Shelfies #59: Colin Brush

The shelf

This shelf is part of a bespoke corner bookcase that occupies the smallest room in the house (what my youngest child, too young to appreciate the irony, signposted the ‘secret libery’). The loo had been removed long before we moved in to create some storage space. We just took the door off and added the shelves. Since it is the latest bookshelf in the house, it is the one with the most space, where recently read acquisitions or rereads tend to accumulate before they are subject to occasional fits of pruning.

The books

Since the year 2000, I have been a copywriter at Penguin Books (now Penguin Random House – still disappointed the merger did not result in the creation of Randy Penguin; c’est la vie) in the UK and I am also the company’s copywriting trainer, specialising in book jacket copy. This means that I cannot pick up a book, hoping to be enticed into reading it, without also critically examining the blurb to determine what structural shape (yes, I believe blurbs have shapes: triangles, hourglasses etc) has been used or what kind of reader the writer thinks they are talking to. The following books are keepers both for their contents and their blurbs of note.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

I teach using the copy for this book about the world of fungi. I believe it is a great example of the three-part argument (three-part structures – beginning, middle, end – are a kind of Platonic ideal for the blurb writer). In this case it uses three sentences to make increasingly intriguing statements, each one built on the preceding sentence, to keep expanding the book's scope and, ultimately, argue for the need to read it. You start the blurb thinking you’re holding a book about mushrooms but by the end it is promising a mind-altering journey that will help you understand all life on Earth. Starting small and ending big, this blurb is also triangle shaped.

The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

This ancient Penguin paperback features possibly my favourite opening line to a blurb ever: 'Robert Forester is a nice guy, but he's also a prowler.' I trip over that line every time I read it. It stops me in my tracks. Nice guys are NOT prowlers. Yet here is Highsmith’s blurb writer insisting he's both. How do we resolve this troubling paradox? We must read the book. Could you use this line today? Prowler has fallen out of everyday use, I feel. The closest common word we might use is stalker, which partly describes Robert’s behaviour, but since stalking is both now an official crime and is, quite rightly, freighted with much more specifically negative connotations than prowler ever carried, I suspect most readers would be less intrigued and more repelled.

Which Lie Did I Tell?

This is here less for the blurb and more for the book’s subject (it’s also on the shelf above, so it’s kind of cheating), which is screenwriting and how to tell stories. William Goldman, despite being one of Hollywood’s most famous and successful screenwriters, was nevertheless subject to endless rewrites as well as suffering the ignominy of being dropped from projects as other writers were brought on board. He makes few claims to being a brilliant original writer (watch his films, read The Princess Bride, he is) but what he does argue he has a talent for is finding a story’s structure, the way of telling the tale. He means finding its shape or backbone. This is key to the blurb writer’s craft. To retell a story, you first need to understand how that story works and then you need to find a new way into it as you pitch it in fifty to two hundred words.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

This is one of mine. Evaristo’s Booker Prize winning novel features twelve characters over twelve entwined stories. Pitching story collections, even those that are novels, is every blurb writer’s nightmare. Do you focus on one story, or mention several? It rarely comes across as more than the sum of its parts, in my experience. Here, I tried something different. I didn’t show, I told. Up top I made two bold declarative statements about the book’s originality in British writing. In the middle, I explained how the book worked: this is what you’re going to get. And, lastly, I pitched it as well as I could manage as being a novel very much about how we live now, ie squarely in Booker territory. Isn’t that what prize winner novels are supposed to do? Find new ways of telling our story.

Busman’s (bookman’s?) Holiday Reads

Another slight cheat. The five titles topping off the middle and right piles (top 2 and 3, respectively) are the books I read on my summer holiday. Why did I choose them? I had read books by Butler, Catton and Enriquez before and I knew I would not be disappointed. The Kuang everyone had been talking about. I wanted to be part of that conversation. The Lakshminarayan (no stranger to Shelfie’s editors, I discovered in the acknowledgements) had been well reviewed and shortlisted for the Clarke Award last year. As a result, I had no need to read the blurbs on any of them before purchasing; I was always going to read them. It is a great reminder to me that people buy books for multiple reasons, and the blurb is only one of them. George Orwell said good writing should be clear, like a pane of glass. The best blurbs are invisible so that only the book is seen.

Colin Brush was born in Scotland and raised on the Channel Island of Jersey. After studying geology in Glasgow, he moved to London and started working in the book trade. Over the last quarter century, he has written the cover copy for over 5,000 books. He lives with his partner and their daughters on the southeast coast of England, a few miles from Dungeness, the sea-shaken wilderness that is the inspiration for his first science fiction murder mystery Exo, out from Diversion Books in November (US and UK). He posts about writing and copy as colinthecopywriter at his website, on Bluesky and Instagram.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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