Irish author, Emma Donoghue has made the Booker Prize shortlist with her book, Room.

Speaking about the announcement Sarah Bannan, Head of Literature at The Arts Council, said, ‘In Room, Emma Donoghue has created a gripping and haunting work of fiction, one which stays with the reader long after the last page. She brings life to an authentic and original voice, and her prose is beautifully crafted. A gifted writer truly dedicated to her art, it is a great pleasure to see the book recognised by the Booker judging panel.”

Fellow Irish writer Paul Murray, whose book Skippy Dies was on the longlist, has not been included.

Donoghue has garnered considerabel attention since her nomination for a book that was “triggered” by the Fritzl case.

Her sales have been significant in Ireland and although overshadowed by Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap in the UK, she has sold well there.

Tsiolkas failed to make the shortlist.

The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on Tuesday 12 October at a dinner at London’s Guildhall.

The announcement will be broadcast on BBC News across television, radio and online.

The full short list is:
Peter Carey ~ Parrot and Olivier in America ~ Faber and Faber
Emma Donoghue ~ Room ~ Picador – Pan Macmillan
Damon Galgut ~ In a Strange Room ~ Atlantic Books – Grove Atlantic
Howard Jacobson ~ The Finkler Question ~ Bloomsbury
Andrea Levy ~ The Long Song ~ Headline Review – Headline Publishing Group
Tom McCarthy ~ C ~ Jonathan Cape – Random House

Tony Blair was in Eason on O’Connell Street Saturday 4th September 2010 to sign copies of his autobiography, A Journey. His visit prompted tight security and things didn’t go entirely smoothly.

The Irish Independent reported that:

There were violent scuffles between protesters and gardai in O’Connell Street, Dublin, yesterday during former British prime minister Tony Blair’s controversial book signing event.

Shoes and eggs were thrown by the crowd at his car as he arrived to sign copies of his memoir, A Journey, at Eason’s flagship bookstore beside the GPO.

The missiles, thrown by anti-war protesters, who numbered no more than 200, did not hit Mr Blair as he arrived at the venue shortly before 11am. The poor weather greatly reduced the risk of widespread trouble.

Four people were arrested as activists clashed with gardai during the demonstrations before midday. The four were charged with minor public order offences and later released from custody.

The Irish Times gave further details on those arrested:

Four men were arrested following a protest in Dublin city centre yesterday morning where former British prime minister Tony Blair held a public book signing, the first since his memoirs were released this week.

The four, two aged in their late teens and two aged in their 30s, were taken to Store Street Garda station where they were charged with public order offences and released. They are due to appear in court on September 30th.

On a more thematic note The Guardian reported:

Some were determined in Dublin that these glass walls should be broken down; a few protesters even went to the trouble of queueing to make their judgments on his book in person. Kate O’Sullivan, a 24-year-old from Cork, and a member of the “Irish Palestinian Solidarity Movement”, got past the concentric rings of security that involved Garda and Special Branch and Emergency Response Units, and while Blair scribbled his signature informed him: “Mr Blair I am here to make a citizen’s arrest for the war crimes you have committed.” She was dragged away, she said, by five security people.

The day before, Blair appeared on RTÉ’s Late Late show with Ryan Tubridy for his first live interview since releasing the book:

Tony Blair On The Late Late Show

This article was written by Richard Wachman, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 4th September 2010 23.06 UTC

Tim Waterstone, the founder of the books chain that bears his name, is considering a £100m-plus bid to take the chain private if the parent company, HMV, fails to turn the business around by the new year.

Well-placed City sources say Waterstone is closely monitoring developments at the bookshops, where sales and profits have plunged under HMV’s ownership.

HMV’s chief executive, Simon Fox, is to update the City this week on trading at the group’s operations as rebel shareholders push for a sale following the bungled opening of a new centralised distribution hub in Burton upon Trent.

Waterstone is ready to fire off a bid if Fox decides to sell, and has lined up funding from backers that include a London-based hedge fund.

HMV shareholders are pushing for a sale, although they are prepared to wait until after the all-important Christmas trading period before presenting their case to management.

Waterstone, who last week published his first novel in 10 years – In for a Penny, In for a Pound – founded Waterstone’s in 1982, opening the first store in London’s Old Brompton Road.

He sold the firm to WH Smith in the early 1990s, which in turn offloaded the company to HMV in 1998 for £300m. But in recent years, the business has floundered. Waterstone attempted to buy the firm back in 2006 for £280m, but withdrew his offer following a row over the terms of a deal.

