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”

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. So much so that one chapter, the story of the vitamin pill peddler Mathias Rath had to be removed from the first publication while a legal dispute took place. The chapter is now included in the current edition and I urge everyone to read it (and you can do here for free). It is a somewhat chilling reminder that bad science and misinformation can create healthy profits on one side, and decidedly unhealthy patients on the other. Ben Goldacre isn’t just out to reel in the big fish though and some of my favourite sections of the book are the examples of simple science twaddle, harmless to everything but our bank balances and pride. A personal favourite is Ben’s piece on a ‘Detox Footspa’ product – just watch that water turn brown as the toxins are purged from your feet…bonkers.

If you haven’t visited Dr Ben Goldacre’s site yet, why not do so now. His most recent post, on Christmas Day, is about the bible passage Daniel 1:8, which Ben claims describes the first ever clinical trial.

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.

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.

The Corrections is my book of the decade, by some way. The paperback was published just as I joined the company, and that jacket with the dinner table scene sort of captures a moment in time for me and remains a favourite. The Corrections is an extraordinary novel, I love it and I still find myself thinking about it a lot. It’s the one book that I recommend the most.

- Damon Greeney, Key Account Director, Intl Sales

The entire company of Fourth Estate, fifteen or sixteen of us, sitting round a big table in a pub, hatching plans as to how we might best publish some of our upcoming books. The discussion turned to The Corrections. It was quickly apparent that all but one of us had read it. The next three-quarters of an hour were spent talking about Enid and Alfred and their three children. Everyone had a view on the Lamberts, talked about them as if they were a family they knew from real life. The book had truly affected my colleagues in a profound way, as it had done me. In fact, we never did get round to talking about how to publish it that afternoon, the stuff of the book itself was just too interesting. It was at that point that I knew The Corrections would surely find a readership in this country.

I suppose for many of us in the West, the defining moment of the last decade was the collapse of the twin towers. The Corrections had been published in America just a week earlier. In those peculiar days that followed, it was impossible to escape the worry that The Corrections might be swept away by those events that had rocked America on its axis. But although obviously not about the neurosis of that specific event, The Corrections is a book about a whole bundle of anxieties and captures perfectly the early millennial mood. Such was the clamour for the book in this country that, a few weeks later, Fourth Estate lost control of its publicity completely. So we decided we would publish the book immediately rather than wait until the Spring, as we had planned. The rest is history.

- Nicholas Pearson, Publisher, Fourth Estate

If you haven’t yet read The Corrections, what are you waiting for? It is an amazingly powerful yet accessible study of human relationships in the 21st century. I happened to study it for part of my undergraduate degree in 2007, as it was obvious to tutors even then that the book was an important one – and destined to be a modern classic. Get your copy here, or get a special limited edition copy, with a cover by artist Michael Landy, here.