A MESSAGE FROM AUTHOR NATALIE JENNER
Dear readers,
I am immensely grateful for the outpouring of affection that so many of you have expressed for my debut novel The Jane Austen Society and its eight main characters. When I wrote its epilogue (in one go and without ever changing a word), I wanted to give each of Adam, Mimi, Dr. Gray, Adeline, Yardley, Frances, Evie and Andrew the happy Austenesque ending they each deserved. But I could not let go of servant girl Evie Stone, the youngest and only character inspired by real life (my mother, who had to leave school at age fourteen, and my daughter, who does eighteenth-century research for a university professor and his team). Bloomsbury Girls continues Evie’s adventures into a 1950s London bookshop where there is a battle of the sexes raging between the male managers and the female staff, who decide to pull together their smarts, connections, and limited resources to take over the shop and make it their own. There are dozens of new characters in Bloomsbury Girls from several different countries, and audiobook narration was going to require a female voice of the highest training and caliber. When I learned that British stage and screen actress Juliet Stevenson, CBE, had agreed to narrate, I knew that my story could not be in better hands, and I so hope you enjoy reading or listening to it.
Warmest regards,
Natalie
BOOK DESCRIPTION
ADVANCE PRAISE
BOOK TRAILER
READ AN EXCERPT
The Tyrant was Alec McDonough, a bachelor in
his early thirties who ran the New Books, Fiction & Art Department on the
ground floor of Bloomsbury Books. He had read literature and fine art at the
University of Bristol and been planning on a career in something big—Vivien
accused him of wanting to run a small colony—when the war had intervened.
Following his honourable discharge in 1945, Alec had joined the shop on the
exact same day as Vivien. “By an hour ahead. Like a dominant twin,” she would
quip whenever Alec was rewarded with anything first.
From the start Alec and Vivien were rivals,
and not just for increasing control of the fiction floor. Every editor that
wandered in, every literary guest speaker, was a chance for them to have access
to the powersthatbe in the publishing industry. As two secretly aspiring
writers, they had each come to London and taken the position at Bloomsbury
Books for this reason. But they were also both savvy enough to know that the
men in charge—from the rigid Mr. Dutton and then-head-of-fiction Graham
Kingsley, to the restless Frank Allen and crusty Master Mariner Scott—were whom
they first needed to please. Alec had a clear and distinct advantage when it came
to that. Between the tales of wartime service, shared grammar schools, and past
cricket-match victories, Vivien grew quickly dismayed at her own possibility
for promotion.
Sure enough, within weeks Alec had quickly
entrenched himself with both the long-standing general manager, Herbert Dutton,
and his right-hand man, Frank Allen. By 1948, upon the retirement of Graham
Kingsley, Alec had ascended to the post of head of fiction, and within the year
had added new books and art to his oversight—an achievement which Vivien still
referred to as the Annexation.
She had been first to call him the Tyrant; he
called her nothing at all. Vivien’s issues with Alec ranged from the titles
they stocked on the shelves, to his preference for booking events exclusively
with male authors who had served in war. With her own degree in literature from
Durham (Cambridge, her dream university, still refusing in 1941 to graduate
women), Vivien had rigorously informed views on the types of books the fiction department
should carry. Not surprisingly, Alec disputed these views.
“But he doesn’t even read women,” Vivien
would bemoan to Grace, who would nod back in sympathy while trying to remember
her grocery list before the bus journey home. “I mean, what—one Jane Austen on
the shelves? No Katherine Mansfield. No Porter. I mean, I read
that Salinger story in The New Yorker he keeps going on about:
shell-shocked soldiers and children all over the place, and I don’t see what’s
so masculine about that.”
Unlike Vivien, Grace did not have much time
for personal reading, an irony her husband often pointed out. But Grace did not
work at the shop for the books. She worked there because the bus journey into
Bloomsbury took only twenty minutes, she could drop the children off at school
on the way, and she could take the shop newspapers home at the end of the day.
Grace had been the one to suggest that they also carry import magazines, in
particular The New Yorker. Being so close to the British Museum and the
theatre district, Bloomsbury Books received its share of wealthy American
tourists. Grace was convinced that such touches from home would increase their
time spent browsing, along with jazz music on the wireless by the front cash,
one of many ideas that Mr. Dutton was still managing to resist.
Vivien and Alec had manned the ground floor of the shop together for over four years, circling each other within the front cash counter like wary lions inside a very small coliseum. The square, enclosed counter had been placed in the centre of the fiction department in an effort to contain an old electrical outlet box protruding from the floor. Mr. Dutton could not look at this eyesore without seeing a customer lawsuit for damages caused by accidental tripping. Upon his promotion to general manager in the 1930s, Dutton had immediately ordained that the front cash area be relocated and built around the box.
This configuration had turned out to be of
great benefit to the staff. One could always spot a customer coming from any direction,
prepare the appropriate response to expressions ranging from confused to
hostile, and even catch the surreptitious slip of an unpurchased book into a
handbag. Other bookshops had taken note of Bloomsbury Books’ ground-floor
design and started refurbishing their own. The entire neighbourhood was, in
this way, full of spies. Grace and Vivien were not the only two bookstore
employees out and about, checking on other stores’ window displays. London was
starting to boom again, after five long years of postwar rationing and
recovery, and new bookshops were popping up all over. Bloomsbury was home to
the British Museum, the University of London, and many famous authors past and
present, including the prewar circle of Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton
Strachey. This made the district a particularly ideal location for readers,
authors, and customers alike.
And
so, it was here, on a lightly snowing day on the second of January, 1950, that
a young Evie Stone arrived, Mr. Allen’s trading card in one pocket, and a
one-way train ticket to London in the other.
Excerpt courtesy of St. Martin’s Press, New York. Copyright © 2022 by Natalie Jenner. All rights reserved.
LISTEN TO AN EXCERPT FROM THE AUDIOBOOK
Narrated by esteemed stage and screen actress Juliet Stevenson, you can enjoy the full unabridged edition of Bloomsbury Girls.
“Stevenson delivers the satisfying triumph at the end with perfect polish.” —AudioFile Magazine.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natalie Jenner is the author of the
instant international bestseller The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury
Girls. A Goodreads Choice Award runner-up for historical fiction and
finalist for best debut novel, The Jane Austen Society was
a USA Today and #1 national bestseller and has been sold for
translation in twenty countries. Born in England and raised in Canada, Natalie
has been a corporate lawyer, career coach and, most recently, an independent
bookstore owner in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two
rescue dogs. Visit her website to learn more.
2 comments:
I'm looking forward to this book.
denise
Thanks for sharing the excerpt. The the fact the the story is set in a bookstore was like catnip for me!
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