Chris Radmann

I hope and pray that bookshops will survive – somehow

When writing a novel, there comes a time, in the process of gestation and planning, when other books are required. It is almost as though, Middlemarch-like, your little attempt at writing cannot be separated from what others have written. The world is a great web. Books speak to books. They cry out, call, whisper. I find it very strange. When writing a novel, when so much is held in your heart and your head, certain books quietly announce themselves. Usually, I have found, that happens in bookshops – those rapidly-diminishing repositories of paper and card and ink.

It is not the same online, on the electronic web. Yes, I know that Penguin Random House has just publicised plans to build platforms that will enable readers to share their thoughts on good books. And I know that Amazon is like a large, single-breasted lover, always on call, forever willing to suckle my need for books. She – and here I do the intrusive, algorithmic computing software a personifying favour – faithfully makes recommendations based on previous purchases and even on simple searches. And with a quick motion, we click, she and I. And a few hours/days later, the offspring of our union appears in neat cardboard nappies. Books simply drop through the door, delivered by the stork it would seem.

But it is not the same as standing in a bookshop. Many people have written about that sense of tingling serendipity. I have experienced it many times.

Like when I wrote my first novel. There I was in Heffers bookshop, Cambridge, drifting inevitably downstairs, to where they kept their Africa section. There they were: amid all the others, two books that would profoundly influence my writing of Held Up, a literary novel about the new South Africa.

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