Bond Girl Forever

So, it’s not every day that you watch your sister being ferried down the Thames by a phalanx of marines, flanked by two navy helicopters.

Today is the publication day of DEVIL MAY CARE, something that we’re only mildly excited about here at Penguin. And something I promise we’ll stop shouting about soon. Well, maybe not soon, but certainly in the next year or so…

And I’m perhaps more excited than most about it here, as my sister’s the Bond girl on the front cover.  My sister’s been a successful model since she was 16, and this is the first time that our professional worlds have collided. And what a collision! Not only is Tuuli the cover girl, and therefore on display in every bookshop in the country, but she also had to deliver the first 7 copies yesterday by speedboat, to a waiting Sebastian Faulks on HMS Exeter.  And to look at the pictures of her stiff and steely stance as the figurehead on that speedboat, dressed in a skin tight red stretch-leather Jitrois catsuit, as it raced up the Thames, you’d never guess how nervous she was!  And the fact that at the last minute she got clearance to arrive without a safety lifejacket on, meant that the arrival looked even more fabulous. 

But she didn’t drop the suitcase in the Thames, thank goodness, and delivered it safely to Sebastian, by now having changed into 6-inch stiletto heels (which weren’t obviously allowed on the rubber boat). Sebastian, Commander Paul Brown (the Captain of HMS Exeter), and Lucy Fleming signed the 7 books, before Tuuli was put in charge of them again, to escort them to Waterstones Piccadilly in a beautiful open-top Bentley. As I wasn’t on HMS Exeter, but watching from the bank of the river with my mum and Tuuli’s fiancé, the first we knew of the press attention on board was when they disembarked to make their way to Waterstones. They had to pose in front of the Bentley for a good 15 minutes, with a bank of about 50 photographers shouting ‘Over here Tuuli’, ‘To your left Tuuli’ – it was madness! It also made it very obvious that I could certainly never do her job. As I organise publicity for our authors at Penguin, I’m much happier behind the scenes directing the action. I turned around to remark this to my mum, but she’d vanished, until I spotted her right in the middle of the press pack, clicking away with the best of them.

Photographers banished, Tuuli and Sebastian swept off in their Bentleys to Waterstones, where a laser-guarded box was waiting to safeguard the books until publication day today. And official duties done, we headed off for a quiet celebration lunch (catsuit safely exchanged for something more sedate – I don’t think London lunchers were ready for red leather somehow), with the family phone calls starting about spots on ITV and the BBC.

My mum rushed out and bought all the papers this morning, and is busily sending copies to grandmothers and aunts and uncles. Today is again a normal day, and Tuuli’s back to riding the bus rather than Bentleys. But she’s a Bond girl forever for our family, and we’re prouder of her than anything.

Katya Shipster
Press Officer

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Special Guest Post – Unfiction

We Tell Stories, our alternate reality game and digital storytelling exercise finished 3 weeks ago – here Naomi Alderman explains the mysterious seventh story and the difference between writing books and writing games.

Last week, I went for a drink with some of the characters in a story
I’d just finished writing. Or at least, that’s what it felt like. It’s
a feature of writing Alternate Reality Games that the boundary between
players/readers and story-effecting characters becomes perilously thin.

As part of the We Tell Stories online storytelling project, I wrote
the Secret Seventh Story; one which you’d
only find if you went looking
for it. On the main site there was a white rabbit icon. Clicking on the rabbit led to a blog
called "Treacle and Ink", written by novelist and bookshop owner, Alice
Klein. Over eight weeks, Alice’s story unfolded. She found a black
mirror in a junk room above her shop – looking into it gave her
wonderful ideas for that difficult second novel. But she began to spend
more and more time staring into the mirror, and the effects on her life
became increasingly troubling.

Meanwhile, within the six stories of We Tell Stories, clues were
appearing. "Alice, call 020 8133 8141" read a message that flashed up
during Charles Cummings’ The 21 Steps. A pattern of dots in an image in
Toby Litt’s story Slice led to information about a black mirror.
Clearly someone was trying to contact Alice Klein via these stories –
but who, and why?