Sources say Waterstone is still keen to regain control and that “it is unthinkable he wouldn’t be in the running” if HMV decided to sell. Analysts say the value of Waterstone’s is not reflected in the HMV stock price, which closed at 59p on Friday, valuing the entertainment group at about £255m.

“According to some calculations, Waterstone’s doesn’t feature at all in the parent company’s market value,” said one broker.

As reported in the Observer’s sister paper, the Guardian, last week, shareholders will demand a sale of Waterstone’s if a turnaround plan unveiled in March fails to reap returns.

Investors were rattled at Christmas when HMV disclosed that like-for-like sales at Waterstone’s had slumped by nearly 9% during a period viewed as peak trading time.

After the collapse of Borders in the UK, Waterstone’s is now Britain’s last major specialist books chain, with a national presence of 300 shops. But the firm has been hit by fierce competition from internet retailers such as Amazon and Play, and supermarkets.

New devices like the Kindle e-reader have raised concern about the long-term viability of high-street bookshops. But Tim Waterstone is understood to believe that rumours of the death of the bookshop have been greatly exaggerated.

Former colleagues of Waterstone say he has been troubled by poor morale at the chain, but is supportive of its new managing director, Dominic Myers, who took over when Gerry Johnson departed earlier this year.

An HMV spokesman said: “We have a clear strategy for the turnaround of Waterstone’s, focused on reinforcing our credentials as a range bookseller and helping stores reflect the local interest of their customers. Although we are only a few months in with this strategy, we are making very good progress and our initiatives have been very well received by the wider book industry.” Insiders said there was no intention to sell at present.

Despite problems at Waterstone’s, HMV revealed last month that group profits had risen by more than 12% after a strong showing from its core music and entertainment business. Fox said then that HMV was “on track” to transform the company into a broad-based entertainment brand after a move into live music and ticketing. The idea is to be less dependent on CD and DVD sales.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Bord Gais Energy is to launch an online book club Monday 6th September. The site is live now at www.bordgaisenergybookclub.ie.

The book club will feature a rotating panel of reviewers including Bert Wright who is the administrator of the Irish Book Awards, a celebrity author and a librarian from one of the 369 public libraries in Ireland.

The first month features Skippy Dies, the Man Booker nominated book by Irishman Paul Murray, which will be reviewed by Bishopstown librarian David O’Brien. Amanda Brunker will review Fogive And Forget by Patricia Scanlan and Bert Wright will review, bestseller, The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

This marks the fifth book related promotion by Bord Gais Energy who also support The Irish Book Awards, The Irish Book of The Decade, TV3′s Ireland AM Book Club and the Readiscover Your Local Library campaign.

The competition for book readers attention is heating up with the Irish Independent launching their own book club in August and The Irish Times launched an online book club earlier in 2010.

However there are some 500 private book clubs in the country and if the attendance at the Ennis Book Club Festival is anything to go by, there is no danger of readers falling out of love with book clubs anytime soon.

The Hughes & Hughes store in Dundalk, which was first opened in 2004, has reopened today creating eight jobs.

Derek Hughes, Managing Director, said, ‘To be re-opening our much acclaimed store in Dundalk is very gratifying and illustrates the long term confidence we have in Dundalk.  I am especially pleased for our Manager, Ellie Winters, and many of our staff, who will be rejoining us.’ He added that ‘Trading in our other five stores that have reopened has been very strong over the last three months and we are confident that Hughes & Hughes Dundalk will follow this trend.’

Ellie Winters, Hughes & Hughes Dundalk Manager said, ‘This is a great day for everyone in the Hughes & Hughes family and especially for people associated with the store here in Dundalk.  All eight of us are book enthusiasts and we are looking forward to sharing our knowledge and passion for books with our customers once again.’

The re-opened Dundalk store is still located at Clanbrassil Street, covers 3,200 sq ft and stocks 20,000 titles. The store offers a large young readers section including titles for pre-school age readers.

The new holding company that owns Hughes & Hughes, Sivota Limited, have now reopened six of the company’s former stores:
- Hughes & Hughes, St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, Dublin 2
- Hughes & Hughes, Pavillions Shopping Centre, Swords, Co. Dublin
- Hughes & Hughes, Omnipark, Santry, Dublin 9
- Hughes & Hughes, Dundrum Shopping Centre, Dublin 14
- Hughes & Hughes, Ennis, Co. Clare
- Hughes & Hughes, Clanbrassil Street, Dundalk, Co. Louth.

