The German occupation of the Channel Islands is an aspect of World War Two that I know little about and so the setting of this book in its immediate aftermath, together with the title had me hooked as soon as the proof arrived on my desk.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society begins in 1946 with a coincidence that leads to a correspondence between Juliet Ashton, a writer living in London and Dawsey Adams, a Guernsey famer.  As she learns more about the literary society, formed in a moment of panic, she becomes fascinated by its members and their experience of life under the Nazis.  She decides to visit the island to meet her new friends and once there she falls in love with the place and its people and is intrigued by the story of Elizabeth, the absent nucleus of the society who was sent away to a concentration camp, leaving behind a daughter with a German father.  Inspired, Juliet sets out to write Elizabeth’s story.

The book is written entirely in the form of letters, with the odd telegram thrown in.  I often find this format annoying; in the hands of an unskilled writer the characters often become blurred and indistinct.  However, Shaffer creates characters whose individual voices shine through and carry the reader away.  Shaffer also manages to portray the romance of the island and its people and comments unflinchingly on the privations of the Occupation and the treatment of Nazi prisoners.  The book is moving without resorting to sentimentality.

I absolutely loved this book and I’m sure that it will be a huge success when it is published in August; pre-order it now so that you can enjoy it as soon as possible.  It is such a shame that the author, who died earlier this year, will not be able to witness its success.

We’ve deliberated long and hard about our first choices for Fugly Friday. After all, there’s the horrors that are Geri Halliwell’s Ugenia Lavender books (look left, aren’t they horrid?  Not as bad as the Rainbow Fairies though), but I think the main objection to those is the (possibly) ghost-written pap within them, not just the covers. The point of Fugly Fridays is to show what makes a truly awful cover - because, all together now people: “you can’t judge a book by its cover but you sure as hell can sell it by its cover” - and to point out some of the really good covers around.

So, our inaugural, Fugly Cover of the week is The Chaos Quest by Gill Arbuthnott over there on the right.  I can’t decide what I hate most; the retina-burning stripse, the nasty font for the title, the strange image of an amorphous blob flying across the middle - certainly nothing in the blurb on the back indicates what that might be.  It doesn’t do the book justice.  Gill Arbuthnott is a very talented writer but try as I might, I can’t sell this book. 

Her third book, Winterbringers, is also excellent and has a great cover; interesting, intriguing, attractive, related to the story and I hand sell lots of copies.  See how lovely it is.  Children read this, they come back to tell me how good it was and won’t read the other two because there’s also The Chaos Clock - also brilliant but also with a minging cover.

Another Fugly Cover next week but do continue to send us your nominations and publishers, do remember that we are trying to be constructive.  Mostly.  But if you give a book the hindrance of a lousy cover then you’re condemning it to a life bereft of a face out position, never to be placed on the centre table, never allowed near a window display, never to be included in a catalogue unless you actually pay cold hard cash to a bookshop to do that.  Surely your books deserve better than that?

Saw this in The Times.  Utterly ridiculous.  A Doctor Who fan who knits designed some patterns to knit characters for the series (see how cute the Adipose are!) and the BBC’s lawyers threaten to sue her.  Not because she was making money from it; she made them available under a Creative Commons licence but because other people were selling the patterns and the knitted figures on Ebay.  Don’t take on Ebay, have a go at one of the fans who kept the show going during all those years when the BBC couldn’t be bothered with it - that’s the spirit!  One of the best things any film, tv programme or series of books can have is an enthusiastic fan base because they will sell your ‘product’ more energetically and imaginatively and effectively than any advertiser will.    And I want one of the knitted Oods!

Edinburgh may be a capital city with a Parliament, and a palace and a castle and all the other accoutrements that that status entails, but it is, in essence, a big village.  It feels as though everyone knows everyone.  If the theory goes that everyone is six degrees of separation from everyone else then I would guess that in Edinburgh it goes down to two or three. 

In One Good Turn, Atkinson takes this element of the city, combines it with an ex-detective, some Eastern European economic migrants, the heaven/hell of the Edinburgh Fringe, a corrupt local businessman and a crime writer who gets involved in something way beyond what he could invent and turns it into one of the finest crime novels that I have ever read.  But it isn’t just a ‘crime novel’ - labelling a book with a genre always somehow seems to devalue it as though one is say ‘well, it’s not bad for that type of book’.  This is a great novel full stop, no qualifications needed.

The book starts in The Cowgate, the semi-subterranean heart of the Old Town where a seemingly random incident of road-rage sends shockwaves through the lives of a dozen or so characters, their lives brushing simply due to this act.  From a technical point of view, dealing with that many characters, maintaining their distinct voices and not letting any become a bit bland and filler-ish is quite an acheivement and Akinson handles it effortlessly in a plot which is complex but doesn’t feel contrived or convoluted.  She acknowledges the coincidences upon which the plot relies with the comment that ‘coincidence are just explanations waiting to happen’ and I liked the use of the matroyshka doll to reflect the layers within layers of the story.

It is an absolute joy of a book and I am horrified that the copy I bought when it was published in 2006 sat, unread, on the shelf for this long.  As soon as I have time I will be catching up with the rest of her backlist as clearly I have been missing something in the years since I read the award-winning Behind the Scenes at the Museum. 

