Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth: Deeply wise and hilarious
Author
:
Emma Jane Unsworth
ISBN-13
:
978-0-00-834721-5
Publisher
:
The Borough Press
Guideline Price
:
£ 16.99
Sarah Hudson is an angsty, workaholic Mancunian, still single in her early 40s and about to kiss goodbye to her inner self: a traumatised wee lassie persistently besotted with her childhood English teacher.
Sarah has appetites; she's a 'caner', an enthusiast for drugs, booze, and bedding rock'n'roll singers. She reckons on a window of sex before the inevitability of post-menopausal invisibility. Deciding on a Scottish safari with her sister Juliette, they go on a motorhome tour of distilleries, more nip than tuck, more win a bag of coke than Winnebago. A road trip then, a novel about sibling love and rivalries.
They stagger up to Ullapool and Cape Wrath, John O'Groats and Aviemore, fuelled by shots of Highland Park, Talisker and The Singelton. Sarah and Juliette expose their vulnerabilities, their worries over an ever-shrinking circle of friends, their Corryvreckan spiral of decline in self-esteem. A voluptuous melancholy that has Sarah determined 'she would try to let people into her broken little house of horrors'. In tone, Slags
is an earthy blend of
Emma Cline
and Ed Atkins with a similar fixation on solipsistic inner interrogations and the palliative use of food in the face of existential despair.
All this delivered in Sarah's droll confessional, her voice echt
,
as brightly true and un-phony as that of
Holden Caulfield
. Unsworth's story is packed with pithy diagnostics, conspiratorial giggles: hers is an absurdist humour of recognition over modern life's humiliations. A weird and wacky world obsessed by gut health and generalisation about generations, where 'Gen Z-ers will respect your pronouns but not you as a person'.
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Unsworth is also hypersensitive to the othering of single women, the endless questioning: 'Found anyone yet?' She has too a supremely delicate sympathy to 'the eternal book balancing of siblingdom' and its bottomless 'layers of subtext', the She Ain't Heavy debts and denials.
[
Emma Jane Unsworth on postnatal depression
Opens in new window
]
Life for the sisters is, in Powell and Pressburger's memorable phrase about postwar Vienna, 'hopeless but not serious'. This is a deeply wise and hilarious novel about a pair of clever romantics who 'always get a bit lost' and where there's no such thing as closure.
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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Irish Times
Have we no more active rights over life, birth and death?
Stephanie O'Connor, a research officer at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, was awarded this year's Hubert Butler Essay Prize in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle on Saturday. John Banville, honorary patron of the prize, said: 'With courage, clarity and subtle discrimination, Stephanie O'Connor addresses fundamental questions that arise, as she writes, 'at the edges of human life', and presents an argument that affirms the dignity and respect that are due to all of us no less in the process of our 'going hence' than at the moment of our 'coming hither'.' This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Hubert Butler's first essay collection, Escape from the Anthill , which appeared in 1985- the author's 86th year. It was also the first production from Antony Farrell's Lilliput Press. The essay prize, brainchild of Jeremy O'Sullivan, was founded seven years ago and is now an integral part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. READ MORE This year's essay theme was the question of how far we can and should control our destinies over lif birth and death, instancing Edgar's stoical monition to his despairing father Gloucester in King Lear : 'Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither.' Historian Roy Foster, who judged the prize with Catriona Crowe, Nicky Grene and Barbara Schwepcke, said the winning essay 'went straight to the point of asking whether we were any the wiser for the increased options available in an age of reproductive technology and end-of-life planning. 'Stephanie O'Connor concentrated on the legal and moral ethics of keeping a brain-dead woman on life-support for the sake of an unborn infant who will almost certainly not survive. She discusses with compassion and empathy the 'uncanny ambiguity where the dead might remain legally ambiguous', and incisively states the need for 'a new ethical framework, shaped by legislation and public debate': medical ethics being 'the scaffolding by which we try to uphold the human spirit in a world increasingly seduced by the procedural and drawn to the utilitarian'. 'The clarity with which she addresses issues described rightly as intimate and harrowing is deeply impressive, and her definition of 'dignity' as a guiding principle strikes a powerful concluding note.' The winning essay is reproduced below. Have we no more active rights over life, birth and death? ' Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither .' So speaks Edgar to his blind and broken father, Gloucester, in William Shakespeare's King Lear (Act V, Scene 2), reaching for some scrap of consolation amid the wreckage of betrayal, madness, and loss. It is a fantastic line. It is a fatalistic line. This is not hope. His words carry the chill of stoic resignation, a frail attempt to impose meaning on the brute finality of death, a comfort as thin as the wind on the Cliffs of Moher. To accept that birth and death lie beyond our control. I recently witnessed the death of