If volcanic ash and the consequent absence of most international publishers from the London Book Fair last week served any purpose, it was to teach us, in this virtual world, the importance of face-to-face contact when it comes to finding foreign literature to publish in the UK. I felt very forlorn wandering the empty halls seeing name plates but no people. Of course they have all emailed me their Rights Lists and Publishing Programmes, but it’s not the same as hearing someone deliver an impassioned speech about why I absolutely have to publish a collection of Bulgarian short stories. Still, it meant that the French – who could take the train – got a lot of my attention, and in particular one French short story writer whose work I shall be seeking out. Perhaps we shall see a sudden upsurge in the publication of French short stories. And I still had lots of those fortuitous encounters with people I hadn’t made an appointment with, who told me about books I hadn’t heard of (in one case a beautiful Japanese novel that I’ve fallen in love with), or urged me to reconsider things I’d turned down. I like the fact that I work for ‘Random House’ because it seems to me that so much of publishing is about the random.

Another sadness of the fair was failing to buy a Chinese novel that was much talked about – Ai Mi’s Hawthorn Tree Forever. A love story set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, it is being made into a film by Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, House of Flying Daggers). To my chagrin the book was sold to Virago. Afterwards they asked me whether I knew a good Chinese translator for it. For a moment I wondered why I should tell them. Then I realised that, if we are ever going to get more books translated into English, we all have to help each other. That’s why I’m excited by the launch of ‘And Other Stories’ (www.andotherstories.org), a non-profit community of readers, translators and publishers dedicated to finding books worthy of translation and either recommending them to established publishers or bringing them out independently under the ‘And Other Stories’ imprint. Watch that space. I think it’s an interesting one.