Surprising neighbour
It's great when you walk into a bookshop to look for your latest cover, and see it up there on the shelves. I think every author gets a buzz from the idea that, at last, people might be about to read the book you've just spent a year or more working on.
Novels will often be in the alphabetical fiction section, of course, or in "new fiction", but in railway stations and airports, the shelves are much more random, so you never know where you might turn up. I once saw the French translation of my book about Napoleon next to one on Jesus. Rather apt, I thought.
Yesterday, though, I spotted Merde in Europe on the bookshelves for the first time, next to a (sadly) familiar face. Given that my novel is about the possibility of a European meltdown, it came as something of a shock. But I decided to leave them together. It's pretty appropriate, really – just look at the merde he created in Europe.
