 'written by AI']]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/i-read-the-novel-written-by-aihttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/i-read-the-novel-written-by-aiSat, 28 Mar 2026 08:02:22 GMTThe second half of the survey about Backstory will now follow next week… what follows was too juicy to wait!

WELL, WE WERE WARNED. Before the reader even reaches the prologue of Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, you alight on a chunky “WARNING”. The book, you are told, will “leave you squirming and linger in your mind for days. Proceed with caution.”

Quite.

The squirming that Ballard has prompted, though, has been less about the graphic depictions of the “absolutely feral” controlling relationship between Gia and Nathan, and more over the question of how a major publisher put out a novel that its “author” now concedes was edited with the help of AI. (Ballard denies using AI herself, saying it was used by someone she hired to edit the novel.) Hell, the book even (briefly) graced the bookshelves of Backstory. Blushes all round.

When The New York Times broke the story last week, the publisher pulled the book. Darby, our bookshop manager, banished our last remaining copy to the basement with this appropriately stern note:

Brutal, umcomfortable and visceral

As usual with my perverse run-towards-fire instinct, all of this fuss made me more, not less, keen to read the thing.

And I have bad news.

The writing is not bad. I mean, obviously it is bad. Unreadably so: I eventually allowed myself to give up after 100 pages. But it is not that bad. I’ve read much worse, both in raw copy in newsrooms and novels published by celebrities to much ballyhoo.

If AI did any more than just brush up the punctuation, I have to conclude that it’s really not at all bad at this writing game.

Sure, there is some deeply weird phrasing (“I just trudge upstairs…the weight of his smile pressing into my back”), lots of passive voice (“When I finish, the plate is rinsed immediately”) and some slightly peculiar lists (“I bring out the roast, the green beans, the potatoes…”). Everything is either sticky, wet, steaming or draping, or else contained within Declarative. Short. Sentences.

But if anything, the overall impression is of a story that is overwritten rather than underdone, as if the author or the editor or the bot — let’s say “the collaborators” — is trying just a little too hard. When a character is at ease, their body is “loose, unguarded, comfortable”; when they are not, they are weighed down by “a suitcase big enough to fit forever”.

I disliked this derivative and poorly written novel. But it felt like I was reading a derivative and poorly written novel, not a random amalgamation of words.

To show me that AI can do even “better” than this, my friend Ben asked ChatGPT to come up with an idea for a thriller about a bookshop owner in Balham. In an instant, it proposed a plot in which the proprietor comes to the disturbing realisation that the plots of the novels he recommends predict real events in his customers’ lives.

He then asked Claude to write the opening few paragraphs. Again, it did so within a matter of seconds:

It is a truth not universally acknowledged but readily apparent to anyone who has spent an afternoon in conversation with Tom Hargreaves that the man possessed a gift for book recommendations of an almost unsettling precision.
The shop itself—Particulars, as a hand-lettered sign above the door announced, with an air of having given the matter considerable thought—occupied a narrow stretch of Balham High Road between a dry-cleaner's and a purveyor of artisanal sandwiches. It was the sort of establishment that managed to be simultaneously very small and, once you were inside it, surprisingly difficult to leave.
Tom had been its proprietor for eleven years. He was thirty-eight, moderately bearded in the way of men who have decided that shaving is, on balance, more effort than the alternative, and he had the slightly distracted expression of someone who has just remembered something important but cannot quite locate what it was. His manner was gentle; his opinions, when solicited on the subject of literature, were firm to the point of being, occasionally, alarming.
"You want this one," he would say, pressing into a customer's hands some volume they had never heard of, by an author they couldn't place, with a title that seemed, at first glance, to have nothing whatever to do with their lives. And then, invariably, it would.
Mrs. Alcott, who taught piano in Streatham and came in every few weeks for something to read on the train, had once asked him how he did it.
"I don't do anything," Tom said. "I just pay attention."
This was, he believed, entirely true.
He would later revise this view.
The particular Tuesday on which our story begins was distinguished, in Tom's estimation, chiefly by the quality of the light—it had the grey, particular flatness of a London October, the sort that made all of Balham look as if it had been photographed through tracing paper—and by the arrival, at twenty past eleven, of a woman he had not seen in six weeks.
Her name was Caroline Marsh. She was a secondary school administrator, a reader of literary fiction, and, as of this moment, conspicuously shaken.
Tom looked up from the catalogue he had been annotating with remarks of limited professional restraint and registered, with the diagnostic efficiency of long practice, that something had gone wrong.
"The book," she said, setting it on the counter with the deliberate care of someone handling evidence.
Tom looked at the book. He had recommended it to her in September. It was a novel published in 1973 by a Flemish author of whom essentially no one had heard, in an edition so obscure that Tom himself had difficulty explaining why he stocked it, or indeed, precisely when he had acquired it.
"The book," he agreed.
"It's about me," Caroline said. "Not like me. It is me. The school, my sister, the— " she paused. "There are things in it, Tom, that happened last week."
Tom regarded her for a moment. Then he looked at the book again.
Then he said, in the tone of a man who has decided that measured responses are what the situation requires: "That does seem unlikely."
This was true. It was also, as he would shortly discover, entirely beside the point.