It was the British Book Industry Awards at the Booksellers’ Association conference in Brighton last night.  You probably remember the Book Awards a couple of months ago where Jordan was short-listed for her book on pony care (those awards really are trying to throw away their credibility) but last night’s were the less glamourous but arguably more important awards for the people who actual put the books on the bookshop shelves, both as publishers and as booksellers.

We were delighted to see that the very lovely Em and Rob at Snowbooks picked up the award for Innovation in the Book Industry for their XSL work and that Mostly Books in Abingdon won New Bookshop of the Year - we have an especial soft spot for both of them - Snowbooks have been hugely supportive and encouraging and when we opened the bookshop, Mostly Books were really positive and made us feel as though we weren’t completely mad to open a bookshop with absolutely no experience.

So congratulations chaps and maybe next year we’ll enter - Malcolm has his geek hat on and fancies the Innovation award and I’d like a shot at the bookshop one so we’d better start planning now!

As a follow on from yesterday’s post; up at the top you’ll see a little search box which searches both the blog and the website for whatever you’re looking for.  So you can see everything we’ve ever written about our fab books or other people’s and it stays within our site and doesn’t launch you out into the big scary place of Google search.  And we think it looks more professional so we’re a little bit smug at having written our own bit of code for it.

Tomorrow, I shall be back to talking about more interesting things; in particular One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson which I’ve almost finished and which is outstandingly good.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that the blog has had a few tweaks design-wise…

The tabs along the top allow you to move seamlessly from this to other parts of the website so that you can see what we get up to when we’re not wittering away here and there’s more uniformity in the design with a new logo to tie in with the other website ones. And over there on the right below the box marked ‘Blog Pages’ is a widget which randomly showcases some of our particularly lovely books - click on one that takes your fancy and it will take you straight to the on-line shop page where you can buy it - easy eh?

As for Fugly Friday - we have a few contenders at the moment but would still love to hear from anyone if they spotted any gems of dreadful design over the weekend.

Yesterday evening we held our first event ‘for grown ups’ at the bookshop and a couple of dozen people squashed in to have a glass of wine and listen to Steve Augarde talk about writing for children based on his own experiences as a published writer for some thirty years.  It was great and gave everyone lots to think about - a few said to me that they felt newly energised to take up their pens again so I’m expecting great things.

One of the things that was discussed during the evening, and later when some of us adjourned to the pub, was the importance of cover design.  I know that you can’t judge a book by its cover but as a bookseller I know that I sure as hell can sell one by its cover!  Or fail to if it’s completely wrong.  If someone is looking for a book by a particular author then they won’t care what the cover looks like but for the casual browser the first thing that catches their attention is the front cover - if that’s dreadful then their eye will skip over it.  This is especially true of children’s books - it doesn’t matter to an 8 year old that a book got a great write-up in the Telegraph if they don’t like the look of it. 

I love the covers of Steve’s The Various trilogy - the texture, the foiling, the feel of them and there are plenty of other covers that I love at present such as Susan Hill’s The Battle for Gullywith and Diana Wynne Jones’ current covers.  However, there are some truly vile examples around; possibly because publishers have never been on a shop floor and seen the way customers recoil from some of their efforts and we think it’s time to name and shame.

Henceforth, we’re launching Fugly Fridays.  In homage to the Go Fug Yourself girls; the scourge of the terrible red carpet choices of the rich ‘n’ famous, we will be posting up some of our least favourite covers on Fridays and explaining why we hate it.  Others may disagree - any aesthetic criticism is obviously subjective, although I can think of a good few examples off the top of my head that only a mother could love - and we’d love to have your suggestions for others so do email links to your personal horrors and we’ll try to include a few. 

However, we don’t want simply to denigrate so, in the manner of the GFY girls, we will also be posting coveted ‘Well Played’ awards to covers which we feel are especially good. 

So, let me know if you see any particular horrors on your forays into bookshops this weekend…

I see that Faber has launched a new imprint called Faber Finds which intends to reissue via print on demand some out of print titles that would otherwise not warrant a larger print run. 

My generation grew up with Virago’s green-spined paperbacks with the colophon of Eve’s apple and although they were always perceived within our rather prim local library and at my equally proper school as emblems of rabid feminism, I always loved the uniform appearance and the cover artwork.  It’s probably why I have a similar affection for the pared-down elegance of Persephone’s books and why our own covers have the original dustwrapper illustrations surrounded by retrained shades from the Fired Earth colour chart. 

Later when I started to read the books I was surprised that they weren’t that rabid at all - The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield is one of my favourite books and the PL is, while notable for her writing career and consequent independent means, hardly suffragette material.  And others - such a shame that Elizabeth von Armin and Antonia White now seem to be out of print again.

What Virago did was to give a voice to women’s literature, much of it largely ignored until they dusted it down and sent it out there and I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the 1970s as the women who set up Virago planned and plotted and dreamt. 

I loved this article by Carmen Calil about the genesis of Virago and was particularly excited to see that there will be some lovely new hardbacks of some of the gems of their list published imminently - they’ll be going on my bookshelves very soon!