Canongate’s fiction highlights of 2009
2009 has been an amazing year. It really kicked off with a bang with the Presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, and Canongate really has had a fun time publishing fiction we love. Before looking towards the publishing about to come, here are some highlights from our 2009 fiction list.
We launched brilliant debuts with The Bird Room, The Earth Hums in B Flat (which also won the Amazon Rising Stars promotion last spring) and Ghosts and Lightning. We predict big things for Chris Killen, Mari Strachan and Trevor Byrne, who were all well-reviewed, debuted their novels at literary festivals this year and got loads of online coverage to boot.
Some fun has been had with a couple of our reissues as well. To celebrate the new look Fup, we commissioned the Fup game – can you teach Fup to fly? The in-house record is well over 600m. We also reissued Life of Pi with a new jacket, new website and global readalong campaign, which was a good opportunity for us (and you, dear reader) to reconnect with the magic of Yann Martel’s storytelling – we are really looking forward to publishing Beatrice and Virgil next year!
New Canongate author Geoff Dyer published Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi with us and we drank a lot of Bellinis with him. It’s one of Publishers Weekly’s books of the year and we think that’s justly deserved! Other book group favourites Kate Grenville and M.J. Hyland also published new novels with us: Grenville’s The Lieutenant told the story of the first meaningful contact between the British colonisers and Aborigines. Hearts broke. Hyland’s This is How brought us into the world of a very different character and won rave reviews everywhere.
The end of summer marked the season of the Bunny – The Death of Bunny Munro, that is. Everyone loves to hate the Cocksman, and Nick Cave’s nomination for the Bad Sex awards got us even more column inches (pun unintended). Bunny came to us in multiple formats – you can get him in hardback, audiobook, ebook download and a very nifty iPhone application that broke all the rules on how ebooks can be enjoyed.
We hope you enjoyed our publishing this year and we promise to carry on publishing with as much enthusiasm and passion next year – just take one look at our 2010 list and it’s hard not to get excited!
