Books by Boris Johnson, Stanley Tucci and Miranda Hart are among those being published today, on this year’s “Super Thursday” – the day when more books are published than on any other day of the year.
A total of 1,900 books come out today – up from 1,286 last year, which was a particularly low figure, possibly due to the knock-on effect of the pandemic on book production.
“Super Thursday is an exciting day for booksellers with hundreds of new books arriving in bookshops on the same day,” says Kate Skipper, chief operating officer at Waterstones. “It is always a hugely busy day but there is a real buzz to unpacking so many of the big books for Christmas at once.”
Johnson’s memoir, Unleashed, recounts his time in power, from London mayor to prime minister. “Johnson’s book gives his version of the big episodes,” wrote Martin Kettle in a Guardian review. “But it dodges the larger issues they raise. The description of what he calls ‘the whole Partygate hoo-ha’ is typical.” The book is currently third on the Amazon UK bestseller chart, based on preorders.
Big fiction releases include Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue – the latest instalment in his Rebus series, which was adapted for TV by the BBC in May – and Sophie Kinsella’s What Does It Feel Like?, about a novelist who has brain cancer. Kinsella is the pen name of Madeleine Wickham, who revealed she had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of aggressive brain cancer, earlier this year.
By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult is also published today. The novel is about a young woman and talented storyteller, Emilia, living in Elizabethan England, who pays an actor called William Shakespeare to front her work.
The final novel in Kate Mosse’s Joubert Family Chronicles series, titled The Map of Bones, is also published today, along with The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins’ The Blue Hour.
The highly anticipated latest addition to AF Steadman’s Skandar series – Skandar and the Skeleton Curse – is out today. In 2020, Steadman landed what was believed to be the largest ever book advance for a debut children’s author for the first three books in the series.
Readers can also now get their hands on Tucci’s What I Ate in One Year, in which the actor records 12 months of his life via eating, and Hart’s new book, I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You, the comedian’s account of facing an undiagnosed health condition. Memoirs by Rick Astley and Alison Steadman will also be landing this Thursday.
Other memoirs coming later this autumn include those by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Pacino and Cher, as well as the posthumous writings of Alexei Navalny.
On the fiction side there is plenty more to come this autumn too. Ali Smith will publish Gliff – the first instalment of a two-novel project – on 31 October. Jonathan Coe’s satirical murder mystery The Proof of My Innocence, set during Liz Truss’s tenure, will come out on 7 November, as will Eliza Clark’s short story collection She’s Always Hungry.
Haruki Murakami’s latest – The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel – will be published on 19 November. The novel follows a young man whose search for his vanished girlfriend leads him to a mysterious walled city.
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