The hunt was on. The blog’s readers became more engaged in the
story than I could ever have hoped. They emailed Alice telling her
about the messages – she didn’t believe them at first, so they had to
find ways to convince her. They went to St Pancras station to unravel a
coded message hidden there. They wrote online stories themselves to communicate with a character in the story.

In perhaps my favourite part of the story, the readers discovered
that another character, Jacques, had crucial information they needed.
But Jacques had recently broken up with his girlfriend. He said he was
just too desolate to talk to the readers – he’d only give them the
information they wanted if they came to a London pub and gave him
trinkets to win his girl back.

True to form, a band of readers turned up at the Jerusalem Tavern
one Thursday night in April. Claire Bateman from Six to Start had
briefed an actor, who waited in the pub while giggling, excited readers
presented him with their gifts. One had baked muffins, another had
painted a picture, another had bought a little ring from Argos, while
another had written poems for Jacques to recite to his girlfriend. Duly
impressed, "Jacques" gave them the information they’d come for, while I
lurked round the corner, trying to be inconspicuous while overhearing
the odd snatch of conversation.

It’s this level of engagement and immediacy which makes this kind
of story so much fun to write. Working on a novel is a marathon:
perhaps several years of effort, and no one to cheer your progress
week-by-week, let alone day-by-day. By contrast, much of an Alternate
Reality Game has to be written quickly, to respond to the readers’
actions. Very frequently, on this kind of project, I’ll be writing
something in the morning that goes live online in the afternoon and is
then busily discussed by readers on their forums in the evening. That
kind of instant response is intoxicating – and the most-engaged readers
end up influencing the story so much that they can come to feel like
characters themselves.

Is this the future of storytelling? It’s too early to tell – we’re
only just beginning to explore the storytelling potential of the
internet and computers. But instant communication makes reader
involvement a real possibility – and in a much more subtle way than the
horrific "vote on what should happen next" TV experiments of a decade
or so ago. Many writers might feel that reader involvement could only
sully their stories. But as for me, I’m excited by all the
opportunities the new technology brings.

Naomi Alderman is the author of the prize-winning Disobedience and was lead writer on pioneering alternate reality game Perplex City. She is currently working on her second novel. If you want to read the players perspective and watch how they solved the clues, the unfiction forum provides comprehensive coverage.

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Saddling up old warhorses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last summer it was decided to reissue Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy in a new look (above, design and illustration by Penguin’s own Nathan Burton) that complemented her new book Life Class, also set during the First World War. The three books form a particularly pleasing tableau when lined up together (booksellers take note). The reissues were published on the 1st of May and, coincidently, eleven days later it was announced that The Ghost Road, the third title in the trilogy, which won the Booker Prize in 1995, had been short listed for the Best of Bookers.

The Best of Booker Prize is a curious event pitting past winners of the forty-year-old prize against one another: the old warhorses of yesteryear saddled up for one last battle. It works something like this. Forty-two winners (two years had joint winners) were read by a judging panel of three and whittled down to a short list of six, announced on May 12th. The winner will be announced on July 10th, decided by public vote via text or website.

Obviously, this Booker of Bookers is just a publicity exercise intended to get people talking about books and the state of literature as published in the UK, while reminding people of the cultural value of the Booker Prize. But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the process is somewhat flawed. If we leave aside the fact that comparing books is like comparing apples and apricots, we have the larger problem of the public vote. A judging panel is at least required to try and read all the eligible books. The public have no such obligation. So the votes for the short list will fall almost exclusively on those books voters are familiar with. In my case that is one book – which I forked out money for and sat down and read. Three others I have had cause to work on professionally.

It is therefore a popularity contest. Tony Blair might have called it the People’s Booker.

In which case, you might ask, why not use book sales? The mass of people prepared to put their money down for a book are making a definitive statement – any book which didn’t pass muster with joe public would swiftly find itself out of print (which has been the fate of at least one past Booker winner). William Hill have already put Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which won an earlier Best of the Booker contest in 1993, as favourite, while Barker’s The Ghost Road is odds on second.

