MacLehose marks 10th anniversary with 'adventurous reading' promotion

MacLehose Press is celebrating turning 10 this year with a 10-month promotion in bookshops and libraries that aims to help readers make fresh discoveries in international fiction.

The Year of Adventurous Reading launches this month and will run until November, focusing on 10 “key” titles in the MacLehose Press canon, one per month. Bookshops and libraries signing up to the campaign will receive point-of-sale material for whichever titles they choose to promote, including book club discussion points, further reading suggestions, bookmarks and postcards, and short pieces about each book by the author, editor and translator.

Dominic Smith, field sales director, said the 10 books “perfectly showcase the breadth and quality of the imprint’s publishing over these years”. Featured titles are: in February, Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes, translated by Jamie Bulloch (Germany); in March, An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy (India); in April, The President’s Gardens by Muhsin al-Ramli, translated by Luke Leafgren (Iraq); in May, The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, translated by Lloyd Jones (Wales); in June, A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava (USA); in July, An Englishman in Madrid by Eduardo Mendoza, translated by Nick Caistor (Spain); in August, Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore (France); in September, The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, translated by Sam Taylor (Switzerland); in October, The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting, translated by Paul Russell Garrett (Norway); and in November, The Bickford Fuse by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk (Russia).

Bethan Ferguson, marketing director, said: “We hope that readers and bookshops will want to read the whole list, but the promotion is designed to be flexible. Bookshops and readers can dip in when they want to, promoting the books that particularly appeal to them. Either way, we hope that they’ll join us to discover new voices, stories and fresh ideas.”

MacLehose Press launched in January 2008 with three books, one of which was Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Since then, Christopher MacLehose and associate publisher Katharina Bielenberg have published more than 200 books translated from 23 languages, including Icelandic, Catalan, Welsh and Estonian. In 2014, the MacLehose Press joined Hachette UK.