UPDATE: CHENILE KEOGH from Merlin has contacted IPN to clarify the position of Wolfhound titles saying, ‘this situation does not effect the Wolfhound list, all the Wolfhound titles are still on sale and will be for the foreseeable future.’

In a statement to Irish Publishing News the company said that ‘Due to the very significant downturn in the book trade which has seriously affected the level of sales of books, the Directors of Merlin Books Limited (trading as Merlin Publishing under the Merlin imprint), have made the decision to cease its current publishing activities. As a consequence, Merlin Publishing will not be releasing any new titles for the foreseeable future.’

Gill & Macmillan Distribution, who had acted as the publishers distribution agents, announced that they had ceased ‘acting as distributor to Merlin Publishing with immediate effect.’ They further said that ‘All future orders, returns requests and queries should be addressed directly to Merlin Publishing.’

Primarily known for its true crime titles like, Paul William’s Crime Wars and Gangsters, Merlin also publishes the Wolfhound list which it acquired from that list’s founder Seamus Cashman in 2001.

It is unclear from Merlin’s statement how this move affects the remaining staff at the publisher.

In 2008, following concerns over material about Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) investigations contained in Paul Williams’ bestselling Crime Wars, Merlin was forced to withdraw the book from sale.

A finding of contempt followed and in January 2009 High Court judge, Mr Justice Brian McGovern imposed a fine of €5000 plus costs on the company.

Later that year Merlin was forced to lay off a number of editorial and marketing staff.

This article was written by Richard Lea, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 27th August 2010 14.32 UTC

The past vies with the future and poetry with prose on the longlist of the 2010 Guardian first book award, which was announced today. The 10 debut titles in the running for the £10,000 award range from dystopian fiction to popular psychology, and span the globe from Somalia to Finland, Kashmir to Winston Churchill’s family home in Kent.

War stalks the pages of the best-known novel on the list, Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy, which was longlisted for the Orange prize and has already won the 2010 Betty Trask award. Mohamed takes the story of her father, who left Somalia as a boy and settled in the UK after crossing Africa, and transforms it into fiction inflected by the African tradition of praise poetry. Starting as a 10-year-old boy in 1930s Somalia and journeying through Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt to freedom in Britain, Mohamed’s main character witnesses key moments in the African experience of the second world war and embodies the itinerant experience of the Somali community.

According to the chair of the judges, the Guardian’s literary editor Claire Armitstead, Mohamed is just one of a group of young British authors on the longlist who are expanding the territory of the novel.

“This year’s longlist brings together a younger generation of writers who have moved beyond the social realism of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, and are pushing at the boundaries of realist fiction,” she said.

Armitstead also cited Rebecca Hunt, whose novel Mr Chartwell imagines the depression that haunts both Winston Churchill and a young woman in Battersea as a huge black dog, and Ned Beauman, who explores Nazism, eugenics and entomology in Boxer, Beetle, as responding to the changes in publishing and wider society with fiction that enlarges the possibilities of the novel.

Speaking to the Guardian, Beauman, who expressed his “delight” at finding himself on the longlist, agreed that there was an impulse towards experimentation, but not necessarily in imposing what he called “the literary equivalent of recessional austerity measures”.

“Paring away plot, character, humour, lyricism, humanity is more often boring than it is bold,” he said. “The Americans know this, and indeed all I did in Boxer, Beetle was smuggle a few postmodern devices across the Atlantic, but at the moment a lot of British readers seem to be falling for this idea that the most interesting fiction has to involve rather dated Modernist self-flagellation.”

After the success of projects as various as Inglourious Basterds and The Kindly Ones, he confessed himself unworried by the difficulty of attracting readers to a story which combines the Third Reich and cockroaches. “What has emerged as a bigger obstacle is that everyone finds all the characters so horrible,” he said, “which had honestly never occurred to me when I was writing it.”

Steven Amsterdam, whose episodic novel Things We Didn’t See Coming considers how we might retain our humanity in a future ruled by environmental and technological catastrophe, and Maile Chapman, whose Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto evokes life in a 1920s Finnish asylum, are the two remaining novelists on the list.