someone I loved very deeply – a moment of quiet surrender, beyond my control, that left an unfathomable gulf in my life. I desperately wanted them to live, and yet, to be there, as they let go, quietly, peacefully, after years of the struggle with ill health, was a profound and beautiful privilege. In that stillness, death felt less like a rupture and more like a final act of grace. And yet, even after witnessing what is called a ' good death ' – peaceful, dignified, and free from suffering – I find myself questioning whether Edgar's words still hold true. Can we really, in our modern world, still accept that we must simply endure our coming and going? In an age of reproductive technology and end-of-life planning, it would appear we have long since moved into an era where such a fatalistic acceptance of our helpless arrival and helpless departure is no longer passive, but shaped by choice, by law, and by technology. The question is: are we wiser for it? I find I cannot consider the question of our active rights over life, birth and death without revisiting the harrowing case of P.P. v. Health Service Executive (2014) , a case that personally gripped me, and I suspect many others, and would echo through Irish legal and ethical discourse for years to come, making me wonder: What if Edgar's lines are no longer merely literary, but legal? What if, in our era, death itself must await constitutional interpretation? And what if the body, in its going hence, becomes hostage to a cause it never chose? In December of that year, a young Irish woman, only 26 years old – daughter, partner, and mother of two – suffered a catastrophic brain injury and was declared clinically dead. She was 14 weeks pregnant at the time. Her heartbroken family, already reeling from the suddenness and irreversibility of her passing, was told that her body would be kept on life support – not for her sake, but to prolong the gestation of her unborn child. For three weeks, the young woman's dead body remained tethered to the apparatus of somatic support, sustained artificially in a state of biological animation, while the medical team monitored the foetus in her abdomen – her heart mechanically pulsing, her organs perfused. Eventually, the High Court permitted what her distressed loved ones had requested from the outset: that the machines be stopped because the woman was dead, and that the treatment was ' unreasonable ', ' experimental ' and therefore unethical. There was, the court found, no realistic prospect that the unborn child would survive, and ' in the best interest of the unborn child ' authorised the withdrawal of ongoing somatic support. She could be allowed, at last, in that long-honoured phrase, to rest in peace. It is worth pausing to consider how we arrived at a point where such a scenario was not only conceivable, but could unfold in reality, and be upheld in law. The answer, in large part, lies in the legacy of Ireland's constitutional recognition of the unborn's right to life. The now-repealed Eighth Amendment, inserted in 1983, was shaped not only by theological conviction but by the moral anxieties of a devout society. It created a legal equivalence between the lives of women and their unborn, and in doing so, an uncanny ambiguity, where the dead might remain legally ambiguous: both people and legally bound vessels burdened by gestational obligations. In practice, creating situations such as P.P. v HSE , where legal obligations forced doctors to override death itself in the interest of potential life. Its repeal, in 2018, returned legislative authority to the Oireachtas, allowing for a new ethical framework shaped by legislation and public debate. However, while progress has been made, the fundamental legal and ethical dilemmas at the heart of P.P. v. HSE remain unsettled, leaving open the possibility that such tragic circumstances could arise again. In a searing editorial at the time, the woman was referred to as a ' cadaveric incubator .' The term is terrible, and its honesty is unmerciful. For what else, legally speaking, was she during those weeks? She was no longer a citizen. No longer a patient. No longer capable of consent. She had become, by a certain line of reasoning, a resource, one whose utility had not yet expired. And yet: this young woman had been someone. Someone who had made choices, who had loves and fears, and who might have left an advance directive had she ever imagined such a grim fate. Her family's grief was compounded not only by her loss but by the State's intrusion into what should have been a sacred and private time of reckoning with death. It brought into sharp focus ethical questions that, while deeply significant, are often approached with caution or even skirted in public discourse – What is life? Who owns death? Who decides its terms? And does the unborn's fragile spark of potential outweigh the dignity owed to the dead? The High Court, to its credit, ruled with sobriety and deference to expert medical consensus that there was no reasonable prospect that the foetus would survive to viability. But it still took weeks of judicial intervention to affirm that a woman who was clinically dead should not be subjected to experimental prolongation. I revisit the case here not to reopen wounds, and indeed, I thought long and hard, hesitant to write at all out of deference to those who lived its reality. But then I recalled something Hubert Butler once said of another historical silence, when atrocities in Yugoslavia went unmentioned because naming them would mean naming our own complicity: '.. silence did not help me ... It became increasingly difficult to be silent .' And so, it is here. We must