I have been wanting my own copies of Look We Have Coming to Dover and The Hole in the Sum of my Parts for a while now, so off I went to the gigantic high street bookstore in Leeds. Three spacious floors of books, with each section given a huge flank of shelves and tables piled with the ‘must reads’ du jour. Imagine my disappointment, then, when the impressive poetry section had no Daljit Nagra or Matt Harvey. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I turned the corner and...wait, what’s this...why, it’s a tiny, puny, itty, bitty eight shelves dedicated to Black and Asian writers. Here they are:
I counted the number of authors they put on these shelves: approximately 150 (although it looks a lot less in the photos). They have included Yann Martel as a Black and Asian author. It beggars belief.
So a big fat raspberry to that particular store, but a huge bunch of fair-trade flowers to Foyles on Charing Cross Road (but not Mr Grump who served me), for having the brilliant Look We Have Coming to Dover and The Hole in the Sum of my Parts plus Where Earwigs Dare. Not even the London Review Bookshop could match that.