"Readers will be rapt"
(According to "Publishers Weekly".)
Hello!
In this edition of a swimming pool library:
- A Presidential review and interview
- Boekie launch
- The Odyssey / a little odyssey
Through some minor miracle, the US-based Publishers Weekly (considered by many to be "the bible of the book business") plucked my novel, The President, from their reviewing slush pile and reviewed it!
Published this week, the Publishers Weekly review describes The President as an "engrossing debut". While noting that the novel takes inspiration from real-life, they say "the action doesn’t read like thinly disguised reporting. Instead, like the best political thrillers, it’s suspenseful, propulsive, and infuriating at once. Readers will be rapt."
It was a privilege to join Radio 702's Weekend Breakfast host Gugs Mhlungu recently to chat about The President. I was nervous and I'm hopeless at speaking off-the-cuff, but it was a fun convo, regardless.
If you've already read The President, THANK YOU! It means more to me than you could possibly imagine. If you haven't yet and would like to, here's where to find the standard paperback edition:
- US/UK/Australia: Order directly from IngramSpark here or from your bookstore of choice
- South Africa: Bridge Books (or ask your local bookstore to order it for you from the distributor, Protea Boekehuis)
You can buy the ebook edition (ISBN: 9781967449026) from your preferred e-reading platform from just about anywhere in the world (just search for “Xander Beattie, The President”). If your public library uses Hoopla to lend out digital materials, you can borrow the ebook using that.
Collectable editions
The Common Press in London has some copies left of our limited edition Pocket Hardback. Our friends at Pulp Paperworks in Johannesburg will soon be stocking it too. (And Pulp, I believe, have a couple copies left of the original Artist Edition, a fundraiser for the Pride Shelter that comes with a fine art risograph print by Brett Murray).
As I mentioned in one of my previous Dispatches, I hope my adventures in publishing extend beyond The President/my own work... which is why I'm so delighted that we'll be launching our next title (a non-Xander Beattie one!) on 22 August.
Comrades and Cannibals in Oxford is a boekie by the acclaimed historian Bill Nasson. It's every bit as juicy as its title might suggest... fascinating, amusing and a little bit bone-chilling. As publisher I'm admittedly biased, but I'm confident it sets a high bar for what's to come.
If you're in Cape Town on 22 August, please do join us; invite details below:
Have you watched The Odyssey / are you going to?
I personally don't have the appetite for the Hollywood blockbuster treatment of one of my favourite books (even one starring Matt Damon!) BUT I am still delighted at the way the film is getting folks (back) into cinemas as well as curious about reading the book. Its themes of homecoming, family, loyalty, adventure, belonging, temptation etc. are as lively and relevant now as they were back in Seventh Century BC. And Emily Wilson's translation is a crisp and vividly-rendered treat.
I've been on a mini-odyssey of my own recently – a road trip to the Eastern Cape mountain village of Hogsback.
I am happy to report I managed to avoid getting waylaid by Cyclops, Calpyso or seduced by roadside Sirens); the pothole and cattle gods spared us too. On the way back, visits to the Valley of Desolation and two national parks I'd never been to before (Karoo and Mountain Zebra). On the outbound journey we visited Storms River Mouth, a rest camp in the Tsitsikamma section of the Garden Route National Park which I used to visit almost every summer holidays when I was growing up.
Tsitsikamma is where I think I can trace back my love of nature to, and the first stirrings of a desire to conserve it (the first job I wanted to have was to be a game ranger!) . The remnants indigenous temperate forest we walked in (a narrow band between ocean and clifftop that logging had somehow spared) was something that even as a seven-year-old I could appreciate was precious, that needed protection.
To be back at Tsitsikamma was like a homecoming – albeit a bittersweet one. Here I was, older than my dad was when I first visited as a child. Dad very much now gone, me holding his two film cameras, finding comfort in their heft and in the act of photographing – a practice I suppose I've inherited from him. [I shot all the photos in this Dispatch on film with Dad's Olympus Trip 35.]
The suspension bridge across the river mouth was closed for renovations so we couldn't cross to climb up to the view point. The boardwalk to the river, once wooden, had been replaced by recycled plastic 'planks' that must be shedding countless toxic microplastics into the surrounding ecosystem.
The bright wooden raft bobbing off the beach I used to swim out to was gone (apparently destroyed in a storm years ago). I had a hard time explaining to myself why its absence left me (leaves me?) so distraught.
And yet. The log chalet we stayed in smelled the same as the ones I'd had in childhood. The shrubs near it exhaled a spicy aroma, impepho-like, that I immediately recognised. The ocean flung itself with ageless enthusiasm on the rocks. Dolphins slipped past, as did whales.
Change had come – as it inevitably does. But the magic – Tsitsikamma's gentle, captivating, salty-aired shimmer – persists.
