The Good Muslim
|The Bookseller Staff
The Good Muslim, The Marriage Plot and Go the F**k to Sleep are among the books literary publishing directors wish they had published themselves this year, with Other People’s Money, What I Did and The Dovekeepers among those they had thought would make a bigger impact.
In a Guardian round-up of “Wishes and Misses”, publishers including Jamie Byng, Suzanne Baboneau and Alexandra Pringle selected the titles they wish they had published, and those they did that they had higher hopes for. Among the reasons for books not catching a wider readership, the editors suggested variously a lack of support from booksellers, and the challenge of “pushing a backlist”.
Pringle, editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury, selected Other People’s Money by Justin Cartwright as her book which deserved better, saying: “It received outstanding reviews—the best, probably, he has every received—and it sold well. Yet not only was it not shortlisted for the Man Booker or Costa; it was not once mentioned in the press as one that should have been nominated.” She selected Tahmina Anam’s The Good Muslim (Canongate) and Louisa Young’s My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (HarperCollins) as books she was “especially sad” not to get, having offered on them.
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