NPD Books’ Kristen McLean said Seuss titles always got a boost this particular week, but this year sales were triple what they were in the same week in 2020. In the NPD bestseller list for ″⁣juvenile fiction″⁣, she said there were six Dr Seuss titles in the top 10 compared with four last year.

The return of Chloe Hooper
Chloe Hooper’s next book of non-fiction is very different from her last. That was The Arsonist, you will recall, about the man who set fires in the Latrobe Valley on Black Saturday in 2009. Bedtime Story bounces off the cancer diagnosis her partner, writer Don Watson, received. (He’s in remission now.) How would she explain what was happening to her young sons?

According to Scribner, which will publish the book next year, “In Bedtime Story, Hooper explores how to talk with children about death, this most taboo of subjects, in ways that won’t leave them afraid of life. Part memoir, part literary quest, Hooper examines how mortality is explored in children’s literature from the Brothers Grimm to J.K. Rowling, and how the writers’ own lives and losses informed their work.” Hooper has followed her publisher at Penguin Random House, Ben Ball, to Simon & Schuster’s literary imprint.

The Ishiguro influencers
There will be two Ishiguro novels on bookshop shelves soon, from Nobel winner Kazuo and his daughter Naomi. His latest, Klara and the Sun, came out last month; her first, Common Ground, is out in Australia in 10 days.

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She was asked in Britain’s Daily Telegraph during an interview involving both Ishiguros what sort of influence he had been.

“Mostly in me just wanting to do it in the first place,” she replied. “The idea of sitting in a room in silence runs absolutely contrary to my nature. But having a writer as a parent gives you a model for what books can do: they give you a voice that carries on into the world; it’s a way of emotionally communicating across all sorts of boundaries. To see the magic of that as a child is amazing.”

And he found his daughter had a surprising influence on him. “I have to say that I have been influenced a lot, not just by the fact we had a child, but by Naomi and her influences. You start to see things through her eyes and become open to different ways of telling stories, to different genres.

“Part of the reason I was able to move into sci-fi in Never Let Me Go was because I had a young daughter who was incredibly enthusiastic about these things. Klara and the Sun is actually quite influenced by those illustrated hardback books for three-year-olds. In a way it’s my flirtation with that genre.″⁣

Kazuo Ishiguro is a guest at Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au).