Tangible Proofs

See what I did there?

All sorts of things happening here, including a guest appearance by my right foot. For the curious, the model is wearing his own slippers, Swiss Flag pattern by Giesswein.

However critical slipper couture is, though, and as deep as my love of Switzerland may be (and it’s very deep, if you’re wondering) the key thing here is the book. This is the US proof, complete with jacket design and my new author pic by the amazing Nadav Kander.

A word about that picture. In my life, my father gave me three ‘professional’ gifts: one of his pens, a table he like to work at, and - rather firmly - this author portrait. I don’t really use a pen to write, though I carry it anyway, and the lovely folding wooden table has huge sentimental value but is, for me, an impossible workstation - my feet get tangled with the legs and I get back pain from leaning over it. Which he did too, when he used it. But a session with Nadav taking a picture was an incredible experience, and now here it is on the back of a book.

This is my first opportunity to use it - Gnomon was already out when it was taken, and the Aidan Truhen/Jack Price books didn’t use my picture because I was totally anonymous in much the same way that Gandalf’s plan to sneak the hobbits into Mordor was a stroke of covert ops genius that no one could ever see coming.

Titanium Noir is also the first Nick Harkaway book I’ve written since inhabiting the mad skin of Aidan for two novels’ worth of life. So it’s different from what went before, and yet also still mine: my brain, my obsessions, my writing. I’m really looking forward to people actually getting to read it, and simultaneously terrified. As ever, I’m trying something I haven’t done before and I have no idea how that will go.

I got the UK proofs just before Christmas, but they were earlier in the design cycle, so they have a functional text jacket rather than a mock up of the actual book.

I’d forgotten the HUGE buzz that comes with holding the proof and realising that this book will be real soon, that people will see it on shelves and carry it on their commute and drop it in the bath and spill wine on it and steal it from their friends and rescue it from the dog.

Probably not all of these things will happen to the same copy.

But… wow.

I wrote a book.