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  The idea behind the series was excellent and, based on the evidence of Angels Rising, Seppi was a powerful storyteller, but that didn’t mean Gabrijela was going to go for it. She had expressly prohibited the acquisition of any more fiction from Seppi, and even if Zach could somehow get her to read the manuscript and hope she was as blown away by it as he was, they would still have to get retailers and reviewers to take Angels Rising seriously. The world had changed irrevocably since retailers had gained access to accurate sales data, and unless they could prove that the author had done something dramatically different with his new work the initial orders of every important retailer were going to be based on Seppi’s indifferent sales record. Everyone knew an exceptional fantasy series could set the trade on fire, but Zach wasn’t known as an editor of bestselling commercial fiction – why were they going to take his word for it?

  A couple of stories that were now firmly part of publishing lore had floated into his mind as he sat up in bed thinking about how he was going to tackle the situation – the ten-year-old son of the founder of Allen & Unwin recommending that Tolkien be published; the enthusiasm of the eight-year-old daughter of the chairman of Bloomsbury getting J.K. Rowling a publishing deal after twelve publishers had turned her down. Unfortunately Angels Rising was not for kids, and it was not a debut novel. However, it had supernatural beings and perhaps he could convince his boss that angels were going to be the next big thing after wizards and vampires.

  Gabrijela Kostic was a true publisher in a profession now awash in suits. At the age of thirty she had thrown up a secure job as the youngest editorial director of one of London’s storied publishing houses to take up an offer from a Serbian compatriot to start a firm specializing in the writers of Eastern Europe. Her benefactor was jailed for fraud two years after she set up Litmus, and it looked as though she would have to fold her company, but Gabrijela was as stubborn as she was brilliant. Through the careful management of capital and her personal friendships with some of Europe’s finest writers, she kept the firm going. After one of her writers won the Nobel, her finances improved somewhat and she promptly parlayed that slight advantage into raising more funds and giving the company heft with agents and authors. By the time Zach arrived at Litmus it was among the top twelve publishing firms in London, but the trouble the industry found itself in had begun to have an effect; unless they scored a big one the Arts Council grants and occasional hits would not be enough to pull them out of trouble year after year. Litmus did not have the war chest or the backlist that the bigger and older players had, so it had to make at least half of the books it published every year count, and that was a near impossibility, despite Gabrijela’s exceptional eye for talent. They weren’t giving up, their few recognizable names kept them going, but every Litmus staffer knew that they needed a Life of Pi. Soon.

  Celebrated editors are superstars at the companies they work for. They are feted for their taste, their ability to make the work of the finest writers even better, and the role they play in launching the careers of authors who go on to become household names. The world is aware of one of the most important skills any editor worth her salt must have: the ability to nurture all the writers she publishes, for the editor is the only person with whom the writer works continuously throughout his association with his publishing company. But another equally important skill is almost never spoken about outside the profession: the ability to sell. In an industry that is entirely speculative, where decisions at every stage of the publishing process are subjective, where any mistake can wipe out the company’s tiny profit, every great editor needs to be a brilliant persuader. Each time an editor is seeking to acquire a book for her company she needs simultaneously to fall under its spell and remain detached from it, so that she is able cannily and passionately to sell it, to herself, her publisher, her sales colleagues, her marketing colleagues, and everyone in the company with a stake in the success of the book. Flogging an unsuccessful author to your skeptical colleagues is akin to raising the dead. More so, if the publisher you need to convince is someone like Gabrijela Kostic.

  When she was eight Gabrijela’s parents had fled Yugoslavia, a few years before the Prague Spring had marked the beginning of the end of the fragile peace the region had enjoyed. They came to Leeds, where her mother had family. But although the Serbian community welcomed them to the city, there was not enough to go around. Her father, who had worked for Tito’s government, could find only low-paying daily-wage jobs, and spent his time bemoaning his fate with other exiles from his homeland, while her mother, a schoolteacher, cleaned homes, took in washing, scrimped and saved. There was nothing unusual about the Kostics’ story – the standard immigrant experience, more or less – but it did invest their daughter with a very low level of tolerance for inefficiency, lack of ambition, indecisiveness, laziness, and dolts.

  She ran her editorial meetings like a sergeant major – quick, efficient, with not a lot of room for sloppy thinking or ill-prepared pitches. In a profession where long, rambling discussions are the norm, Gabrijela expected her firm’s acquisitions editors to be clear thinking and concise in their pitches. As soon as they started to waffle on pointlessly they would feel her eyes, grey as a submarine’s hull, boring into them; if they ignored that warning signal, they could expect to be shut down with very little ceremony. If Zach was going to get Seppi past her he would need a plan.

