Editors’ Envy

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?