Tony Smith
Tony Smith began bookselling at Hall’s Bookshop in Tunbridge Wells during vacations from reading English at university, and moved to Heywood Hill’s Bookshop in Mayfair in 1995. He’s lucky enough to live only 7 minutes from the shop, if he’s riding his Brompton bicycle and the wind’s in the right direction.
Current reading
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (Pb, £8.99)
In an unnamed city by the sea during the Emergency in India in the mid-1970s, four lives become intertwined. Until reading this, I had not been a fan of the Great Indian Novel, but this had me hooked very quickly. Awful things happen to nice people, but somehow it grips and doesn’t let go until the end. As Mistry writes, ‘You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.’
A favourite
Ed. Neil Astley, Staying Alive (Pb, £10.95)
Neil Astley has been in charge of the poetry publisher Bloodaxe for more than thirty years, helping (with Carcanet and Faber) to keep poetry publishing alive in this country. Like Faber’s The Rattle Bag, compiled by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, this anthology has become a bestseller and deservedly so. Arranged in thematic sections (Roads and Journeys, Growing Up, War and Peace, etc) with lucid introductions, the poems and poets are juxtaposed to strike sparks off each other. So successful has the anthology been that a second, Being Alive, has been published (also available), created from suggestions made by readers.