Tag: penguin random house

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Subject Matters

I learnt yesterday that Jamie Oliver has withdrawn his children’s novel Billy and the Epic Escape over accusations that it stereotyped Indigenous Australians. It had already been on sale for six months.

As the backlash dies down, it’s being quickly replaced by puzzlement. If this book had been written by a previously-unknown author and released by a small press, it’s easier to see how this might have happened.

But this is one of the country’s best-known celebrity chefs contracted to one of the five largest publishers in the world, namely Penguin Random House. The manuscript will have been seen by countless pairs of eyes before the first copy was even printed. Each would have looked at a specific element such as grammar or typesetting, and that would typically include some consultation with the community it portrays. The story is also widely believed to have been ghostwritten, adding another possible layer to the checking process. We’re unlikely to find out who this is. It’s almost always a contractual requirement that the identity of a ghostwriter is not revealed.

Still, this book somehow slipped through the net, and the reason might never be known. I’m only conjecturing here, but it’s possible that everyone involved assumed someone else was dealing with the matter, or maybe any concerns didn’t reach more senior ears.

It must be stated that there’s nothing wrong per se with authors writing outside their own experience, but it’s vital to have an insider’s perspective. When Frederick Forsyth wrote The Day of the Jackal, a fictionalised background to a real assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle, he used his background in investigative journalism to construct his plot. It shows in the precision of the language and imagery, even if I personally think he could have deployed a few more commas.

Regardless of whether it’s done for well-justified reasons, banning or withdrawing a work is often the best promotion it can receive. I wasn’t aware of Billy and the Epic Escape before this news broke, nor about Oliver’s most recent cookbook, which is also on sale and has attracted no controversy.

At the time of writing, it’s still possible to bag a copy of the novel from Amazon UK, and you can bet the remaining stock will sell out soon.

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Discussion Questions About Discussion Questions

On Sunday evening, I reached the end of the Richard Osman novel The Man Who Died Twice. I always like to read over the acknowledgements, and then I turned the page to find a section titled ‘Discussion Questions for Readers’.

Most of the questions give away plot points, so I won’t repeat those here, but there are a few only tangentially related to the story, such as ‘Have you ever been lonely in a new town?’ and ‘What is an acceptable name for a pet, and what is unacceptable?’

I’d never before seen this feature in a novel, so I asked around to see whether others had. While some pals were – like me – surprised to see this outside of an educational setting, others reported discussion questions appearing in other books, such as:

  • A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six, both by Taylor Jenkins Reid

These titles were all published in or after 2012, and I’d be interested to find out whether any older novels also have this feature.

One respondent reported debating with herself whether such questions encourage critical thinking or are merely there to spoon-feed reading groups. I’ve considered this question myself, but I have no conclusions so far.

It’s not clear whether the discussion section was the initiative of the author or the publisher, but I expect you’d want to test the waters first. My edition boasts ‘The multi-million-copy bestseller’ on the cover, so I expect Penguin Random House knew by this point that its readers would want to discuss the title.

Although I really enjoyed The Man Who Died Twice, perhaps I haven’t seen a discussion section before because I simply don’t normally lean towards crime fiction, cosy or otherwise. However, I will keep an eye out for this in the future.