Book news: Archer tops bestseller list, eats lamb chop

The redoubtable Jeffrey Archer reports from his ceaseless publicity drive, telling us that his latest novel, A Prisoner Of Birth (regular readers may remember his thorough documenting of the quirksome production process), has ascended to number one in the Australian bestseller list. News Hour is sad to hear that the celebrated author was said to have marked the news ‘sat in my hotel room alone…with a lamb chop’. Such were the pressures of his selfless promotional tour that the author confessed he ‘lay down…at 9pm for a brief rest, and didn’t wake until 3am’. Tough times indeed.

The disgraced peer has an excellent track record in Australia, having previously sold out two print runs of his tome Sons Of Fortune in the country. The book was described in its own publicity as a: “powerful tale of twins separated by fate and re-united by destiny” and did well despite Archer being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure at the time of its release, and so unable to embark on the usual carousel of book signings, interviews and promotional junkets that climax in the solo consumption of a lamb chop. (Could Archer have been echoing a previous, enforced solo dinner in this recent celebration?)

Without wishing to offend, we wonder if the collective consciousness of Australia’s once convict-heavy populace created an instant empathy between the book-buying public and the imprisoned Archer.

A Prisoner of errors: checking continues on Archer’s ‘best ever’ novel

With scarcely more than four months to go before the release date for A Prisoner Of Birth, the correction process for Jeffrey Archer’s new book rumbles on. The disgraced peer wonders at the ‘strange and wonderful mind’ of his line editor, who pointed out some factual inconsistences in the latest draft of his work. How strange that a convicted perjurer could let such discrepancies creep in.

It is even odder when you consider his apparently perfectionist tendencies with regard to the cover – no less than 41 designs were rejected during the process (the final is displayed on his blog). The artistic classes are a strange and wonderful bunch with a rhyme and reason all their own.

Peer review: Archer’s latest work is ‘best ever’, claims Archer

Readers keen to devour the latest work by disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer will be happy to know that he has at last completed the Herculean task of correcting his page proofs. This task, he informs us, has taken an epic 50 hours, or ‘6 minutes a page’ – and now the book is out of his hands and winging its way toward a release date in March.

Cynical readers might suggest this delay is to allow a little ‘extra tweaking’, even after the tome has passed under Lord Archer’s forensic eye – while those enamoured of the great man’s talent might imagine that, so vast is the demand for his work, the sheer scale of the print run is such that it must be begun now, a full five months before release. Who can say?

One thing we can be certain of: it is his best yet. As the author himself claims, in a moment of unashamed modesty: ‘I am in no doubt A Prisoner Of Birth is the best piece of work I have ever done.’

(Cynical readers might want to check the original post, where the ‘is’ after Birth has been left italicised, presumably to lend a deliberate emphasis.)