speak with clarity and compassion about where medicine, law, and human dignity intersect – and where they diverge. In this instance, we were forced to ask ourselves whether a dead woman could be called upon to continue a pregnancy she could no longer consent to, whether she could, as some bioethicists starkly put it, ' be used '. The question was no longer whether the unborn had rights; instead, it was whether the dead had any rights left? It is important to stress here that no argument was presented to diminish the moral status of the unborn. Rather, the arguments were made to try to assert the indivisible dignity and bodily integrity of the already lived life, and the rights of families to mourn without being conscripted into bioethical theatre. In cases such as this, when all evidence points to futility, continuing life support is no longer an act of care – it is an act of fear, driven by legal shadows, not moral light. And it seems, we are no longer mere witnesses to birth and death; we are, increasingly, their stewards. Modern medicine has given us powers that previous generations could never have imagined – the ability to keep bodies functioning after the mind is gone, after death, to intervene in birth and delay death. But these powers have brought with them difficult questions: just because we can act, does it mean we should? In cases such as P.P. v HSE , where a woman declared clinically dead was kept on somatic support for the sake of her unborn child who has no chance of survival, and against her family's wishes, we see how the boundaries between life, death, and duty blur and just how complicated these questions can become. When we ask if we have no more active rights over life, birth and death, but instead are forced to confront the clash between medical possibility, legal obligation, and human dignity. Is this not best answered by opposing principles, but by turning toward the moral terrain where those principles collide: a space requiring not only legal interpretation, but imagination, conscience, and care. This is not a simple clash between religion and secularism, or between tradition and progress. Nor is this tragic paradox in any way confined to Ireland. This case is only one of a number of rare, tragic, high-profile, and contentious medico-legal cases, which have gone before courts around the world in recent years. Some are cases where pregnant women, have been clinically diagnosed as brain-dead but are kept ' alive ' artificially, to preserve the life of the unborn until such time that a Caesarean section can be carried out. In such cases of maternal-foetal conflict , the pregnant woman's interests conflict with the interests of the foetus because clearly, to allow the mother's death would result in the unborn dying because its intensive care support would be withdrawn. Again, I stress that what I write here is in no way a debate about the moral status of the foetus, nor a contest between the right to life and the right to die. It is, instead, an attempt to consider how we act when the old moral frameworks no longer fit – and how we honour the living and the dead when the answers aren't written down. For while P.P. v HSE may bear the peculiar imprimatur of our constitutional and religious legacy, the underlying conflict is something more intimate and harrowing – between technological capacity and moral restraint – the redefinition of the human identity in an age of technical possibility. And across Europe and beyond, similar cases have arisen to highlight the global resonance of these issues and underscore the universality of the dilemma: the collision between medical capability and moral uncertainty, between the language of law and the needs of grief. Instances where medical possibility outpaces ethical consensus, and where law, unsure of its footing, stumbles into the most private regions of life and death. In Texas, the high-profile case of Marlise Muñoz in 2013 echoed with chilling familiarity: a brain-dead woman, pregnant, was kept on life support against her family's wishes due to state laws protecting the unborn. In Germany, the debate continues over how to balance prenatal life with posthumous dignity in the absence of explicit legal directives. Even in secular France, the Vincent Lambert case in 2019, though not involving pregnancy, laid bare the painful entanglements of familial love, legal ambiguity, and medical endurance. These are not the accidents of jurisdiction, but the growing pains of a civilisation increasingly unsure how to interpret the sacred in the age of the mechanical. The principles of medical ethics – autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice – known collectively as the Beauchamp and Childress framework, form the quiet architecture by which medicine seeks to balance power with compassion, and are not merely philosophical ornaments. They are the scaffolding by which we try to uphold the human spirit in a world increasingly seduced by the procedural and drawn to the utilitarian. Each principle carries distinct weight and, when in tension, reveals the intricacy of end-of-life decision-making: Respect for autonomy, in the context of P.P. vs HSE , becomes paradoxical. It affirms the individual's right to have meaningful agency and moral authority over the most fundamental aspects of their existence – how they are born, how they live, and how they die. This includes making decisions about their own body and life, including the choice to refuse life-prolonging treatment or to seek medically assisted death. It means honouring a competent person's wish to die with dignity, even when that wish contradicts societal norms or professional instincts to