"It is as accomplished, as entertaining and as funny as anything its author has done" - DJ Taylor

Some books are written. Others, at great cost and against all advice, are published.

George Harpole and Emma Foxberrow have returned home from an ill-fated educational enterprise in deepest Africa. Just as they settle back into the same old mundane churn a new opportunity presents itself. They set up as publishers with very little money, an unpromising back-list, rogue writers to corral but no lack of ambition.

A tender, mischievous tribute to the stubborn pleasure of making books and the small independent press raging against corporate behemoths and the literary establishment.

"Books concern printers, publishers, sales reps, booksellers, proof-readers, professors, illustrators, indexers, critics, text editors, literary editors, librarians, book-reviewers and bookbinders and book-keepers, translators, typographers, Oxfam fund raisers, whole university departments of soothsayers, manufacturers of thread and glue, auctioneers, lumberjacks, starving mice, wolves howling at the doors of authors of first-novels, the Post Office's book-bashing machine minder, religious bonfire fuel suppliers and libel lawyers. So, by and large, this is what this book is about. It tries to answer Mrs Widmerpool's sister's alarming enquiry at George Harpole's trial: "What are books? Where do they come from?" Her "Where do they go?" is unanswerable - except, quite often to the head" - JL Carr