A very happy New Year to you and all you know, from 4th Estate. 2014 was a fantastic year for books, wasn’t it? Or, to borrow the phrase from Andy Miller, it truly was The Year of Reading Dangerously. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie taught us that We Should All be Feminists, while Lena Dunham told us how she came to be one in Not That Kind of Girl. David Cronenberg put us off our dinner with the fantastic techno-thriller Consumed, but Anna Jones set us back on track with her astonishing debut recipe book A Modern Way to Eat. The phenomenal Sali Hughes taught us all we needed to know about beauty (and all we didn’t know we should) in Pretty Honest: The Straight-Talking Beauty Companion, a guide we should all start referring to daily in the new year. Read more…
I work in publishing, a world carved out by the white upper class. A world that, for the most part, inadvertently continues to pave the way for white middle to upper class writers. I’m a black twenty four year old woman from a working class background. I’m increasingly aware of this, especially at a time when slavery is being thrust into people’s faces, with Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave being one of the works prompting some awareness of a system that people are keen to forget happened in the not too distant past. Read more…