Blimey.

Well, in the tone of a man who has decided that measured responses are what the situation requires, this does seem rather alarming.

Of course, it’s one thing to write a page and quite another to write an entire novel. And there is far more to the art of writing than putting words on a page: what about structure and pacing? There is far more to the art of publishing than putting out any old potboiler with an AI-generated image slapped on the cover.

And, for most of us, there is far more to reading than just gobbling down some words, however good, bashed out by a computer. There’s a magic in one human communing with another through a world entirely of their creation.

Still. That passage may be overwritten and the pacing a bit weird — in need of a good editor — but I wouldn’t say it was poorly done. It made me smile, even laugh. And the bit about the beard is, appropriately enough, on the nose.

What to say about all of this?

My main reflection is that, though we all love a scandal, we should serve a good measure of self-reflection with the schadenfreude. It seems probable that, sooner or later, AI will catch out all of us.

That includes AI itself. There was much discussion about whether the publisher in question ought to have run the book through an AI detector. In order for that to be worthwhile, however, we would need to be confident that it would be able to distinguish between work belonging to Large Language Models and that from human-authored Largely Loose Manuscripts. One such model asserted a “100%” probability that the first paragraph of chapter five of Frankenstein was written by AI. As far as I’m aware, it was Mary Shelley.

Authors, agents, publishers and booksellers can — and should — take a stand against selling books written by AI. (Or at least where that is not clearly declared.) But how will we know?

Perhaps all of this is good news in disguise. While AI might, in time, be really rather good at pumping out derivative takes on the latest market trend (just as, arguably, publishers already do), I feel confident in saying it would not have come up with something as bonkers, brilliant and above all original as Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits, set in Ancient Sicily but somehow narrated in the tone of a late-night tale in a Dublin pub.

So publishers, let’s have something new, something bold, something risky, something so obviously and distinctively of that author that it could not possibly have come from Claude.

Happy reading,

Tom

]]><![CDATA[And our survey says]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/and-our-survey-says-acehttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/and-our-survey-says-aceSat, 21 Mar 2026 08:02:05 GMTA WARM WELCOME TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS to this newsletter. Several hundred of you have signed up since our recent British Book Awards win (did I mention that?) and it’s great to have you along for the ride.

You can expect a newsletter like this every Saturday morning at about 8am UK time. It is (almost) always by me, Backstory’s founder Tom, and I treat it a bit like a cross between a confessional diary and a jotting pad.

I’ve been writing these newsletters for more than four years now: here’s the first ever edition, laying out why I was taking the mad decision to quit my job to found a bookshop.

I write about a different topic each week, ranging from trying to get my head around the broader book industry (such as five things I’d tell a first-time author) to peeks under the hood of what it means to run your own small business (eg how we’re coping with our taxes going up 163%) — and, of course, book recommendations.

Every six weeks or so we share another edition of Overheard at Backstory, little nuggets of tittle-tattle from the shopfloor and fun things customers and authors have said in the bookshop recently.

Anyway, whatever brings you here and however long you stay, you’re all very welcome.

Read on for this week’s edition.

Come and join us for an event

Our May events have just been announced, with a very exciting line-up including Katja Hoyer on the Weimar Republic and James Bloodworth’s deep dive into the manosphere.

