I’m getting a bit frustrated with publishing’s ongoing love affair with series. I don’t know why it’s so disappointing to get to the end of a novel only to have a preview of the next installment taking up the last thirty pages. It feels like the ongoing push for ‘content’ and making books more like television, where the point is to always have a next installment.

That said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a couple of sequels lately, perhaps because they were so unexpected. Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room was a book I read about fiteen years ago and its mixture of Glasweigan noir with gay subculture was something I hadn’t seen before. I always meant to check out more of Louise Welsh’s work, but never seemed to quite find the time. Anyway, some twenty years after The Cutting Room was published, there’s a sequel - The Second Cut. The protagonist, Rilke, runs an auction house and gets embroiled in a plot that involves an estate sale. It’s both fun and sad and I’d recommend both books to anyone looking for an offbeat crime novel that isn’t about cops.

I’m interested in what prompts an author to go back to work so many years later. Jonathan Coe did it with late sequels to two of his best novels What a Carve Up! and The Rotters Club, both of which were better than I thought they would be (and I wasn’t a huge fan of The Rotters Club). In a weird piece of imagined history, I felt sure there was a similar late sequel to The House of Sleep, but perhaps that one’s best left alone.