Strange turning over Leaves without Caroline:It doesn't matter how many times I catch a glimpse of my face grimacing out from the top of this column: I'll never get used to it. Loose Leavesis – was – Caroline Walsh's baby. She revelled in it and made it her own. And compiling it, or attempting to compile it, in the wake of her death just before Christmas is one of the most saddening tasks imaginable.
In these pages last week we carried a double-page spread of highlights from the publishers’ catalogues for 2012. I have been researching and writing this feature for more years than I care to add up, but always depended on Caroline to scrutinise, add, subtract, encourage and generally save me from myself and from the most inappropriate inclusions – naughty publishers, declaring a book will appear “in January”, when what you really mean is “in the shops before Christmas or bust!” – and omissions.
For months before the final deadline, a stream of exuberant emails from Caroline would bounce into my inbox. “Isn’t it marvellous – X has a new book out. Or, did you hear about Y?” (Almost always, I hadn’t). During her illness, and now in the terrible silence of her absence from the office, much of the joy went out of this annual bookfest.
In the past few days, I've spotted plenty of advance announcements Caroline would never have missed. They include a study of governance – or the lack of it – in this country by the political scientist Elaine Byrne, Political Corruption in Ireland 1922-2010: A Crooked Harp?Coming from Manchester University Press in April. Stephen Starr's Revolt: Eye-witness to the Syrian Uprisingis due from Hurst in May.
There'll be a new novel from the wonderful Thomas Keneally, The Daughters of Mars– in which two Australian sisters volunteer as nurses in the first World War and end up at Gallipoli – from Sceptre in June; and, hooray, a biography of that most aristocratic of travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor, from John Murray in October.
The Indian writer and author of Serious Men, Manu Joseph, also has a book out from John Murray in August. It's entitled The Happiness of Other People, and the blurb for it includes the line: "Ousep begins investigating the extraordinary life of his son, blissfully unaware that his wife is plotting to kill him . . .".
How novel as Miller beats Barnes to Costa prize
The Man Booker, Impac and Costa awards may be among literary fiction’s tastiest goodies – and speaking of the latter, who would have foreseen that Andrew Miller would fight off Man Booker-winner Julian Barnes to lift the Best Novel award, or that Matthew Hollis’s study of the war poet Edward Thomas would beat Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens to take that category?
But a tiny tome produced in April 2011 by the Cork publisher Onstream Publications has been blazing a tasty little trail of its own through the publishing world. Roz Crowley's Our Daily Bread: A History of Barron's Bakery, with photographs by Arna Run Runarsdottir, has already won the Irish section, and has made it on to the shortlist of four books in the bread section of the World Gourmand Cookbook finals which will be held at the Folies Bergères in Paris in March. The book chronicles the dedication of the Barron family from Cappoquin, Co Waterford, to the art of bread and beyond. It made it into the nonfiction bestseller charts in Ireland – even beating the mighty Jamie Oliver on one memorable week. We wish Roz bon voyage (or should that be bon appetit?) on her Parisian odyssey.