preserve life using systems that neither knew us nor will mourn us. But the dead have no will – they once had one. Is it beyond our moral imagination to give it voice and let it be heard? Interest Theory allows for the possibility of posthumous rights, including, for example, the right to have one's remains treated with dignity, the right to have one's wishes regarding burial or cremation respected, or the right to protect one's reputation from posthumous defamation. But in the age of technology, has society chosen to limit the principle of posthumous autonomy and posthumous moral and legal rights? The right to die a natural death is supported by the right to respect for autonomy. But many states, including Ireland, invalidate a woman's advance directive if she is pregnant because of the compelling legal right to life of the foetus. Often, irrespective of whether the woman's wishes are known or not, courts will use a best interests test or substituted judgment standard. Some will argue, understandably, that beneficence – our duty to do good – extends most urgently to the vulnerable unborn. But beneficence, if severed from context, becomes blind and can even lead to tyranny. In trying to preserve a hypothetical life, we may violate an actual death. In doing so, we may dishonour both. Regarding non-maleficence, a dead person experiences no physical harm from continued somatic support because they are dead. However, if we consider posthumous rights, it could be argued that somatic support of a decomposing dead body potentially violates the cultural norms of dignity and respect that society confers to dead human bodies. Regarding the principle of (social) justice, intensive somatic support is expensive and it is arguable that the State should not direct such limited resources, for an indefinite time to the care of one dead individual, even when balanced against the costs of caring for a baby for a prolonged time in a neonatal intensive unit care if gestation were not delayed to allow the foetus to mature further in utero. When making decisions, particularly in situations involving maternal-foetal conflict, doctors must balance these ethical principles with professional practice guidelines and responsibilities under the law. But in navigating, we encounter the limits of law in matters that are deeply human. The law may compel action, but there are moments when law, though meticulously reasoned, proves insufficient to capture the full scope of human experience or embody compassion. Yes, legality can codify duties, define rights, and offer structure to our moral instincts. Still, even the most carefully constructed legal frameworks cannot fully account for love, grief, or the emotional, ethical, moral and familial complexity of life-and-death decisions, let alone the unspoken complexities that shape human lives. In cases like P.P. v HSE , and many others, the boundaries of law meet the raw edge of human sorrow. What follows is not merely a legal question but an ethical reckoning with what it means to honour the dead, to protect the unborn, and to listen to the quiet dignity of those who mourn. And where competing rights, such as the sanctity of life or the rights of the unborn, are applied as absolutes, is it possible that they can obscure more than they resolve, especially when they collide with the dignity owed to the dead? It raises the question – when we cling to principles too tightly, do we risk losing sight of the person? As Hubert Butler observed, ' Science has enormously extended the sphere of our responsibilities, while our consciences have remained the same size .' In an age where the dead can be biologically sustained long after meaning has ebbed away, the question is not just what we can do, but what we should do – and why. Is there a point at which the machinery of law must yield to the compassion of humanity, where rigid adherence gives way to moral judgment grounded not in statutes, but in empathy, respect, and care? It is in this space – between what the law allows and what decency demands – that our truest responsibilities begin. Dignity is an elusive but crucial concept. It's not simply the absence of suffering, nor merely the preservation of respect for autonomy. Dignity might serve as a middle path – a humane principle in the absence of consensus, reminding us that medicine is not only a technical craft but also a humane one. In the bleak world of King Lear , mortal lives are at the mercy of fate and indifferent, as Shakespeare's characters are cast from birth to death with little control, their will overwhelmed by storm, folly, despair and madness. Today, medical ethics, biotechnology, and law offer tools that challenge this fatalism. Edgar's stoic call to ' endure ' in King Lear was a balm for despair, but in our modern context, endurance is no longer passive. It is curated, legislated, and medicalised. When endurance means tethering a dead woman to machines for weeks against her family's wishes, it is no longer stoicism – it becomes imposition. In this, perhaps, Edgar's words still hold – not as a declaration of helplessness, but stripped of its fatalism, it becomes a call to humanity. A reminder of the deep humility required at the edges of human life. Yes, men must endure their going hence – but not in silence, not without dignity, and not without the right to be mourned as more than a vessel. Whether we are choosing to end treatment, to intervene in birth, or to withhold the breath of a machine, we are not gods. Our agency is real, but it is bounded by mortality, by ethics, and by love. Yes, men must endure their going hence. But we, the living, must also ensure they may go in peace.
