Cocker and Hadley headline Vintage 2022 Spring and Summer Preview

Jarvis Cocker, Julian Barnes and the founders of the Everyday Racism project Naomi and Natalie Evans were among those headlining the Vintage 2022 Spring and Summer Preview. 

Hosted by journalist Paula Akpan, the virtual event took place on 10th November, featuring around a dozen authors discussing inspirations behind their upcoming books. Hannah Telfer, Vintage m.d., described the showcase as featuring “irresistible debut voices and established Vintage names that we’re so thrilled to return to”.

Screenwriter and critic Gabrielle Zevin talked about her novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is due out in July 2022 and already being developed into a film. “It’s about love, art, video games and time,” she said. “It’s the story of two childhood friends and fellow gamers, Sam Mazer and Sadie Green... while still in college they bootstrap a video game and against the odds it becomes a blockbuster. It’s a book about lifechanging success and everything that comes after success: the hard breaks, the disappointment, the occasional tragedy.” 

Debut author Susan Stokes-Chapman introduced her novel, Pandora, which she described as a “loose re-interpretation of the Greek myth, Pandora’s Box, set in the antiquities scene of Georgian London”. It follows a young woman, trapped in poverty, whose life is thrown into disarray when a mysterious shipment containing an ancient Grecian vase is delivered to her uncle. 

Novelist Tessa Hadley discussed Free Love which is set in 1967, following a 40-year-old woman, Phyllis, who makes a momentous decision when believing a young man has recoiled from her at a dinner party. “This opens up a sort of dismay inside her at being 40 and having always been an attractive woman and suddenly sensing that a young man might recoil from you and that you might be growing old and unloveable and unwantable,” she said. It compares an older world of “suburban respectability and behaving well” and the newer world of radical politics in the 1960s, “with this fracture written across a woman’s body", Hadley added. 

There was also a spread of non-fiction with the Evans sisters discussing The Mixed Race Experience. “It’s something we wished we had when we were growing up and that our parents and family friends could have had to better understand us," they said. "After starting the platform Everyday Racism and seeing all the conversation about race really blow up all over the world we started to realise there was still a lot of language based around the binaries of Back and white with very little nuance and I think for some people that has left them wondering where they fit in.”  

Meanwhile Cocker explained how his memoir Good Pop, Bad Pop was inspired by picking through the debris of his loft. “I’ve written songs for most my life but this is the first time I’ve written a full-length book,” he told attendees.

“The idea behind the book... it’s based around a loft... it got stuffed with things over the years. There were also things from my childhood from when I first moved to London from Sheffield. 

“What I found there was actually a life story was lying around there in pieces. If I could just go through the stuff in this loft and put things in the right order than I could tell the story.” 

Other presenting authors included Vesna Goldsworthy, Ajay Chowdhury, Sheila Heti, Warsan Shire, Dipo Faloyin, Oded Galor, Christie Watson, Mya-Rose Craig, Claire Ratinon and Vesna Goldsworthy. 

Around 250 guests tuned into the event and a goodie bag was sent to the first 100 guests to RSVP featuring advanced bound proof copies of French Braid by Anne Tyler, Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch, Shire’s Bless The Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head as well as exclusive samplers from other authors along with refreshments such as Cotswold Gin and British Snack Co Popcorn.