Books of the Noughties

Last week 4th Estate editor Mark wrote about the first of his ‘Books of the Noughties’ – Miracles of Life by JG Ballard. This week he talks about 4th Estate’s most recent success, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

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.

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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”

Continuing our Books of the Noughties series, I asked our head of marketing for an anecdote from when Bad Science was published.

Ben Hurd said this about it:

Dr Ben Goldacre has built up a very strong community around his Bad Science website and Guardian columns and in 2008 published a rather brilliant book that extends his crusade against the ridiculous and often nasty inaccuracies that prevail in the world of science. Bad Science is a superb book – it is funny, revelatory and hugely important.

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To celebrate our achievement of having so many titles on the books of the decade lists, we’ve decided to dedicate some blog space to them. We started on Tuesday with a post about The Corrections. Today we’re celebrating Stuart, a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters.

Here’s what John Bond, MD of Press Books had to say about publishing it:

“I remember Nicholas Pearson calling me when I was at an airport. Can’t remember where I was off to, but I was running Sales and Marketing at the time. I’d read the proposal and we were trying to think of books that bore comparison to Alexander Masters’ extraordinary portrait of Stuart Shorter so it would help in pitching it internally and externally. And we couldn’t think of any. Which in that moment seemed genuinely exciting rather than a problem. A uniquely amazing book. “

Stuart, a Life Backwards is the story of a remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator (‘a middle class scum ponce, if you want to be honest about it, Alexander) and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar whom he gets to know during a campaign to release two charity workers from prison. Interwoven into this is Stuart’s confession: the story of his life, told backwards. 

Get your hands on a copy of the book here, or track down the excellent BBC drama, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alexander, and Tom Hardy as Stuart.

To celebrate our achievement of having so many titles on the books of the decade lists, we’ve decided to dedicate some blog space to them. First up is The Corrections, a book that is pretty much universally loved both in and out of the office.

I asked around for some opinions on what makes it such a definitive book, and for some memories on how we came to publish it, and got these responses from Damon Greeney, an International Sales Director at HarperCollins, and Nick Pearson, who published it.

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