My London Book Fair: Sarah Braybrooke

My first LBF was in 2015. I spent the days getting lost in Olympia and the nights sneaking into parties I had not been invited to! Not much has changed.

I very much think IRL fairs are important to the industry. I love meeting international editors, agents and rights managers and it feels particularly significant to be able to welcome overseas contacts to London post-Covid and post-Brexit. As Ithaka Press is a brand new imprint, it’s especially useful to be able to sit down and talk about the kinds of titles I’m looking for. These days it’s comparatively rare to buy a book “at” a book fair, but I did acquire two during Frankfurt last year, so you never know…

Ithaka has had a lot of international interest in the run-up to LBF with A Small, Stubborn Town, Andrew Harding’s suspenseful account of how a community of Ukrainians banded together over a few pivotal days to thwart Russian invaders. It’s full of beautifully rendered, memorable characters and manages to deliver a masterclass on resistance in 160 taut pages. There are also two projects in translation that I’m really excited about. Being an Oak is the internationally bestselling biography of a 240-year-old tree, by biodiversity expert Laurent Tillon (translated by Frank Wynne). The Eighth House is an unputdownable memoir about murder and motherhood by Swedish writer Linda Segtnan, with Elizabeth Clark Wessel translating.

Mick Jagger turned up to an LBF party I was once at, which was unexpected, but my favourite events are usually smaller and less starry than that. In 2016, I spontaneously went for drinks with a couple of publishers I had bumped into at the fair. Years later, we are close friends and industry confidantes.

It’s always a pleasure to see US agents and to catch up with European publishers about what is happening in their markets. It’s been a difficult few years globally, and although many social and political trends span continents, they are expressed in different ways across cultures. I’m always interested in how the public conversations around technology, science, politics and history are changing. And, of course, I’m hungry to learn about any ideas that international writers have regarding how to tackle the enormous challenges we are facing.

Every year I help organise a dinner at House of Ho on Percy Street, and it’s one of my favourite nights of the year. The food is excellent—and it tastes even better after a week subsisting on coffee and dry sandwiches at the fair.

My LBF tips? Stay hydrated, pack a snack, never discuss more than three books per meeting and don’t wait for people to invite you to things—organise your own dinners and drinks.