Show 7: The venerable bookshop's Sales Manager on his top read...
Hatchards, booksellers since 1797, is the oldest surviving bookshop in London, whose customers have included some of Britain's greatest political, social and literary figures - from Queen Charlotte, Disraeli and Wellington to Kipling, Wilde and Lord Byron.
Roger Katz is Sales Manager of the venerable institution, and his book club recommendation is Suite Francais by Irene Nemirovsky.
“This book was the best-selling new novel last year when it came out in hardback. That’s quite remarkable: it was written 60 years ago, in 1942 when she had fled Paris and was living in the French countryside. Nemirovsky was the daughter of a Jewish banker from Ukraine. She moved with her husband to Finland following the Russian Revolution and then, in 1919, moved to Paris. She fled to the French countryside where she was picked up by the Vichy police and sent straight to Auschwitz. A month later, she was dead of typhoid.
For the next 60 years, the book lay in a small leather case which had been given to her two small daughters. What were thought to be her diaries proved to be two great novellas. The title refers to her intention that this would be a suite of books – like movements in music. What you have in the last par of the book is an appendix where she writes out what she it thinking of doing and how the stories will follow on from one another.
Everyone considers the book to be a masterpiece, and like all great writers’ masterpieces, it is accessible. Short books; great stories; beautiful style, and the question, and the question you should ask yourself is how come a book written over 60 years ago is still so modern and still so relevant to what happens today?”