A bookshop across the pond

Two books with September publication dates in the United States, featured in the post Headlights on September, are already available for purchase  at the London Review Bookshop online – or at 14 Bury Place, in London’s Bloomsbury district, should you be heading that way:  Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd

I recently subscribed to the London Review of Books and discovered the availability in an advertisement for the shop. The discovery comes with a bit of a ‘duh!’ factor, considering the books are by U.K. authors.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England in 1960. He became a household literary name with the novel The Remains of the Day (1989) about an aging British butler. It won Ishiguro the Booker Prize and became a movie staring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. It’s also his first novel with a British protagonist set in England – his two previous novels (1982, 1986) feature Japanese protagonists.

Kiberd is an Irish writer born in Dublin 1951. He’s a professor of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin. The Irish Times describes him as, “an individual given to responding with his heart, as well as his intellect.”

Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us has been published in the U.K. with a slightly different subtitle from what we’ll see in the U.S.: “The Art of Everyday Living” versus “The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece.”

Also of note: A. S. Byatt’s new novel The Children’s Book, with a U.S. publication date in October, is also already published across the pond.

Here’s what the London Review Bookshop writes about it:

“A.S. Byatt’s latest novel, ‘easily the best thing [she] has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece, Possession (1990)’ according to Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times, is a panoramic four-family saga set between 1895 and the end of the First World War.” (Read more.)

All this in case you can’t wait for publication of the U.S. editions. (I couldn’t.) Keep in mind eagerness costs more money. Delivery takes 7 working days, so they tell me. Not bad.