"It is as accomplished, as entertaining and as funny as anything its author has done" - DJ Taylor
 
JL Carr reunites George Harpole with Emma Foxberrow (after their school-teaching confrontations in The Harpole Report) in a new venture to run a publishing business. With an inherited back-list of unpromising titles, their fortunes seemingly improve when they take on the pot-boiler romances of little known author Grace Pintle. Her nomination for the Big Britlit Prize, a surprise in itself, sets off a train of surprises.
 
"Books concern printers, publishers, sales reps, booksellers, proof-readers, professors, illustrators, indexers, critics, text editors, literary editors, librarians, book-reviewers and bookbinders and book-keepers, translators, typographers, Oxfam fund raisers, whole university departments of soothsayers, manufacturers of thread and glue, auctioneers, lumberjacks, starving mice, wolves howling at the doors of authors of first-novels, the Post Office's book-bashing machine minder, religious bonfire fuel suppliers and libel lawyers. So, by and large, this is what this book is about. It tries to answer Mrs Widmerpool's sister's alarming enquiry at George Harpole's trial: "What are books? Where do they come from?" Her "Where do they go?" is unanswerable - except, quite often to the head" - JL Carr