See all upcoming events here, including this coming Tuesday’s event on Dominic Gregory’s amazing memoir about his life as an RNLI volunteer. We’ll be talking all things saving lives at sea including, of course, the small boats crisis.

Come to an event

I DON’T QUITE UNDERSTAND how it is already late March. But, somehow, it is, so apologies for taking a while to share the results of the survey I sent round at the beginning of the year about how to make Backstory more… Backstory.

There were an amazing 492 responses, often quite detailed, which I have only now found the time to properly digest. Thanks to the hundreds of you who took the time to give your feedback, even those who, asked what merch we should consider designing, requested “action figures of staff members”. And I’ll probably discount the entry I don’t remember submitting that reads “hi tom it’s tom”.

Some of the ideas may be impossible to pull off, for reasons of space, time or finance. Others are mutually incompatible: how to reconcile the preferences of the many who wrote asking for more Overheards with the one respondent who loathes them?

But, taken together, your feedback is a very useful snapshot of what we’re getting right and what could be better. Some of it is wishlist stuff that I can bear in mind for the future, or when I marry a billionaire, but a lot of it is granular, bread-and-butter stuff that amounts to a brilliant to-do list that I can diligently work my way through.

I might also be a bit mad for sharing this with you. I suspect the instinctive response of most bosses would be to hoard such commercially helpful information, perhaps to be presented occasionally to their team as a brilliant brainwave that has just come to them.

But I know that several of you enjoy a peek under the hood. I’ve been as open as I can be about the bookshop from the very beginning, long before I even had premises. And one thing that comes through loudly from the survey is how deeply many of you care about Backstory: that is so lovely for me to hear, and underscores my desire for us to shape its future together.

Also I can’t keep secrets.

Since the feedback was so helpfully detailed, I am going to split my reply between two newsletters. This week’s will cover your responses about our website; next week’s will cover what more you’d like us to do in the bookshop, including improvements to what we stock, the bar and our events line-up.

Have you ordered a book via our website?

This one is really interesting. Just because it feels like you bang on about something all the time, that doesn’t mean that everyone has heard the message.

Of course, there are several good reasons why, if you’re in that 53%, you might choose not to order your books online with Backstory. Some of you may just be here for the overheards, or my random ramblings — and that’s absolutely fine.

Locals

Many locals prefer always to come into the shop in person. Indeed, avoiding shopping online might be the very reason you choose to shop with Backstory. And that’s lovely. One respondent, for instance, said “I don’t tend to buy any books online since for me the pleasure is in the browsing & the in-shop experience. Also I live in Balham so it doesn’t make sense for me to order online when I can easily pop in :)”

That makes complete sense. I don’t think any website replicates the magical feeling of walking into a bookshop and feeling enveloped in warmth. I prefer browsing books in person, too.

That gives us the opportunity to meet you, have a chat as we serve you a coffee or wine with your book and have a face-to-face interaction. So that works just fine for us, too.

But we do want locals to know that they have the option to click-and-collect books, too, if that makes life more convenient. (And most of you do. Question 2 was: “Did you know we offer free click-and-collect on 500,000 books via our website with next-day collection in the bookshop?” 72% said “yes”, 27% said “no, but I do now”.)

When you want a browse, popping straight in might well be the way to go. But if you are after a specific title, particularly if it is a little niche or a few years old, it can be helpful to order it from our website first, then we can have it waiting behind the counter when you come in. You still get to browse the shop when you visit.

As a way of thanking you for saving on the postage and coming to see us in the shop, we’ll give you a free cup of coffee (to drink in or take away) every time you click-and-collect a book.

Nine times out of ten, if you order the book by 4pm, it’ll be ready to collect at lunchtime the next day (the only exception is if you order on a Sunday, when it will be at the shop on Tuesday lunchtime).

If you live further afield

If you’re not in southwest London, we definitely want to encourage you to order books from our website! We do next-day UK delivery as standard (again, the cut-off is 4pm, and if you order on a Sunday, it will be with you on a Tuesday), and it’s free over £25. (Only 34% of you knew this.)

In the UK, we’ve sent parcels in the last few weeks to Abergavenny, Belfast, Corby, Dumfries, Enfield, Farnham, Grimsby, Hastings, Ipswich, King’s Lynn, Leeds, Middlesbrough, Newport, Oxford, Peterborough, Ruislip, Salisbury, Torquay, Uckfield and Walsall.