  This was easier said than done. The mystery at the heart of the publishing business, the unsolvable conundrum that every single publishing professional worries about, and the one question to which no one has the answer, is this: no one knows what books are actually going to succeed in the marketplace. Editors will use taste and skill to acquire and edit authors of quality, marketers will slavishly follow the trends du jour to package them, salesmen will brandish sales data to persuade retailers to stock them, accountants will come up with excruciatingly detailed P&Ls to show how they will turn a profit, but in the end all this masks a simple truth: unless the author has a proven track record, and has written an even better book than the one she published last year, no one in the business really knows how her book will be received. And for unknown authors or those with a less than stellar sales history the mystery deepens, threatens to be practically insoluble.

  This means that every action in the publishing sequence has a whiff of desperation about it. Editors frantically sell their colleagues further down the chain on the mythical selling points of the book they are pushing, and these fabrications get ever more elaborate and fantastical as the process unfolds. By the time the salesman is selling the book to the buyer at the retail chain, neither quite knows or believes what is being talked about – partly because the odds are they haven’t read the book but more so because they haven’t the faintest idea of whether it will work or not. Given this scenario, everyone in a position of authority is cynical about the claims made by those who need them to buy into their arguments. This is what Zach was struggling with.

  In the end, he decided to keep it simple. He would let the book speak for itself; there was nothing that could better support his conviction that Litmus should publish Angels Rising. Although Gabrijela did not like editors to read from manuscripts at editorial meetings – to her it simply meant that they hadn’t marshalled enough selling points to persuade her to approve the acquisition – this was precisely what he intended to do. He deliberately did not put the novel on the list of titles to be discussed at that week’s editorial meeting. After they had gone through the titles on the agenda, he said there was a submission that had come in at the last minute that he wanted to table. Gabrijela’s eyes had locked on to him as he nervously started to read the first paragraph of Angels Rising.

  You do not want to be touched by an angel … he began. There was no interruption, and he steadied his voice and read the next six sentences unhurriedly and stopped. Editors know when they have won a room over, and Zach knew he had caught and held the interest of every person present. The only one who knew what
he was trying to do was Maggie, the marketing manager, whom he had shared the manuscript with. She had loved it, but Gabrijela knew they were friends and he hadn’t been sure how persuasive Maggie’s support would be.

  Into the spell cast by Seppi’s writing he introduced the things that could sink his campaign – the name of the author, his dismal track record, the four books that they would need to buy. Gabrijela’s eyes gave nothing away. Maggie spoke bravely into the silence, said she had loved the book. Still nothing from the boss. Then, with her usual lack of ceremony, Gabrijela approved the acquisition. The sales director, Gareth, raised a dissenting voice, said Seppi would be a tough sell, but he wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know, and the decision stood. She set one condition: Zach couldn’t pay more than twenty thousand pounds for world rights to all four books.

  Zach waited for Toronto to wake up, and phoned his author with the news. Seppi’s response was as unemotional as ever. Zach was a bit irritated by this – if only the author knew about the hoops Zach had had to jump through to be able to make an offer. But he tamped down his annoyance and asked why Seppi had decided suddenly to write about angels. “I’m Italian,” Seppi had said, “and Catholic. Why wouldn’t I want to write books featuring angels?” He then told Zach about the catalyst that had got him started, and the devotion and commitment that had kept him working away at the project. All through the many years that he had spent writing and conceptualizing the quartet, he had kept quiet about its existence because he had wanted to finish the first book in its entirety before getting in touch with publishers. Meanwhile a friend of his had read and wanted to publish the literary novel he had written in homage to Lampedusa (he liked to work on more than one novel at a time, Seppi said, although from now on he intended to devote himself exclusively to the quartet) and that was why things had worked out as they had. Zach told him what he was prepared to pay as an advance at the very end of the conversation. There was no immediate response from Seppi and Zach’s elation began to drain away – was he going to be denied the opportunity to publish a masterpiece? Then Seppi had asked if there was anything he could do to raise the advance, he really needed the money. Unusually, for someone as stoic as he was, he had expanded on his circumstances – the vermin-infested, suburban one-room apartment on which he hadn’t paid the rent for three months and from which he was in imminent danger of being evicted; the days when he didn’t have enough money even for one proper meal and subsisted on whatever he could get from food banks and marked-down items from grocery stores; the inability to send money to his ailing mother in Palermo. Embarrassed, he cut short his litany of woe. Zach felt for his author but explained how hard he’d had to fight to be able to make even this offer; the best he could do was throw in a couple of sales bonuses. Seppi had hesitated, and then agreed.

  Angels Rising was published eight months later to modest acclaim. It won a minor award at the World Fantasy Convention and sold seven times more copies in hardback than both Seppi’s previous works combined – a grand total of 7,230 copies, although they had given away an equal number at sci-fi conventions, to various reading groups and, two weeks before publication, to random members of the public (each member of staff was given a bag of books to distribute at strategic locations – Tube stations, on buses, Costa Coffee bars, in night clubs). A major Hollywood studio bought movie rights to the first book for a tiny sum by its standards, and Zach recovered the advance from that deal alone.