However, despite these flaws, the short list of the Best of Bookers, which stretches from 1973 to 1999 is one means of taking the cultural temperature of the country’s readers. Is a book about the struggles of a nascent post-colonial nation more important to us than one detailing the crumbling mind of a soldier shattered by war? Does a story about a gamble for love in nineteenth-century Australia touch us more than one about the personal and cultural consequences of abusing a position of power in post-apartheid South Africa? Does a novel of nineteenth-century colonial arrogance in India beat one of twentieth-century colonial hypocrisy in South Africa? Perhaps issues don’t make a winner and it is instead the artistry of the writer that will ensure the enduring appeal of a book. Most likely, it is some hard-to-put-your-finger-on mixture of both.

The book judged best in any given year will be viewed differently in subsequent years. It is a prize winner, but what keeps it relevant? What does its survival or non-survival say about it – and us? Reading any Booker Prize winner today will always be a different experience from reading it when it first came out. We as readers come to certain books at a remove from the context in which they were originally written and received. (There are reasons we don’t see quite as much post-colonial fiction published these days and yet the short list we are offered is dominated by such books.)

The Booker of Bookers reminds us of the distance that separates us from the books of the past. But, I would argue, not so much through the books that have made the cut – but through those that haven’t. What have we lost since then? What has become more or less important to us as readers?

So while we salute the short list we are given and, eventually, the public winner of the Booker of Bookers we will give ourselves, let us also raise a glass to the old warhorses – insert your choice from the list here – that haven’t been saddled up and paraded before us.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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Five in Mind part the sixth

Back in the day when I had an answer for everything, I used to ask everyone I met what their favourite book was. It was my trademark question, my run-out-of-conversation-on-a-first-date question. Then one day, I realised I could no longer answer the question myself. I was a bad first date.

The funny thing with favourite books is that they change all the time, because we change all the time (stay with me on this one). Which means that certain books read at certain times become, for that day, week or month, the ‘best book ever written’. Probably a book that inspired you at a time when you needed inspiring, or whose characters you quoted from endlessly because you were standing in their shoes when you met them.

It’s a relief to learn from the inside that the Penguin Classics list of the Best Books Ever Written isn’t selected on the emotional whims of a woman in her late teens and early twenties. But I was delighted to find that there’s at least some degree of crossover …

High Windows

When I’d reached a point where I was reading Phillip Larkin by day and watching Six Feet Under by night, I knew the world couldn’t get much blacker. Larkin’s honest portrayal of the ugliness of the world is juxtaposed with the occasional moment of stark beauty which always comes as a shock, even when you know the poems by heart.   

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels are magic, not to mention the best form of escapism you can find. And the more of his books you read, the more vivid their world becomes. Journeying through and beyond the whole spectrum of humanity and range of emotions (at least several times), this particular novel is an epic for all the family.

A Fine Balance

I love this story, not only because it gives such a wonderful insight into India at the time, but also because it makes you feel humble in a way that stays with you well beyond the final page. It is rare to find a novel that makes you care about the characters from the very beginning so consistently, and with so much heart. 

Don Quixote

I suspect that I’ll never again meet anyone as funny, tragic or dedicated to the cause as Don Quixote. He’ll always be the one to remind us how hilariously poor our perception can be when we let ourselves be ruled by our emotions. This novel is also a great celebration of friendship – we all need a friend as loyal and entertaining as Sancho Panza, but they’re few and far between.

The God of Small Things

The world became an infinitely more beautiful place when I read this novel, although its greatness lies not so much in the story as in the way it is written. A must-read for anyone with a god-shaped hole in their universe. 

 

I’ll stop there. Except to say that I dig this blog. Because, to quote from Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things how can they be called remarkable? Wise words indeed.