And if you’re even further afield, we deliver worldwide, too. In the last month alone, we’ve delivered everywhere from the Netherlands to New Zealand, Slovakia to South Africa.

So if you’re in that 53%, why not give us a go? Use the code IMNEWHERE for 10% off your first order.

We need to make the website experience feel more Backstory, which brings us to the next question:

If you normally order your books online from [another book retailer], would any of the following make you choose us instead?

Bookseller recommendations

It’s not surprising that “cheaper books” is the most popular. But I thought it was really striking how close a second “more bookseller recommendations” came. This is really useful and heartening feedback.

At the moment, it’s not at all easy to differentiate on our website between “Backstory picks” — books that one or more of our booksellers have read and can vouch for — and the rest: books that are there because we think you might like to buy them, but which we are not particularly championing, mostly because sadly we don’t yet have time to read all 500,000 of them.

I think we need to make it much clearer which 500 or 1,000 books are at the tip of the iceberg — the equivalent of the front few bookcases in-store, with handwritten bookseller recommendations — and which are the remaining 499,000, which we are very happy to make available but which we can’t personally vouch for.

We are going to spend the “Fighting Fund” (and more besides) on a navigation and design that makes differentiating between these two really simple, and creates a browsing experience for our recommendations much more akin to mooching in the shop.

If you have any ideas on how specifically we should do this, please hit “reply” or comment beneath this post. In particular, I’d love suggestions on what collections of recommendations would be helpful: what sort of categories would you like to be able to browse? Is it genres, is it books to gift particular groups of people, is it browsing by mood or purpose (“books to take to the beach” etc)?

Helpful feedback so far has included requests for categories for kids book recommendations by age and for “an archive of Backstory books of the month/year”, which I have now created. One customer said “I think it would be nice to have a few recommendations for choosing books depending on the way a book makes you feel or the main theme of the book as I find choosing a book can be overwhelming”.

Discounts/shipping costs

I will crunch the numbers on shipping! Blanket free shipping is probably impossible, as it would lose us money on some of the cheapest books we sell and make us about 10p on the average paperback.

But having to pay £2.95 at the point of ordering is clearly a source of what the web experts call friction. I will definitely do a proper set of costings for a £15 threshold and see whether that might be possible — I suppose at the minimum that incentivises customers to buy at least two paperbacks in one go.

It’s also interesting that there is smaller, but significant, interest in a one-off annual fee for free shipping. At least two respondents suggested we could call this a “Backstory Club” and include various other benefits as well as free shipping.

If you would consider that option, it would be really helpful to know how much you think you would be prepared to pay for it. And what else would be useful to include as part of the Club benefits? Access to Club-only sales? Priority access to booking our events? Limited edition merchandise? Access to special or signed editions of books? Hit reply or comment below!

Another option several of you suggested was some kind of loyalty scheme. We already have one in store, but we could link it to the website or launch a separate online one. One customer wrote: “A simple stamp loyalty points thing, to discount on future purchases, is what most ‘gets’ me, then I can spend loads on books for other people and use the discount I’ve earned for myself. I probably would also pay an annual delivery fee to then get delivery for free.” What would you ideally be looking for in such a scheme? Let me know.

Other feedback from newsletter readers from further afield

Live-streaming events

A few readers who don’t live near the bookshop mentioned you would be keen for us to live-stream some of our author events — or, intriguingly, to “love-steam” them.

Is this something that could appeal to you? Let me know if so!

Wishlists

Others suggested we have a basket or wishlist that you can pile things into and keep coming back to. Would that be popular?

Formatting

“A quick website improvement would be the formatting issues in the descriptions,” writes one respondent, “e.g. missing spacing or formatting to differentiate quotes and reviews from the main description; at the moment it also runs into one block of text which looks a bit muddled. Also special characters e.g. Colm Toibin coming up as question marks.”

yes, it DR!v*e*s mE M?d

The reason it occurs at the moment is that we import the description of each book from the data supplied via publishers. I know it will come as a shock that we don’t hand-type each of the 500,000 descriptions. (We do, of course, write the “Backstory pick” recommendations!)

