Paige Nick on ‘Book People’ | Verbal violence and a (literal) riot

I always know when things are about to go south. It can be triggered by a handful of things. Someone mentions the “C” word. Not that one. I mean “Crawdads”, or rather, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This novel is just one in a category of what has come to be known as “Marmite Books” on The Good Book Appreciation Society, the club I run on Facebook, which now has over 23 000 members. Marmite, because, much like the spread, you either love it or hate it. And when I say love or hate, I mean completely adore or absolutely loathe, to the point of wanting to murder anyone who has the audacity to have a differing opinion to yours.

Tempers run hot among book people. And it’s not just the Crawdads, Shantaram or Eat, Pray Love that trigger total online chaos. There are more sinister sparks on the book club page too. When I see anyone mention any book that contains a whiff of Trump, Musk, God, Palestine or Israel, then I know it’s not going to be long before the comments section is exploding, the post has been reported 20 times and my inbox is sprayed with complaints.

We tend to think of book people as civilised and educated, and they are, but they are also well-read, which means they have no shortage of words at their disposal. And as we all know, the pen is mightier than the sword, and in this case, can be just as violent. It’s this perfectly moreish, watch in a pass-the-popcorn kind of way, verbal violence that gave birth to my new novel, Book People.

The world offers a great deal of advice on a lot of subjects, one of them is that you should write what you know. So since I spend a lot of time managing The Good Book Appreciation Society, I decided to do just that, and write about a book club on Facebook called The Good Book Appreciation Society. In this novel, I take the worst of what I’ve seen on the page over the last 13 years, double, triple, quadruple it, then escalate it and turn it into a book about some of the worst-behaved book people you can imagine. In it, Norma Jacobs is your average accountant, running an online book club. Except for the part where she’s being threatened by a deranged crime writer and questioned by the police about attempted murder. All just as she’s started a new job as the only 42-year-old intern in the history of publishing.

Harry Shields is the aforementioned crime writer, who has a spectacular public meltdown in response to a negative review of his book on Norma’s page. He gets cancelled, his events get cancelled, and before you can say “author behaving badly”, he’s plotting revenge and stalking his nemesis.

By the time Harry’s gone viral, and Norma’s given up trying to stop him, the online book club has over 100,000 rowdy members and the comments section is a (literal) riot. Entertaining until one member ends up in a coma.

Book People is essentially a love letter to those who love books and the things that excite us, make us, break us, and bring us together.