June Newton Best Seller

June Newton BEST SELLER. Written by David Owen. Author photograph by Nadia Lee Cohen. Illustrated and designed by Karla Jarvinen and Dominik Pollin. This is the first printing of the first edition.

BEST SELLER is the true-to-life story of one woman’s attempt to write herself out of obscurity.

Events of a magnitude only known to particle physicists fill June Newton’s days as a regional department store floor manager. Trapped in a provincial, proverbial hell (a hell where it often rains and never gets hot enough), June loses herself in imaginary conversations with Nicolas Cage, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder.

And then, life plays its hand. The store, where June has worked for thirty years, is set for closure. “Career suicide,” muses June, “hardly necessary in my line of work.” Yet the retail apocalypse is only the most predictable of the emerging narratives. The quirky, hit-and-miss, and miss again book of observations and ideas that June thinks she is writing is overtaken and overthrown by tumultuous real-life events. The pages turn, first into a confessional diary, before accelerating into a full-on, brakes-off, breathless thriller.

BEST SELLER reads like a classic comic novel. Only it is not fiction. It is, in fact, fact. Emotional, uplifting, inspirational – a more likely best seller than June Newton herself could ever have expected.

Hardcover with dustwrapper. 13 x 20cm. 224 pages.