Natalie Ramm
Marketing Manager

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5 in Mind part 5: Adventures in Type

Click to launch slideshow

Links to the books on Amazon:

#1, #2, #3, #4, #5

A Humument has a website with scans of every page.

You might have suggestions for others? You could comment if you do.

Alan
Copywriter

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Covering Bond

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not long after my parents had relocated the family from the cold, damp
and impressively windy Highlands of Scotland to the less cold, only
marginally less damp, but no-doubt-about-it impressively windy island
of Jersey, I was invited to a rich classmate’s seventh birthday party.
You could tell he was rich since on the way home from school in my
parents’ car we passed his house. This took a while.

The signature feature of this boy’s party was something so unimaginably cool that I still think of it now with fondness and envy: a home cinema. Now this wasn’t some tarted-up plasma screen under a ridiculous nom de guerre available on special offer at Curries. This was the mid-1970s. A home cinema meant a roll-up screen and stand, a 16mm projector, speakers and reels of film. In his house. My jaw drops still when I think about it.

Anyway, the home cinema treated us to an abridged twenty-minute version of Live and Let Die. Being six at the time, I loved every butchered minute of it. No matter that it was one sixth the length of the original, featured cartoon-Bond Roger Moore – yet to succumb to the claggy embrace of a safari suit – and clearly could not have made any sense whatsoever. At that age as long as some things got smashed up and people got hit in an entertaining way, what was not to like?

A few years later my mother gave me a book club edition that featured two James Bond novels, Dr No and From Russia with Love. On the cover was a poorly cutout bikini-clad Ursula Andress – from that still – emerging from the water pasted on top of a scarlet background. Being a book club edition it was a hardback. Being a book club edition every other expense had been spared. You could tell because they’d managed to place the novels out of order. This might not have mattered but for the fact that frequently in Fleming’s Bond books one story leads directly onto the next. In this case, From Russia with Love ends with a cliffhanger putting the survival of Bond in doubt, while Dr No begins by recounting the agent’s recovery. Or, if you were reading my book club version, at the beginning Bond gets better from the poisoning he will receive some 500 pages later. Such unconventional linearity gave Bond an unexpected modernist slant.

However, it is this sort of basic inattention to details that has often been all too obvious in past editions. For much of the forty-four years since his death his books have been treated by a succession of publishers rather like that bizarre home cinema experience: a fast, enjoyable thrill not to be taken too seriously or paid much attention to, and something that is certainly not for adults.

The centenary of Fleming’s birth was clearly a good time to revisit the Bonds and cover them in a package that says, yes these are fun, but also makes it implicit that there’s no reason not to take them seriously. Most importantly, they should look like books worth owning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To that end Michael Gillette was commissioned to paint fourteen iconic covers. The books were numbered on their spines so it’s not hard to read them in order (if you’re traditionally minded). The blurbs, adapted from earlier Penguin editions, were themed around the new unified concept. Fourteen book biographies, one for each back flap, replaced the usual author biography (which is found on page one). A short extract from each book graces the back cover. They were made into demi-format hardbacks to be not so much collectible as bloody irresistible.

Having worked on the Bond novels on and off for eight years – and these are the fourth set Penguin have done in that time – I can attest to their enduring appeal. And you won’t find a safari suit in sight.

The new Bond hardbacks are published on May 29th. More information available here.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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Five in Mind part four

What’s that book about the guy who works in a record shop who’s obsessed with making lists called? You know, the one about music and ex-girlfriends? Anyway, that one’s definitely on there, but since it’s a book about lists I don’t think its fair for you to make it count it on my actual list, okay? I should also like to mention that my posting this doesn’t make it ipso facto definitive. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things and I don’t have time thank you very much to sit here trying to remember every book I’ve ever read. Also, it’s Tuesday, and as you know Tuesday’s mood is different to Friday’s mood and naturally my selections will reflect that. So basically, the whole experiment is flawed. What if I were to post two – or, better, seven? That way you’d get some real range, a real sense of what on any given day of the week I’m likely to summon up. One will do? Okay, fine, but I get to change it if it I think of something else, right?

