If you’re an editor, you scan the Books of the Year round-ups not just for the books you’ve published or Christmas present ideas, but also for books you turned down. If there is a book in the round-ups or bestseller lists that you rejected, you hope none of your colleagues will remember your long, passionate explanation in the editorial meeting of why no one would ever want to read about Cromwell, Pacific Northwest vampires, reluctant fundamentalists or Harvard symbologists …

Then there are those books which never landed on your submission pile and so you can envy and admire them from afar, guilt and anxiety free. The books below are of this variety – some of the non-Faber books I wish I’d published this year – call it a retrospective wish list.

Direct Red

The non-fiction book I most wish I’d published is Gabriel Weston’s Direct Red. Weston is a young British surgeon and this – a memoir of becoming and being a surgeon – is her first book. For me the book immediately places her alongside Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks, my favourite medical writers. She explores every aspect of being a surgeon, from making mistakes to fancying a patient to the complicated sexual and hierarchical politics of hospitals, in beautiful, spare, shockingly honest prose.

Dewey the Cat

My mother is a cat-loving librarian. So I have to include another memoir, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, on my list. It’s the true story of a cat who was abandoned in the library drop-box in a poor Iowa town, rescued by the librarian, named Dewey (as in decimal) and eventually became the town mascot. Everyone in the town rallied around Dewey and the library, and they all became cat-loving, library-card-toting, altogether better people: my mother’s dream come true.

American Wife

I’m cheating a bit with this next choice: Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife was supposed to be published this year but was rushed out at the end of 2008 to coincide with the American election. The novel is a fictional account of the life of Laura Bush (another librarian) but Sittenfeld is such a breathtaking writer that I’m convinced it’s all completely true. Sittenfeld is wonderful on those moments in life when you know you should be feeling one way but your emotions run off in an unexpected direction.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The most fun I’ve had all year has been reading the first two Stieg Larsson novels, and so I wish I’d published his third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, even though I haven’t read it yet (I’m saving it for Christmas).

Too Much Happiness

Finally, who wouldn’t want to have published the inevitably amazing new story collection from Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness?

This Bleeding City

Throughout university I dreamed about moving to London. Forever looking ahead, rarely pausing to savour bright moments, I raced forward. We all did. When Edinburgh winds pulled the scarf tightly around my throat, sent Vero nestling to the warmth of my arms, bent Henry low, shielding his streaming eyes with bony fingers, we urged ourselves onward, against the wind, towards London. The only friends we encouraged were those with London flats and London lives; we lived for the Easyjet flights on Friday nights, fluttering southward in our evening dress, champagne spilling from plastic cups as we landed.

In the headlong rush towards experience, we blasted ourselves away from our youth, towards a future of wrinkled disappointment. But no one stopped to tell us that we should be sucking it all in, searing the images onto our memories, baking the emotions into our hearts. Because soon it would be all that we had.

Welcome to the ruthless world of high finance! This Bleeding City is the debut novel from Alex Preston, who (when not writing) is Global Head of Trading at a major City firm.

As Monocle says, ‘It’s a timely book from a young writer; putting a conscience – albeit an often objectionable one – to the bull-market bullshitters, showing the pill-popping, soft-pink underbelly of a legion of red braces.’

We publish This Bleeding City in March 2010. Find out more about Alex on his website.

Published in Summer ‘09, Granta 106: Fiction Special included an extract from Paul Auster’s new novel, Invisible. Granta Editor John Freeman visited the author in New York and recorded an exclusive interview.

Granta Paul Auster Interview from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

Granta 108: Chicago is now available in shops and directly from the Granta website.

Stolen from Lucy Knisley’s great blog.

Downloading Optimism

‘I am constantly amazed at how much stranger science is than science fiction.’ - Marcus Chown

Marcus Chown’s books include The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You (which the Guardian called a ‘limousine among popular science vehicles’ (!)), and now We Need to Talk about Kelvin. He has the great knack of being able to make science both popular and fun – which is probably why he’s recently been appearing on the BBC4 show ‘It’s Only a Theory’:

His new book We Need to Talk about Kelvin is in shops now, and to mark publication he’s embarked on what we think is a first for a Faber author – a guest-blogging tour. Here’s where you can find him:

22 November: Chez Aspie – D J Kirkby’s Blog

1 December: Top 4 Bonkers things about the universe | physics.org

2 December: David Maybury | Blog » Marcus Chown | making your head hurt with logic

6 December: Sue Guiney: Writing Life

7 December: » Interview with Marcus Chown ~ We’re talking about Kelvin

9 December: Gaskella

11 December: The Book of Lost Nights

15 December: teen librarian

15 January: Super Collider Weekly

[Many more legs in pipeline ...]

And when he’s not ‘on tour’, you can always find Marcus on Twitter.

Petina Gappah

Petina Gappah made a welcome visit to the UK and the Faber offices yesterday ahead of last night’s Guardian First Book Award ceremony. The champagne flowed, first here in Bloomsbury, and then later at the Guardian’s new offices as Petina’s book of stories, An Elegy for Easterly, was named the winner.

Claire Armitstead, the Guardian’s literary editor and also Chair of the Judges, called the book a ‘humane and disarmingly funny mosaic of life in Zimbabwe’.

Faber published the book back in April this year, but we took it on – a joint effort by Faber’s Lee Brackstone and Faber Inc.’s Mitzi Angel – back in 2008. It’s great to see something that initially caused so much excitement go on to achieve such success, and hopefully now that the stories are available in paperback, it’ll go on to find the wide readership that it so deserves.

As Petina mentions in the clip above, her debut novel – The Book of Memory – is just over a year away. In the meantime, here’s Petina Gappah reading one of her stories – At the Sound of the Last Post – and an interview we recorded in April.

We were lucky enough to be amongst the first to see the brand new site from the team at the Bush Theatre and are delighted to see it’s now officially launched.

Bushgreen is groundbreaking – it’s a social networking site for theatre fans, writers and practitioners. As they say – ‘a beacon of best practice, a platform for new writing, and a hub for upcoming talent’. Plays can be uploaded, downloaded, previewed, rated and shared.

And not just new talent – you’ll find a number of current Faber playwrights already on there, with all sorts of extra material. Here’s a great interview with Neil LaBute.