Alexandra Harris looks back at the early 20th century through a different lens in Romantic Moderns, a study of how English writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics and composers imbued the artistic revolutions coming across the channel with a nostalgic sense of place. Daniel Swift considers the lack of imagination that powers modern warfare in Bomber County, an investigation into the death of his grandfather which was sparked by Robert Graves’s observation that the second world war produced no great poets. Basharat Peer, meanwhile, reports from the frontline of the conflict between India and Pakistan in a return to his troubled homeland of Kashmir in Curfewed Night.

Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, an exploration of how our convictions shape our lives despite being riddled with error, and Katharine Towers’s The Floating Man, a collection of poetry haunted by music and water, complete the list.

Armitstead will be joined on the judging panel by the artistic director of the ICA, Ekow Eshun, the author Adam Foulds, the biographer Richard Holmes, the actor Diana Quick, the Guardian’s deputy editor, Kath Viner, and Stuart Broom from Waterstone’s, who will represent the views of five reading groups hosted in Waterstone’s bookshops around the country.

Last year’s winner was the Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah, for her collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly. She joined a roster of winners from the 12-year history of the award that includes Zadie Smith, Alex Ross and Jonathan Safran Foer.

The shortlist for this year’s prize will be announced in late October, with the winner revealed at the beginning of December.

The longlist

Fiction

Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (Fig Tree)

Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)

Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam (Harvill)

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman (Cape)

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed (HarperCollins)

Non-fiction

Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two by Daniel Swift (Hamish Hamilton)

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz (Portobello)

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson)

Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir by Basharat Peer (Harper Press)

Poetry

The Floating Man by Katharine Towers (Picador)

• All titles on the Guardian First Book Award longlist are available at a discount from the Guardian Bookshop. Go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or ring 0330 333 6846

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Starting today with the figures for August, and monthly from now on, Irish Publishing News will report the Top Ten Bestselling ebooks through Eason’s ebook store.

Obviously this is only one outlet and the figures for ebook sales are in that way somewhat biased. However until we can secure more sales data from other sources, they’ll remain the best we have.

Interestingly they represent a very different top ten then the weekly print top ten (for the lastest see here). Though this list will cover fiction and non-fiction, no fiction title has made the list.

According to Stephen Boylan, Eason Books Purchasing Manager, the best selling non-fiction title is Matt Cooper’s Who Really Run’s Ireland, but it isn’t selling enough to make the top ten.

Boylan also said, ‘Non-fiction (including academic) is a strong seller, but it tends to be spread across a wider range of titles whereas the new titles in fiction have repeated hits.’

And so, courtesy of Easons, the first Irish Top Ten Ebooks:

1) Pieces of my Heart by Sinead Moriarty
2) The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3) The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
4) The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
5) The Radleys by Matt Haig
6) The Passage by Justin Cronin
7) Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
8) The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
9) Champagne Kisses by Amanda Brunker
10) Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

Founder of the Waterstone bookshop chain, Tim Waterstone will join, Jamie Byng, whose publishing house Canongate published Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and the global success, Life Of Pi, author Matthew Kneale and journalist Rachel Cooke in the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire to debate the future of reading, writing and books.

The session takes place on Sunday 12th September at 1.45pm as part of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown’s book festival, Mountains To Sea which is entering it’s second year in 2010.

The discussion comes at a time of great change in the world of books and the panel will explore this new digital landscape. With the launch in Ireland of Apple iPad and news that Amazon’s newest Kindle device is both the best selling Kindle ever and the best selling product on Amazon there will be much to discuss.

You know that school isn’t far away when the Maths Tables top the charts. Dan Brown scores another stellar week and Stieg Larsson‘s amazing performance continues. Rhonda Byrne, whose The Secret was such a phenomenal success a few years ago is back in the top ten with her new book The Power.

Emma Donoghue has sustained her incredible performance but she and  Sinead Moriarty, whose Pieces of My Heart remains in the top ten (and thus still technically number one in original fiction though Emma also sold 141 hardback copies of Room, which puts her over Moriarty’s unit sales, but who is counting!), are the only Irish writers still in the top ten.

1: Maths Tables , 1,876
2: The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown, 1,829
3: The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson, 1,776
4: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, 1,689
5: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Stieg Larsson, 1,590
6: The Help, Kathryn Stockett, 1,492
7: Pieces of My Heart, Sinead Moriarty, 1,448
8: The Power, Rhonda Byrne, 1,445
9: Room, Emma Donoghue, 1,400
10: Don’t Blink, James Patterson, 1,336
Data Supplied by Nielsen BookScan taken from the Irish Consumer Market week ending 21st August 2010