  By the time the second novel, Angel Dust, featuring the Archangel Gabriel fighting the Beast and his cohorts against the background of the fall of the Roman Empire, was published (the opening battle scene against Alaric’s invading army of Visigoths still gives him goosebumps when he thinks about it), they had got better at publishing a series that was aimed outside their core market. The cover was more commercial, the author’s name and title were foil-stamped, and they had their first brush with the joys and sorrows of pushing substantial numbers of a book into the supermarkets. Half the company’s marketing budget for the year was devoted to Angel Dust – posters on the Tube, window displays, advertising in the broadsheets – Maggie was exhilarated by all the new toys she got to play with, and even Gabrijela, who rarely attended marketing meetings, got into the spirit of things. Litmus printed ten thousand copies in hardcover and to everyone’s delight the book sold double the number of copies of its predecessor. The best was yet to come. In the annual Christmas round-ups, one of the world’s most famous fantasy authors picked the Angels books as her books of the year, and said she couldn’t wait to read the third volume in the series. A fourth reprint of ten thousand copies was rushed through, and from that point onwards Litmus and Seppi were in uncharted waters.

  The title of the book was propitious in more ways than one, for angel dust was sprinkled over all the events, big and small, that took place in Zach’s life that year. The most important, trumping even the rush of publishing a writer who was on the verge of superstardom, was that he had finally begun to feel his life had settled down on the personal front. After the frantic, usually unsuccessful attempts at romance during his undergraduate days in Delhi, his love life had begun to improve, in part, he supposed, because he had stopped trying so hard. He didn’t think of the women he courted successfully as conquests – he genuinely liked most of them and thought they enriched his life in some way. Moreover, he treated whomever he was with as though she were the first woman in his life. The freight of past loves, the knowledge that her glory would rapidly dim, none of this mattered; when he was with her, everything about her was beguiling. The problem was that six weeks or six months later, despite being enormously fond of his lover of the moment, he couldn’t think of a single reason to continue to be with her. In his moments of introspection about his love life, which happened naturally enough when yet another relationship was about to end, he could see how selfish he was being, how much hurt he was causing. It was to their credit that few of his lovers brained him with their stilettos when he suggested that they move their relationship to a rather less intense plane, possibly because they had regarded him all along as an “idiot boy trapped within an adult frame” (as a cellist with impossibly long eyelashes had declared as she sped out of the tail end of their relationship). It helped that he was unfailingly contrite and blamed himself for everything that had gone wrong with the union that until just a short time ago had passed all earthly understanding. On the couple of occasions that things had got ugly, his sense of guilt and mortification had risen exponentially, and he had resolved never to fall for a woman again – until some enchantress came along and placed him under her spell and the entire cycle started up again. And then he had met Julia, who took him over completely.

  By the time Angel Dust had started climbing the charts, they had been married for a little over three years and their lives together had taken on the sort of happy domesticity he had never imagined for himself. The initial white heat of their romance had given way to a deep attachment, and although he sometimes missed the electric charge that had accompanied each new romance in his life, this was way better, and something he had never had before – a union with another person with whom he felt he could always share everything in his life. As their relationship deepened and broadened, and his professional career seemed poised to skyrocket upwards, Zach couldn’t have felt better about himself.

  When it came to publishing the third book in the series, The War of Angels, all Litmus’s forty-nine employees were stretched to the limit. The company was planning to publish a quarter of a million copies in hardcover, along with half a million copies of the movie tie-in edition of Angels Rising to coincide with the release of the Hollywood blockbuster (Seven Star Studios had purchased movie rights to the rest of the quartet after the success of Angel Dust) directed by one of Peter Jackson’s protégés. Taking their cue from The Lord of The Rings, the studio and the director had shot the movies of all three books simultaneously in Iceland, and planned to release them at the rate of one every aut
umn, which was exactly what Litmus needed, because it would be the perfect platform for the release of their new hardcovers and movie tie-in editions.

  Unfortunately, things were not as good on the personal front. The blissful domesticity of less than a year ago had disintegrated to the point where Julia and he were fighting almost constantly. He hadn’t seen this coming and, worse, he didn’t know how to make things better. In the past he would have shrugged and walked away, every romance had its sell-by date. But he knew he wanted to be with Julia no matter how difficult things had become; the strain on their relationship was compounded when Zach’s father passed away from a sudden heart attack. In the end, confused and heartsick, he retreated as far as he could into his work. He immersed himself in all the details required to get the epic story of the Archangel Raphael fighting on the side of the Crusaders during the siege of Jerusalem and the battle of Antioch to as many readers as possible, working long hours, returning home only to bathe and sleep. He wasn’t the only one in the company working maniacally hard. Every person in every department was doing the same, including their two-person rights department that was inundated with offers from around the world – rights were sold in twenty-nine countries. The success of the first book in the Twilight series published that year helped all books featuring vampires, wizards, zombies and, yes, angels and when they launched The War of Angels, it charted on bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Seppi and Litmus were on their way to becoming very wealthy.