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Irish Times
Poem of the Week: Aeneas Bhirgil
i.m. Ciaran Carson Those were the travelling times when we toured like fireflies across the North a set of pipes tuned to the whine of a late-night Hoover in Portadown, a few years later on down the road a walk through the Tenderloin, a mirror in a Paris bar, the lines 'Il pleure… ' and you complained to the five poets you led across Paris to toast Verlaine with 'only the finest Calva' that no Irish poet had written such a line with all our superior knowledge of rain. Mary O'Malley's most recent collection is The Shark Nursery (Carcanet), which is shortlisted for the Walcott Prize.
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Irish Times
Zealous book bans and brilliant writers forged strong Irish Penguin links from the start
'When my first novel appeared in Penguin,' said the writer Malcolm Bradbury, 'I regarded it as a step towards canonisation'. He was surely not alone. For most of us, Penguin books have always been there, from the classroom to the bedside table. But as the publisher celebrates its 90th anniversary this month, it's easy to forget that before its arrival, it was almost impossible to read a good paperback. Paperback novels existed, of course, but they were mostly pulp fiction, penny dreadfuls, as disposable as they were garish. 'Real books' – literature – were largely preserved in hardback, the durability of the format matching the contents. Then in 1934, the publisher Allen Lane was returning from a visit to see his author Agatha Christie. At Exeter train station, he wanted something to read on the journey home but couldn't find anything that was both affordable and worthwhile. [ Books better than screens for students, study finds Opens in new window ] The idea hit him in a coup de foudre. Quality literature in paperback – a good book for the price of a packet of cigarettes. Lane's secretary came up with the name Penguin: a 'dignified but flippant' symbol. A conservative publishing industry was sceptical that the idea would work. But – allowing for the benefit of hindsight – of course it was going to work. This was a culture before TV, before hand-held devices, when the people's choice for portable entertainment was a book. Many people had one on the go at all times, borrowed from lending libraries in Woolworths: so paperback books were a way for publishers to get – literally – into every pocket. The first set of 12 Penguin books appeared in July 1935, including novels by Ernest Hemingway , Dorothy L Sayers and (the indirect inspiration for the series, so it was only fair) Agatha Christie. The series was indeed a huge hit, shifting three million copies in the first year. From the start, Penguin drew on Irish writers for its list. The 17th Penguin title, published in October 1935, was Liam O'Flaherty's Civil War drama The Informer, though not all its Irish titles were so durable. (Does anyone now read St John Ervine's The Wayward Man, published by Penguin in 1936?) [ What do Irish writers read? Donal Ryan, Mark Tighe, Nuala O'Connor, Claire Hennessy and more give recommendations Opens in new window ] Soon, Penguin was not just republishing older books but taking on original titles. The publisher showed that books could be mass-market material without aiming for the lowest common denominator. It created a democratisation of reading. Liam O'Flaherty: Penguin published his novel The Informer in 1935 They showed too that books could be timely as well as timeless, with the rapid turnaround of the Penguin Specials series. In 1937, the title Germany Puts the Clock Back sold 50,000 copies in four days, to a public hungry for detailed information on the Nazi threat. But it also showed that they could not just follow trends, but lead them and initiate the public conversation. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), about the dangers of pesticides and the industry's cover-up, was a clarion call for the environmental movement. [ From the archive: Fifty years on, Silent Spring still matters, by Eamon Ryan Opens in new window ] Most famously, Penguin became part of a campaign itself with the publication of DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. Penguin published the book in 1960 to test the new Obscene Publications Act , which allowed so-called obscene work to be published if it had 'literary merit'. The publisher invited prosecution and the authorities were happy to oblige. At the trial numerous authors and academics spoke up for the book (though Enid Blyton turned down the opportunity to do so), and the prosecution bombed. Penguin's marketing genius – an important part of its success – came into play: it had 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover ready to distribute (using a different printer, as the usual one refused to handle the book) and managed to get some copies on sale the same day as the acquittal. One month later, the novel had sold two million copies. Ireland's own zealous book