“Excitement’s Building Up!”

Simon Spanton at Gollancz has sent me a couple of advance copies of The Adjacent. To Simon I therefore say, Thanks! No matter how many years I have been doing this, the moment when you see the first copy of your new book, when you hold the thing in your hand, is a memorable one.

The Gollancz edition of The Adjacent, I have to say, is a thing of exceptional beauty. Brian Roberts’s cover manages to be both understated and declarative (see the image on the side of this page), a lovely cool green, made iconic with silhouettes of one of the few British aircraft almost everyone can identify on sight. It’s appropriate to the story, even though it’s not a novel about Spitfires, or if so, only adjacently. I should also mention the physical shape and feel and weight of the book: it seems to me to have classic proportions, perhaps by design, perhaps by accident. It is good to hold.

Before I get too sentimental, let me add that it’s also a snip at £12.99. One of the less-advertised wonders of our age is the way that the prices of hardback books, in a time of alleged recession in the book-buying habit, and under the much spoken-of threat of downloads and e-books, remain competitive. Almost exactly twenty-three years ago, my novel The Quiet Woman came out in hardback from Bloomsbury. In 1990 it was priced at £13.99 and contained half the number of pages of my new one. The hardback of The Prestige (Touchstone, five years later) was priced at £15.99. And some books not only keep their prices but gain in value as the years go by. That hardback of The Prestige now usually sells secondhand for hundreds of pounds – there’s a copy on AbeBooks at present, going for £950. I wish I had kept a few more of them.

One final word of gratitude, this time to Charlie Panayiotou at Gollancz, charged with the responsibility of transferring my proof corrections to the final copy. In the manuscript I had devised an eccentric scheme of chapter headings and subheads, which someone in Orion’s production department rather sternly corrected. I appealed to Charlie to restore my original, and now I have seen the book I realize he did, and exactly so. Thanks, Charlie!