Publishers, for obvious reasons, always say their books are astonishingly good, but, just sometimes, they genuinely are. I read Wolf Hall in manuscript in the autumn of 2008, and knew this was one. I hadn’t really known what to expect when I started it, but it was clear within a few pages that this was something not just out of the ordinary but unlike anything else being written today.

So much has now been written about it that it seems pointless to add to it here, but suffice it to say that even the longest and most intelligent review can’t get close to the richness, subtlety and depth of the experience of reading the book itself. But for a short account you can’t do better than John Burnside’s recommendation in the New Statesman’s Books of the Year, who wrote that “to describe Wolf Hall as a historical novel is like calling Moby-Dick a book on fishing and, this year, the Booker judges did get it absolutely right. Mantel is an astonishing writer: a prose stylist who combines absolute precision with a compelling sense of flow, and a marvellously subtle observer of character. Wolf Hall casts a spell that makes us think long and hard about order, law and the workings of power.”

Gratifyingly, the book has done superbly well; coming up to 220,000 copies in hardback in the UK alone. It is easy to say with hindsight that Wolf Hall was always going to be a success, and perhaps it always was; I would have been profoundly surprised, as well as profoundly depressed, if its brilliance wasn’t recognised. But it was, and we are all at Fourth Estate savouring that all-too-rare moment that is, when it comes down to it, why we’re in publishing: when a book that we first read as a word document, and loved, is out there, being read by tens and hundreds of thousands of people.

Read more about Wolf Hall:

• Read an interview with Hilary Mantel
• Hilary Mantel: The Novelist’s Arithmetic
• Watch Hilary Mantel at the Daunt Debates

Keep checking back for more exciting news on Wolf Hall soon.

This week 4th estate editor Mark Richards pays tribute to the amazing JG Ballard, who sadly passed away last year, and talks about Miracles of Life, his Book of the Noughties.

One of the great pleasures of being in publishing is working with authors you have long admired, and previously known only as a reader and fan. In my first year at Fourth Estate I worked on J.G. Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life. A concise but capacious work, fascinating about both the Shanghai of his childhood and the Britain of his adult years whether or not you are interested in Ballard the man, Miracles of Life was the last provocation of a provocateur – a gentle, human and very moving book from a writer best known for his searing and prophetic visions of our increasingly technologised future. 

It was, sadly, his final book, and he died after a long illness in April last year. I feel deeply lucky to have met him and worked with him.      

Read more about J.G. Ballard:

• Read about the mini-site we created to market Ballard’s Kingdom Come
• October 2007: Mark Johnson on the divisive nature of J G Ballard’s writing, and on whether Ballard was one our our “greatest living novelists”

The conversation turned to how little they felt they knew about current affairs, and they were pretty sure they weren’t the only ones who felt slightly bewildered by it all. In our world of 24-hour news and endless internet coverage, we are bombarded with a constant stream of information from around the world. The latest developments in ongoing situations are analysed minutely; but often, unless you’ve been paying attention for years, you may not have an idea of why there is a situation in the first place. We all know, for instance, that India and Pakistan argue over Kashmir, but how many of us can honestly say why?

So they decided to write a book that filled in this gap; one that provided the missing backstory to the news, and that picked out the essential information from the ephemeral. The result is a gentle and amusing survival guide for people of all ages who wish they knew slightly more about what on earth is going on. It is a book for the bedside table, the morning commute or the downstairs loo, where it can be consulted by the confused dinner party guest who has taken refuge from the conversation going on next door. We hope that they will rejoin the table having flushed away some of their ignorance, and feeling all the better for it.

Check out extracts from the book on Afghanistan and modern day Piracy!

What on Earth is Going On? A crash course in current affairs (Fourth Estate) is available in all good bookshops, price £12.99, and on Amazon here.

We at Fourth Estate are hoping for a repeat of this all-too-rare occurrence for the publication this month of Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, a book that has just received in the States some of the most astonishing reviews I’ve ever read, and that has been jumping up the bestseller charts over there since.

The bar was set very high last Friday by the first review to appear in the New York Times, by the reputation maker-or-breaker Michiko Kakutani, who described it as a “stunning new novel”.

This was then topped on Sunday by a review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by their senior editor, Dwight Gardner, who raved that Netherland was “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell,” that “I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had,” that “O’Neill seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought,” and that Netherland “has more life inside it than 10 very good novels”.

Surpassing even this, however, was the daddy of them all: a 4-page review in this week’s New Yorker by James Wood, one of the most important critics alive today (an accolade that still has force in the United States, even if it might now be considered laughable on our increasingly acritical side of the pond). Netherland, Wood wrote, is an “exquisitely written novel, a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read,” and he concluded that “if Netherland pays homage to The Great Gatsby, it is also in some kind of knowing relationship with A House for Mr. Biswas. These are large interlocutors, but Netherland has an ideological intricacy, a deep human wisdom, and prose grand enough to dare the comparison”.

Although he now lives in New York, Joseph O’Neill was born in Ireland, raised in Holland and was educated in England. Netherland is set predominantly in New York, but it is a book about all the world. We very much hope that it will win prizes, of course, but it would make us proud if a prize was the cherry on the cake of an extremely well-deserved success, rather than the only reason for that success. Netherland is not just a good book; it is a great one. Please read it.

Joseph O’Neill is in the UK this week; he will be appearing at Toppings in Bath at 7.30pm on Wednesday, and at the International Fiction event at the Hay Festival, at 6.45pm on Thursday. An audio interview with him will appear on Fifth Estate on Friday.