Sunnyside down

I've just started reading Glen David Gold's, Sunnyside, a book not so much long-awaited as very much unexpected. I'm only forty-odd pages in, so I'll forbear to comment for now, other than remark that it would seem that Gold's time since Carter Beats the Devil appears to have been very well spent: rich prose, delightful vocabulary and the purposeful research of little details which can make a book come alive.

But my beginning the book coincided, coincidentally, with the receipt of a letter from Sceptre , outlining their disturbing plans for the book. The UK hardback edition is to be a Waterstone's exclusive in July, with the rest of the trade allowed a trade paperback edition in October.

I can guess at the commercial rationale for this. Sceptre are an imprint of the Hachette group, which remains in dispute with Amazon about discount; this has forced Amazon to source to stock from wholesalers or to leave sales to sellers on Marketplace, so, principally, it's two fingers up to Amazon, telling them that their support for what I assume will turn out to be Sceptre's biggest title of the year is not required.

The executive director of one UK publisher recently me me that their German counterparts had received a letter from amazon.de telling them to choose between giving them 2% more discount or extended credit terms. They literally had to tick a box to choose their 'preference'. It was heartening to hear that they simply had told them to get lost, as had many other publishers.

So, up yours, Amazon, indeed; and wouldn't it be great to see another publisher stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them, instead of seeing HarperCollins jump in with a rather gauche letter from CEO Victoria Barnsley on their homepage plugging their new releases (and, gloriously, misspelling the name of one of her own authors)?

But promising signed trade paperbacks to the independents to make up for three months without the genuinely desirable hardback (trade paperbacks: all of the unwieldiness with none of the quality) is poor compensation and will continue to drive people away from independents, who have enough trouble trying to compete with chain discounts without being deemed unfit to help launch a major new novel.

Maybe, if its was something from one of Hachette's more commercial imprints, something which would sell a bigger proportion in WHSmith or supermarkets, then it would be less of an attack on the integrity of independents' stock ranges. But this is grim news for the book trade and a precedent to be deterred.

In the short term, it may have some benefits for Hachette, and Waterstone's are doubtless thrilled with their coup. Amazon won't be stopped from flogging the US edition (which is due two months earlier) instead, but the rest of the UK trade will be probably be intimidated into withdrawing any copies they source from the US.

Three possible responses suggest themselves. First, the rest of the trade boycotts the book entirely, trade and mass-market paperbacks included: glorious but impractical. Second, we all order in the US hardback and make sure we have it for those two months before the UK release: Sceptre wouldn't be able to send threatening letters to all of us (and I'm not sure if their territorial copyright applies before the UK release). Third, we all go and buy copies from Waterstones and and resell them at a slightly higher price: a bit wet, frankly.

All of these unfortunately mean giving the whole affair the sort of press which will probably boost sales. I suspect that may be part of Sceptre's grand plan. So, fourth, we all give in, go home and let Waterstone's impose their pitiful vision of range bookselling on the general public.

I don't care how good Sunnyside turns out to be. If these bleak possibilities are what we are left with, I'd rather the book was never published.

Living in the past

Until Never Let Me Go in 2005, I had never read anything by Kazuo Ishiguro and, finding that book unremarkable, might have tried nothing further if it were not for a friend of discerning taste whose favourite author he is. I've since accumulated a selection of his backlist, but had still only read his very first published novel, A Pale View of Hills, which is a model of understatement, perfectly depicting the Japanese dichotomy of public stoicism and inner turmoil. (Andrew Miller's One Morning Like A Bird manages the same.)

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (due in May) is a collection which plants itself between themed collections of short stories and more interwoven multiple narratives within one novel. Like balloons caught on the wind, soaring until they drift from sight, each of these stories leaves an emotive impression but is lost from view before we can make any firm assessment of its destiny. The opening tale of a Venetian cafe guitarist hired by a once famous crooner to help him serenade his wife beneath their hotel balcony is full of romance laid bare: its nerves, its uncertainties, its despair. A man drifting through his life visits friends from university unaware how they have moved on, resulting in bittersweet farce.

