Merry Christmas! If, like us, you’ve had your dinner and would like to take yourself to a quiet corner with something good to read and a cup of tea (or a second Christmas dinner- why not?) , rather than get into yet another discussion about politics or similar tricky topics with your aunt’s husband, then we have a treat for you.
Kindle have discounted a whopping 12 of our bestselling titles. Just click on the tiny price next to each title below and you’ll be able to read Wolf Hall, Americanah, All the Light We Cannot See, Pretty Honest and many more in an instant. With enough titles to take you through to 2016, you’ll have a very happy new year too. Read more…
2015 has been another great year for 4th Estate. We’ve seen Anthony Doerr’s epic All The Light We Cannot See win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Laline Paull’s extraordinary debut The Bees shortlisted for the Baileys Prize, and Bruce Robinson’s excoriating They All Love Jack longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. We’ve published some fantastic books – Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (surely the most talked-about book of the year), Nigel Slater’s long-awaited third volume of The Kitchen Diaries and Nell Zink’s iconic yellow-boxed double whammy of The Wallcreeper and Mislaid among them. We’ve hosted some stimulating Literary Salons at the Book Club in Shoreditch, and we’ve launched a stylish new video series, RE4DINGS.
We’ve been telling you how brilliant our books are all year, so as it’s Christmas, we thought we’d be charitable and highlight some of books we’ve loved from across the industry. So without further ado, here are our favourite books that we read in 2015…
4th Estate are delighted to announce that we have six, yes six, incredible novels on the International Dublin Literary Award list! Books are nominated for the Award by invited public libraries in cities throughout the world – making the Award unique in its coverage of international fiction. Titles are nominated on the basis of ‘high literary merit’ as determined by the nominating library. Read more…
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr has taken the Pulitzer Prize for fiction! The novel, a beautiful, stunningly ambitious tale about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II been described as ‘an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.’
Today we’re delighted to announce that Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See has won the 2014 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction.
The Award caps off a year of enormous success for Anthony and the book, which was No. 2 on Amazon’s list of the Best Books of 2014, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, and last weekend was purchased by none other than President Barack Obama. Anthony’s spectacular, widescreen story took ten years to write, telling of a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. We’re incredibly proud to publish Anthony, and would like to congratulate him on this well-deserved recognition.
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Judith Claire Mitchell, author of the forthcoming ‘A Reunion of Ghosts’ celebrates the indefatigable Madame Manec from Anthony Doerr’s ‘All The Light We Cannot See’…
‘I live in a world that has little use for elderly women, and yet, if I’m lucky, an elderly woman is what I will someday be. I think about this from time to time. It’s not that I’m horrified by the thought of ageing. I’m actually intrigued by it. I’m a novelist, after all. I’m interested in how stories unfold, how they twist and turn, how they conclude. This applies to my own story as well.
What disturbs me is the culture’s dismissal of women who have the temerity to grow old, and the way that, at a certain point, a cloak of invisibility falls upon women, a cloak that is heavy and hard to shrug off and can even, I fear, come to feel comfortable.
Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See, writes:
I first saw the majestic seaside city of Saint-Malo after a full day of travel while on a French book tour. We arrived after dark and went straight to a crowded dinner on small chairs in a small room. Much eating and talking and smoking ensued, followed by more eating and talking and smoking. By the end of the meal I was desperate to get up and move. So while everyone else trudged back to the hotel, I went in the opposite direction, and climbed a long staircase, and found myself—utterly by chance—atop the massive stone ramparts that encircle the whole city. Read more…
A boy is trapped beneath the ruins of a city; from far above and across the airwaves, a girl reads aloud to him. Anthony Doerr explores the inspirations behind his new novel, All the Light We Cannot See – published in the UK on 8 May 2014.
