Latest News from The Bookseller including McCrum takes on Man Booker critics

Two Pocket Shops to open in London Bonnier-owned retail chain Pocket Shop is to open two outlets in London within weeks.

McCrum takes on Man Booker critics The Observer's Robert McCrum has described the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize as "among the best, and most confident, of recent years", calling the selected authors "a distinctive slate of new writers, all of them deserving of the attention bestowed on their work by Booker".

Fourth Estate wins auction for black British women's life guide Fourth Estate is to publish Slay in Your Lane, a guide to life for a generation of black British women by Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinene.

OUP to cite Marlowe as Shakespeare's Henry VI co-author Oxford University Press is crediting one of Shakespeare's rival contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe, as his co-author in a New Oxford Shakespeare edition it is publishing of the bard's plays this month.

Scribe makes trio of acquisitions Philip Gwyn Jones, editor-at-large at Scribe, has made a trio of acquisitions including a "science book that reads like a novel" about the Italian polymath Jerome Cardano, a book bought at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Authors condemn plans to shut Hay-on-Wye library Authors including Joanne Harris (pictured), Kathy Lette and Robert Harris have slammed proposals to shut the library in Hay-on-Wye as “blasphemous” and “disastrously short sighted”.

Wigtown bookseller's diaries to Profile Shaun Bythell - owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop - is to publish his "wry and hilarious" diaries about bookselling with Profile Books.

'Deeply personal' Shukla novel to Atlantic Atlantic is to publish The One Who Wrote Destiny, the next novel from Nikesh Shukla, in 2018.

Ekbäck and Gregory win Historical Fiction awards Cecilia Ekbäck has won the 2016 Historical Writers' Association's Goldsboro Debut Crown for her Nordic noir thriller, Wolf Winter (Hodder). Meanwhile, the Outstanding Contribution to Historical Fiction Award was presented to Philippa Gregory.

LKP signs illustrator Yasmeen Ismail Laurence King Publishing (LKP) has bought Yasmeen Ismail's Push, Pull, Empty, Full, previously published by Blue Apple Books, and will turn the book into a new activity series.