Ishiguro's particular gift is to give us an intimacy with his characters, using the the first person to depict that alternation between impulse and deliberation common to us all. When observing other characters, this results in a selectivity which neither forces us to see them as the protagonist does nor which leaves them too amorphously defined. Like a painting beneath whitewash slowly revealed through time, they are revealed indiscriminately, so that it takes time both to make out details and reckon their importance.

Given the constant conjuration of music's fragile power, it was fitting that there was a song which kept coming fragmentally to mind as I read. On My Life Is a Succession of People Saying Goodbye, which was a B-side to something from You Are the Quarry, Morrissey sings plaintively "Once my life stretched before me, but it now stretches behind" to the accompaniment of the tumbling trills of a harp, a song of regret whose despair lies not in loss but in the acknowledgment that a life's opportunities have been spurned.

Anne Michaels is also a writer with a gift for evocation and The Winter Vault, her wilfully curious story of a marriage thrown off kilter by tragedy, is steeped intensely time and place. The first half sees an engineer responsible for the transfer of the temples of Abu Simbel to higher ground when the Nasser valley was flooded by the creation of the Aswan Dam. (Remember that from geography lessons?) Humbly observing the massive displacement of communities in the name of progress, he and his wife suffer their own loss and return to Canada, where they decide to recuperate apart.

In perhaps more contrasting tones than Ishiguro, Michaels pits the innocence of hope against the naked brutality of fate, as the couple try to find new purpose in their lives. It's an intense read, requiring slow deliberation, so rich in metaphor and poetry. This does lead, perhaps inevitably in such a thoroughly scripted account, to the occasional stumble: a slightly po-faced note, perhaps, or a tangent roughly pulled back into line.

When this does happen, it's a little like opening up a sleek and elegant machine, all gleaming metal and sinuous curves, to discover the greasy nest of pistons and gears within, all whirring and thrusting frantically. Or possibly seeing a duck from beneath, although ducks are hardly the most graceful of birds airside... the banality of that simile's always bothered me.

But Michaels is clearly a born writer, alive to the charge of language, who undoubtedly scratches away in a garret in the light of a guttering candle until dawn finds her fallen asleep across her manuscript. It would be terribly disillusioning if not, anyway.

Switching inelegantly from the ethereal to the mundane, the book trade has an interest in Liverpool One, a new 'shopping and restaurant complex'. I wonder if it's as ghastly as Westfield over in Shepherd's Bush, to which I made a recent visit under the misguided apprehension that it wasn't just filled with the same outlets which dominate every provincial clone high street; I very quickly ended up with the sort of headache induced only by shopping centres and staring fixedly at a computer monitor for eight hours without blinking, the sort that feel like one's brain is being lightly sandpapered.

But for the people of Liverpool, good fortune does not stop with the provision of vital new branches of Top Shop and Clinton Cards, which are apparently their reward for being selected as 2008's European City of Culture. There's a two-floor Waterstone's as well, where a revolutionary - and I use the term at its most witheringly contemptuous - new initiative is being trialled: "personal shoppers".

Half a dozen staff are to be kitted out in green shirts - perhaps they're to be the bookselling equivalent of goalkeepers, the last line of defence against customer indecision - and made available exclusively for the benefit of customers between the hours of noon and three. And four and six; apparently, they all have to go for lunch at the same time.

I wouldn't want to misrepresent this professional upgrade, an evolutionary development more remarkable than the first movement of animals from water to land, so I shall briefly defer to the shop's manager, Ian Critchley:

"All people have to do is tell us a little about who they need to get a present for, and the personal shopper will select the perfect gift. Given we have over 60,000 books, as well as everything else we sell, we think this will be the perfect service for those who are spoilt for choice and pushed for time."

Aside from the fact that discounting on a scale which a psychologist would describe as self-harm means that certain titles are all but thrown in your face as you enter a Waterstone's, in case you should enter with your own arrogant ideas about what might make for a good read, the chain apparently thinks that being able to recommend books is some sort of secret shamanic talent, instead of the basic ability to be gauged when hiring booksellers. How little they would seem to think of their staff. How undermined those not in green must feel.