In April 2008 I was sent a manuscript: it was to be the launch book of a new hardcover imprint, Amy Einhorn Books, at Penguin USA called The Help. It seemed an unlikely book for the British market, a women’s novel told in the voices of- three women in Mississippi in 1962. Those Southern voices would really grate with a British audience, wouldn’t they?
Or would they? Because I couldn’t stop reading. The story was completely compelling – full of suspense, full of pent up anger and empathy for what it was like to be the black ‘help’; it was also very funny, with scenes of real slapstick. The characters were so well drawn – not just the major characters of Aibileen and Minnie, the two maids, or the misfit white girl, Skeeter, (who comes home from college and, while searching for the family maid who has disappeared, takes up their cause), but also the minor characters: the villainous queen of the Junior League bridge party; the beautiful young, white trash wife struggling to fit in, Skeeter’s bewildered conventional parents. I read on and on and on…
And so, totally gripped, I tentatively asked my colleagues to read it too, and to my delight, everyone agreed with me. Actually: more than agreed. They completely took this book to their bosoms. I bought it, and the campaign began. It was quite simple: if you could get people to read this book, they didn’t just like it, they LOVED it.
So we bought the book to publish in the UK and very early on when BBC Radio 4 bought it to make a two week drama serial I began to have that feeling I last had with Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a kind of frisson that a book is really, really going to take off. By the time we published last summer, the book was beginning (after six months) to take serious root in the USA where it has gone on to sell two million copies.
Our own publication has been great too: it’s just a book that everyone who reads wants to recommend to someone else. And it felt wonderful when I was able to call Kitty Stockett last week with news of her bestseller list status. Her answer all the way from Atlanta: ‘Holy Cow !’
Juliet Annan,
Publishing Director, Fig Tree
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