Yossarian's Diary: News and gossip from bookselling's frontline

Communique no. 1 : 13.09.06 : 14.00 hrs

Yossarian recently read one of the hottest books of the moment, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. Much-hyped debuts like this one rarely live up to expectations, but Special Topics does. The story of high school student Blue Van Meer, it starts off like a mixture of Prep (Curtis Sittenfeld) and 'Pretty in Pink', moves into Donna Tartt territory somewhere towards the middle, then completely throws the reader when it goes all Straw Men (Michael Marshall's fantastic thriller of paranoia and conspiracy theories) at the end. The clues that Pessl threads through the book are cleverly placed, and it pays to read the last 100 pages or so slowly, to savour the way the author makes throwaway events from earlier in the book suddenly take on more significance. It's a wonderful book, and the cover is (almost) as gorgeous as the author herself! Well worth seeking out.

Long after Yossarian had dinner with him, Rupert Everett's memoirs are finally upon us. The title settled upon (after much deliberation) is Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. All well and good, though of course they missed the best potential title - Rupert, Bare. Maybe they can change it for the paperback.

The annual Biographers' Club Award was presented recently at the Savile Club in London (just over the road from Claridge's, luvvie). This is a fabulous award open to any new biographer with a work-in-progress, but no publishing deal as yet (wining the award helps in that respect, as organiser Anna Swan found out - she won a few years ago, and her memoir, Statues Without Shadows, was soon snapped up by Sceptre). The judges include Princess Michael of Kent, Jeremy Lewis (whose biography of Allen Lane was one of those books that should be enjoyed by everyone, but sadly has probably only been read by book trade groupies like Yossarian), and Paul Laity of the London Review of Books.

This year's prize was shared between Helen Smith for her book Edward Garnett: Midwife of Genius (a title that would not have been out of place in Martin Amis' The Information) and Birna Helgadottir for The Celebrated Misses Gunning, the story of two 18th Century goodtime girls that gatecrashed the aristocracy - which sounds great fun, even if there was a collective "who they?" from a large part of the room. But the shortlisted book that struck Yossarian's fancy was Susan MacDonald's Ishbel MacDonald. This is a book about Ramsay's MacDonald's daughter - who acted as the PM's 'first lady' due to his status a widower - by her niece. Ishbel was very much thrown in at the deep end when her father was elected, and the fact that they moved into the upper echelons of society while coming from a relatively poor background, should make for a fascinating book.

Of course, what Yossarian really wants to read is a history of the gloriously silly feud between rival Betjeman biographers, AN Wilson and Bevis Hillier. Hillier extracted revenge for Wilson's damning reviews of his work by feeding him a forged letter that revealed a lost Betjeman affair - the first letter of each sentence formed part of a code, which ultimately revealed Hillier's scatological opinion of his rival. Wilson has made light of it in the press, but one imagines that underneath he is fuming. Let's hope the two don't make up too soon - this is the most enjoyable literary spat in years.

Charlie Huston's Already Dead probably won't win as many plaudits from the posh literary pages, but it's great fun and an addictive read - Yossarian read it in one extended sitting this week. It's a wonderfully vicious, noirer than noir tale of a vampire PI and his search for a missing girl and the source of an outbreak of zombies in lower Manhattan. Short and sharp, it hits the targets that the similarly themed Bareback (Kim Whitfields' werewolf novel) recently missed. That book spent too long musing on the whys and wherefores of a world where 99% of the population grow hairy and howl at the moon on a monthly cycle - Charlie Huston starts with vampires killing zombies munching on human brains from the off, then never slows down. Already Dead is out in early 2007 - grab a bite out of it as soon as it's out.

Yossarian notes the story in the papers claiming that men cannot write romances. Now, granted we can't compete with the output of authors such as Danielle Steel, Jo Cox and the like (though Emma Blair - who is famously a bloke - does manfully), but the story surely overlooks two of the most romantic novels of the last twenty years; Love in the Time of Cholera and Captain Corelli's Mandolin, both written by men. If there are more romantic novels written by anyone - man, woman or celebrity - in recent years, Yossarian has yet to hear of them.

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*This column reflects the personal views of Yossarian and not necessarily those of Waterstone's Booksellers Ltd.