Annoyingly, our current system of ingesting these write-ups is a bit s#1t and results in all the random caps and asterisks.

I promise we’re working on it. Jamie, our web engineer, has a cunning plan. Check back in a few months on that!

And that’s it! Not a short list.

Thanks again for all this amazing feedback. I read every single reply and it was so lovely to hear from so many of you, especially those of you I have never met in person, who live hundreds or even thousands of miles from the bookshop.

Asked if they had any recommendations for the bookshop, one respondent replied: “I don’t as have never visited, what with living an hour north of Inverness. I’ve found you totally via Substack and have loved following the journey.”

How lovely!

And thanks, too, to those of you who tried to cajole me into opening another shop, whether “in our Wiltshire market town”, or — perish the thought — “north of the river”.

As I say, next week I’ll share the feedback about the bookshop itself, the bar and events. If any of the above sparks further thoughts or resonates with you, do hit reply and let me know any ideas. I’m all ears.

And, as a reminder, if you’d like to give our website a go, just use IMNEWHERE for 10% off your first order.

Happy reading,

Tom

]]><![CDATA[Coming soon to a bookshop near you ]]>https://tomrowley.substack.com/p/coming-soon-to-a-bookshop-near-youhttps://tomrowley.substack.com/p/coming-soon-to-a-bookshop-near-youSat, 14 Mar 2026 08:03:04 GMTThank you…

…for the brownies (from a mystery benefactor? please reveal yourself!), pastries, flowers, cards, emails, comments, orders and, above all, to the hundreds of you who have popped in to congratulate us and join us in raising a glass to being London’s independent bookshop of the year.

We are so very grateful.

Cheers: Zoë, Francis, Denise, me, Isobel and Darby

It’s been quite a week. I’m glad to be up in Northumberland for a long-planned trip this weekend, from where I can let it sink in a bit. Four years ago, I had just quit my job against pretty much everyone’s advice to attempt to open a bookshop; I was eking out savings and hunting around for premises. Four years on, I get to say I founded an award-winning bookshop!

The fizz is still flowing this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon for all customers, so if you’re local, do pop in to join Darby, Isobel, Zoë and Francis in celebrating. And there’s 10% off all purchases in store and online (just use the code YIPPEE) until tomorrow night.

Use YIPPEE for 10% off

FROM WITHERING HEIGHTS, critics have not been altogether charitable about Emerald Fennell’s recent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel of (almost) that name.

For my part, I rather enjoyed it. But then, I am almost as partial to a bit of maximalist cinema as I am to the charms of Jacob Elordi.

It may not be a vintage adaptation, but it is a classic example of the transformative effect a bit of Tinseltown glitz can have on book sales.

A century and three quarters after her death, Brontë is back from the wily, windy moors to bother the book charts. At Backstory, our current top 5 bestsellers are the paperback editions of Fundamentally (first published 2025), A Family Matter (2025), Three Days in June (2025), The Safekeep (2024) and Wuthering Heights… 1847.

In some national charts, the movie tie-in edition, the Penguin Classics paperback and the Penguin clothbound hardback are all current bestsellers.

Wuthering Heights might be a particularly good example of this phenomenon, but it is hardly alone. Hamnet (also in cinemas, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal) is currently our 10th bestseller. At number 16 is Heated Rivalry, of which a TV adaptation started screening in January.

wuthering wuthering Wuthering Heights

In recent months, we’ve sold stacks of The Housemaid, Trespasses, Say Nothing and Project Hail Mary in the month of — and the month before — their respective adaptations.

Partly, this is a sign that we all have far too much to do. We mean to get round to reading a book we’ve heard great things about but then get distracted. All the hype around a TV or movie release reminds us finally to buy the thing.

It’s also testament to just how deeply ingrained is the rather preachy notion that you should always read the original before you watch the adaptation. Who says? And why? Other stories are available…

And it’s also a useful counterbalance to the endless brouhaha about debut authors and the latest hyped-up new releases. There are so many bloody great older books out there, and perhaps we ought to do more to remind readers of those than to obsess about directing them towards a shiny new toy that probably won’t still be being adapted in 178 years.

Whatever the reason, it’s great for sales. Long may Hollywood never have an original idea!

Happy reading,

Tom

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