A Long Time Gone by David Crosby.

This is one of the best rock autobiographies ever written. Crosby was a founding member of The Byrds and went on to be, in all honesty, the least talented member of CSNY. Neil Young was obviously (obviously) the weird one, but my gawd was Crosby ever messed up. I’m still not sure he’s a particularly interesting guy but he seemed to be everywhere and know everyone and take everything and the story is incredible as a result.

The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner

I’m not even going to say what it’s about, since it might put people off reading it, but it would be my contender for the most brilliant book ever written. Take any passage in the book. Look up the root of every word in the passage. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t once say anything he doesn’t mean to say.

Experience by Martin Amis

I must have read this book like five times. I can and do quote from it liberally and most of the time I say that it’s Martin Amis but there are one or two occasions I can think of where I’ve stolen a real zinger and passed it off as my own. It’s about his life, which by any standard is worth reading about.

A Perfect Spy by John le Carre

I’m not one of those people who think le Carre isn’t taken seriously enough, but if I were I would leave copies of this book in dead letter boxes all round town. It’s a big novel, and a totally readable one, about what makes spies tick (and about a hundred other things).

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

If anyone ever asks me to give them advice on how to write a novel I think I’ll just say “read Disgrace”. In fact, I might start using that as my stock reply when anyone asks me anything.

   

Jon Elek
Assistant Editor

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Five in Mind part three (Five Guilty Pleasures)

Before I start this list, I’d like to stress that I do read Proper Books. I spend my days working on serious tomes about the state of the world, and marvelling at the heights that the English language can soar to in the Penguin Classics. Sometimes, however, I don’t want the finer things in life, so here are my five books of shame. In the way that the Pot Noodle “slag of all snacks” TV ads from a couple of years ago tapped into the need to gorge yourself on something highly unsuitable every now and again, these are the books that I devour guiltily in secret, like a pork pie or a Findus crispy pancake. I’d be a bit embarrassed to be seen reading them on the tube, but I would want to lock myself in the loo at work to finish them. And can you really say that about Middlemarch?

1.The Lord of the Rings.

I know it’s fashionable to snigger at the slightly overblown prose and silly names, but I stand by this book as my ultimate comfort read. I’ve loved it ever since I listened to the marvellous BBC radio adaptation with my granny many years ago, and I still re-read it often (it got up to once year when the films were out – mainly so that I could say things like “Ah, but Elrond never actually did that!” – although I have weaned myself off that now).

2. The entire oeuvre of Stephen King. 

I love horror writing and ghost stories in general, but when it comes to scaring the absolute bejeezus out of you, I don’t think Stephen King can be beaten. Even typing the names of some of my favourites – Pet Sematary, Salem’s Lot, The Shining – is making me slightly nervous. So I’ll move on to number 3…   

3. Lace by Shirley Conran.

“Which one of you bitches is my mother?”

I defy anyone to think of a better opening line from a novel. This just narrowly beat Jackie Collins’s Chances as the biggest, best and most brazen of all the 80s sex and shopping novels. It also has the one thing that many commercial writers seem to overlook these days – a good plot (and the infamous ‘goldfish scene’ is forever burned onto my brain, as I suspect it is for many women over 30).

4. Bridget Jones’s Diary.

My other favourite ladies’ book. Easy to dismiss as the first ‘chick-lit’ novel, but I think Helen Fielding’s heroine captures our foibles, self-delusions and calamities in a way that hasn’t been done as well since Mr Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody (see, I do read classics!). Plus it makes me laugh and laugh. 

5. Revelation by C. J. Sansom.

Be warned – C. J. Sansom’s books are like crack. I’m a huge thriller fan anyway, but who would have thought the adventures of a Tudor hunchback lawyer (think Cadfael crossed with Inspector Morse crossed with the film Seven) could be so addictive?   

So there you have it – I feel a lot better now I’ve got those off my chest. In fact I’m off to have a pickled egg.

Louise Willder
Copywriting Manager

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