bans could also create a market that Penguin was keen to satisfy. In 1950 it published a translation of Apuleius's second-century raunchy Latin satire The Golden Ass, which had been banned in this country. And Ireland's once unloved son, James Joyce, has a strong history with Penguin. Allen Lane, who had been the first publisher to produce a UK edition of Ulysses in 1936 (when Penguin was still a sideline for him), reissued the novel as Penguin title number 3,000 in 1969. James Joyce: Penguin reissued Ulysses in 1969. Photograph: Lipnitzki/He had paid £75,000 for the paperback rights, a record at the time. Within 18 months, it had sold almost half a million copies – an extraordinary figure for a novel as dense, allusive, ambitious and delightful as Joyce's masterpiece. More widely, Penguin has a good track record of recognising Ireland as a country that punches well above its weight in literary brilliance. In 1946, to celebrate George Bernard Shaw's 90th birthday, it published one million books in one day: 100,000 copies each of 10 of his titles. They sold out in six weeks. Shaw had been a Penguin stalwart since the early days. Its imprint of non-fiction work, Pelican Books, was launched with Shaw's two-volume The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism; the author modestly claimed that these new cheap editions 'would be the saviour of mankind'. Now Penguin continues to publish many of Ireland's most successful writers, from Marian Keyes and Colm Tóibín to Donal Ryan and Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, and has its own imprint for Irish writing, Sandycove. Marian Keyes. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw But what first comes to mind when many of us think of Penguin books are the classics series: the slightly forbidding black classics, or the edgier, cooler modern classics. The Penguin Classics series was launched in 1946: its launch title, a new translation of The Odyssey, set out its stall clearly. This was a range to be both high-minded and accessible, to bring the greatest writers in history within reach of the ordinary book buyer. The Modern Classics followed in 1961, for books that weren't quite old enough to be classics, but demanded some recognition – or at least some marketing. They were given stylish covers, in line with its aim to be – as former series editor Simon Winder put it – 'a series to be enjoyed, rather than something that is good for you'. But the Classics and Modern Classics ranges have a tricky line to tread: these books not only reflect the literary canon, but they also help to shape it. It took a long time for Penguin to break out of the traditional modern classics mode of white men: Orwell, Waugh, Greene, Fitzgerald. The current publishing director of Penguin Classics, Jessica Harrison, acknowledges this. When reviewing the list for the 90th anniversary celebrations, she told me, she could see that 'in the 80s they brought in a lot more women writers' and later 'there must have been an editor who was really interested in Japan and Chinese [literature].' Now, the list looks wider, though even now there are only a handful of Penguin Modern Classics writers from China, and one from North Africa. But Penguin's success is not just down to the quality of the books. From the start – see the Penguincubator, a Penguin books vending machine launched in 1937 – the publisher has been a ruthless exploiter of its own intellectual property, with special editions and rejacketed reissues a regular feature of its catalogue. (It currently keeps no fewer than seven editions of Orwell's Animal Farm in print.) This approach itself leads to unexpected successes. In 2018, it launched a dirt-cheap (80p in the UK) series of Little Black Classics, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' most famous work – which meant you could buy The Communist Manifesto at the till point in Tesco. As a result, it made the Sunday Times bestseller list. More recently, Fyodor Dosotevsky has been having a moment, thanks to handsome reissues of his novella White Nights, which became Penguin's bestselling classic title of 2024, outstripping hardy perennials like Jane Austen. This ruthless reuse of its titles has its latest manifestation in the Penguin Archive series, a set of 90 short books published this year to celebrate the anniversary, with handsome covers reflecting the various styles of Penguin books over the decades. Dracula author Bram Stoker The bestselling title of the series when it was launched? Not Austen or Orwell or Fitzgerald, but an Irishman: Bram Stoker, whose short story collection The Burial of the Rats outsold the other 89 titles. It's impossible, of course, to cover the full range of Penguin's history even in a generous spread of 90 titles. But nonetheless, there do seem to be one or two curious omissions. Are there, I asked Jessica Harrison, any authors she regrets not including in the Archive? 'It did feel odd,' she said after a long pause, 'to be without [James] Joyce.' Not half.
