Paige Nick (photo: Liza van Deventer for Fair Lady); book cover: Book people by Paige Nick (Pan Macmillan, 2025)
Title: Book people
Author: Paige Nick
Publisher: Pan Macmillan (April 2025)
ISBN: 9781770109063
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Paige uses her real-life Good Book Appreciation Society (GBAS) page, which she founded on Facebook, as a cornerstone of Book people. At the moment, GBAS has almost 24 000 members who post their opinions/reviews of books they have read, often sparking heated debates about personal likes and dislikes. Many of the contributors are authors themselves.
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I’ve been having a retrospective read of some of Paige Nick’s novels over the past year, as I have needed entertainment to escape the horrors of the world. Paige is a prolific writer, and her books definitely do the trick. I read Unpresidented, Death by carbs and then Dutch courage (one of my favourites) and still want to read A million miles from normal at some point.
I was delighted to receive Book people, Paige’s latest creation, and I’m pleased to report that it’s written with Paige’s characteristic wry wit and perspicacity. Paige has a keen eye for human foibles, which makes her characters deeply entertaining, often at their own expense.
Paige uses her real-life Good Book Appreciation Society (GBAS) page, which she founded on Facebook, as a cornerstone of Book people. At the moment, GBAS has almost 24 000 members who post their opinions/reviews of books they have read, often sparking heated debates about personal likes and dislikes. Many of the contributors are authors themselves.
This fact is used as an inspiration in Book people, as the earnest Norma Jacobs, a 40-something accountant who longs to be a novelist herself, has founded her own GBAS in the novel. Even though Norma has written a book, she doesn’t quite believe she’ll make the cut as an author herself. She shows her work only to her partner, Steve, who has given up his day job to complete his own magnum opus. Steve tells Norma that her novel isn’t worth much because, after all, he is the real writer in the family. Instead of writing, however, Steve smokes weed and plays PlayStation games all day long, and has no written words to show for it. When Norma breaks the news to him that she, too, is giving up her day job to be the oldest intern at a publishing company, he accuses her of being selfish. In his eyes, he believes Norma should support him because he is definitely the superior talent in the family. Norma tends to disagree.
Add to the mix Norma’s greatest confidante, who happens to be Steve’s twin sister, Marina, as well as a handful of opinionated commentators on GBAS, the fellow quirky interns who work with Norma trying to wade through the slush pile the publishers have told them to clear up, and a few other colourful characters, and you have a lively story. The showstopper, however, is Harry Shields, a two-time novel writer who embodies every foible and insecurity which I believe most authors experience when putting a book out into this world. His imagination and ego are his worst enemies as he tries to punt his novel at every opportunity he can on GBAS. When a GBAS member, Edna Molton, rips into Harry’s novel and criticises it viciously, all hell breaks loose, creating a hilarious mess of apparent attempted murder and of deeply embarrassing Award Show video clips which go viral, and sending the numbers of GBAS members soaring.
As I said before, Paige is a gifted writer, and her novel flows with ease. She has her finger on the pulse of what makes people – especially writers - tick. Book people is another page-turner from Paige (pardon the pun!), and you’ll be highly entertained by this novel. Read it.
Q and A:
I’m always intrigued by the path people take to decide to write fiction. Paige, you’ve had a fairly varied career, from what I can glean online. I seem to think you started working in an ad agency, and then decided to write your own novels – am I right? What was the impetus behind starting to write fiction? Do you still have a day job, or are you living the dream and able to write full-time these days?
I’ve been an advertising copywriter since 1994, and I absolutely love it. I’m part of a high-concept freelance creative duo with my art director of over 16 years, Karin Barry-McCormack, and that’s full-on, five days a week. I always wanted to write a novel, and back in 2009 after trying and failing for a few years, I finally took a week off work and did a novel writing course with Sarah Bullen. My first novel came out of that course, and was published by Penguin in 2010. Advertising remains my main game, and the books, columns, Good Book Appreciation Society on FB, and the Book Choice radio show on Fine Music Radio all fit in around the edges of that. I feel like everything feeds everything else, if that makes any sense?
As a fairly new member of GBAS, I don’t need to ask you where your inspiration comes from, but I wondered if you’d tell the readers of LitNet when you started this Facebook page, and what inspired you to do so?
Back in 2013, I was part of an informal book club at the ad agency I worked at with about seven colleagues. We’d meet at someone’s desk every Friday at lunch time and shove books in each other’s faces – sometimes there was cake. Over time, a few of us left the agency and we got busy and started missing meetings, so we decided to start the group on Facebook to carry on chatting about books together. The first post got three likes. Today, there are 24 000 members. That’s the internet for you.
One of your main characters, Harry, steals the show somewhat in the cast of characters. Have you ever had someone like this on GBAS?
A recent interviewer pointed out that there are parts of me in both of my main characters, Harry and Norma, and she’s right. But I’d say, on the whole, that Harry is based on every author I’ve ever met – a kind of warped amalgamation of what you become when you’re putting a book out into the world. There have also been a number of “Harrys” on GBAS over the years. I simply took minor feuds, reactions to negative reviews, and little fallouts I’ve seen over the years on the page, and escalated them.
Norma is obviously my favourite character. She is so relatable – insecure about her own work, and wanting to make a change in her career at an age at which some would consider her to be too old. I, on the other hand, think it’s the perfect time. I only started my real career when I turned 40. You’ve been writing for quite some time, but I wondered how much of you is in this character.
There is a bit of me in Norma, mostly because we both unwittingly run these groups that we never planned on managing at this size. But I worked really hard to make Norma as different to me as possible; it’s one of the reasons she’s an accountant, as I can barely count to 12. Ten is easy – that’s what fingers are for – but after that things gets tricky for me.
You’ve laced some of your favourite commentators from GBAS into this novel through the threads, which are faux GBAS online conversations. Did you have to ask permission from your friends to do so, or were they honoured by the inclusion?
They’re not all that faux. There are two threads in Book people that are verbatim posts and comments off the GBAS page – mostly because you couldn’t make that crazy stuff up if you tried, and they just fitted so seamlessly into the narrative. I reached out to all the posters and was lucky enough to get all their permissions. The rest of the commenters are made up, but are based on the kinds of people one finds on social media or neighbourhood WhatsApp groups. There’s always the peacemaker, the troll, the pedant, the poser, the mansplainer and the preacher, isn’t there?
Your novel is set in the UK. I know you’ve lived and worked both in South Africa and in England, but I wondered why you chose to set the novel there. Has the work been well received in the UK, or is it too early to tell?
My first novel was set in New York, my second was between the USA and South Africa, and the third was set in Amsterdam. Then I had a run of two very proudly South African novels, and now I’m in my UK stage. For some reason, I only want to write books set in England right now; I need to ask my therapist what that means. I’ll get back to you.
There is always a lovely period when a new book is launched. It’s possibly the honeymoon period, but then this awful question arises: have you thought about what you want to write next?
Generally, as I finish a novel, I have a pretty good idea of what I want to write next. I can get a little sad when I finish a novel; I miss the friends I made in it, and the voices that have been chattering away in my head for months. So, starting a new novel is a good way to move on, to stop obsessing over the last one and start obsessing over the new one. I’ve written the first drafts of two novels since I finished Book people. The first will never see the light of day. (It’s a long, sad story. If you’re curious enough, DM me and I’ll fill you in, reader.) And as I finish this sentence and send this interview off, I’ll jump back into my new-new manuscript. I’ve finished a dirty first draft, and now the hard work starts on it.
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