About once a month I get together with my old friend Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe. Henry and I were at university together (he was much cleverer and more diligent than I) and we’ve remained friends since. The tagline for Scribe is ‘We publish books that matter’ and that’s a pretty fair assessment. During our get togethers we generally find ourselves talking about the book business, as you would expect. For the past eight months, Henry has kept me apprised of the progress of what he terms, with a chuckle, ‘the little book’.

The Eighth Life (for Brilka) is, in fact, 944 pages long. First published in Germany in 2014, it became a bestseller there. Scribe subsequently bought world English language rights and will publish in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. this month. Translating and editing such an extensive work is a major task in itself and two translators, Ruth Martin and Charlotte Collins, worked on the book. It’s by Nino Haratischvili, a Georgian writer living in Berlin, and she tells the tale of eight members of one Georgian family from the death of the Tsar until the ’70s. As my colleague, Alison Huber, recently wrote: ‘It’s compelling and immersive and since starting it a week ago I can’t wait to get home each night so I can pick up where I left off.’ As a bookseller, sometimes you get a sniff that something is going to capture people’s imagination and I get that with this book! Read the review here.

In a different conversation about books, after hearing about the organisations the Readings Foundation supports and deciding they like what we do, Sonja Hood and Trish Boyce came to us with an idea to raise some money for the Foundation. Sonja and Trish are mad fans of the Booker Prize and each year they read the shortlist and try to guess the winner. Last year, they organised a night with a group of friends on the eve of the Booker Prize winner announcement to get together and argue about the different books – few guessed the winner successfully, but they had a great deal of fun! Would we, they asked, like them to help us organise a similar event for this year so that part of the proceeds could go to the Readings Foundation?

Of course we thought it a great idea. We booked Tolarno Eating House in St Kilda for the dinner and asked Jane Sullivan the journalist, critic, judge and author to take part and give us an insider’s perspective on book-prize judging. If you’d like to join us for some Booker Prize discussions and prizes on Monday 14 October, you can book here. I’m looking forward to it.

And one final conversation snippet for the month: I bumped into author Sophie Cunningham the other day and she said ‘I’ve just come from Government House.’ ‘Again?’ I asked – we’d been to a publishing function there earlier in the year. ‘I went for this!’ she replied, and produced a beautiful, gold Order of Australia. Sophie is so well deserving of this award as an author, as an editor and as a tireless campaigner for authors, particularly through her work on the Stella Prize. Congratulations Sophie!