I first visited Svalbard in 2013, after forming the sudden conviction that I must see go to the Arctic and see the ice. I certainly didn’t have a story in mind, but something was tugging at me to go and have a look. Rubbernecking, maybe: see the ice while it’s still there. Polar bears are all very well, but that wasn’t my focus. I didn’t actually have one, which was relaxing. I was supposed to be on holiday.
The epiphany came when I was temporarily alone on deck – staring out at the peculiar beauty of a slow, semi-frozen satiny black sea full of huge white mosaic pieces of ice. I heard singing. Or rather, the sound of the ice bumping and creaking, I knew that was what it was – but I could also literally hear a strange a-tonal but very beautiful sound coming out of the water itself, as if the ice had a voice and was speaking to me in a tongue I had never heard. I was enchanted as if in a wild fairytale, and very sad to have to turn back when the captain said we might risk being stuck if it moved in and locked around the ship. It had a life, non-human and non-animal, but powerfully present. And I felt it.
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…
From well-known and treasured stories including Aesop’s Fables, Black Beauty and The Tale of Peter Rabbit, to writers such as Michel de Montaigne, Anton Chekhov and T.S. Eliot, storytellers have used animals not only to capture the imagination of readers, but to deliver powerful and revealing messages about what it means to be human.
A huge congratulations to Laline Paull, whose debut novel The Bees has been shortlisted for the coveted Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction!
Sunday the 15th of March sees Mother’s Day, a day to celebrate every single thing your Mum has done for you. Whether it’s something as basic as your washing, as unconditionally kind as coming to collect you from the train station when you’ve missed the last bus and don’t want to shell out for a cab, or telling your dad that he really ought to respect your life choices (even if it means you’ll be out of work for a year until the green grows out of your hair), Mum has your back, and Mum’s are the best. And, in some cases, let’s not forget that Mum has to be Dad too. To help you give your Mum the very best gift possible, we’ve paired some of our brilliant Mum-friendly books with some especially Mum-friendly presents. Spoil her rotten this Mother’s Day.
This month our blog theme is ‘Love in All its Forms’ – we’re celebrating the diverse ways in which love is depicted in literature – so we asked our authors to tell us who their dream fictional date would be. Laline Paull would hop into a hot air balloon with Lord Asriel from Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ and fly to a party in West Egg, New York…
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…
