Between the covers: What's really going on in the world of books

Padma Lakshmi portrays husband Salman Rushdie as 'unsympathetic and a little needy' in new memoir

Padma Lakshmi has lifted the lid on her relationship with Salman Rushdie in a memoir released on Tuesday. In it, Rushdie comes across as unsympathetic and a little needy.

For instance, when Lakshmi, a TV presenter, showed him that she had made the cover of Newsweek, his response was: “The only time Newsweek put me on their cover was when someone was trying to put a bullet in my head.”

Between the Covers met the couple in 2004 at the launch of Lisa Appignanesi’s novel The Memory Man, when they had been married for a month and had just returned from their honeymoon.

While Lakshmi gushed that married life was wonderful and she felt like the luckiest woman in the world. Rushdie, on the other hand, retorted: “The only thing anyone seems to know about me now is that I’m married.”

He had, at least, enjoyed his honeymoon. “We decided to do all the obvious things you just don’t do in Paris: we went to see the Mona Lisa ... I haven’t seen it for 20 years.”

Rushdie also revealed that evening that he was three quarters of the way through a novel, but “I won’t discuss it until it’s finished, because it drains away all the energy”. His next book was Shalimar the Clown, in 2005, a novel with a hero who is betrayed by a beautiful woman.

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Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday has reached number two on Waterstones bestselling hardback fiction chart, almost a month after it was published.

The novel is not really about Mothering Sunday, at least not in a Hallmark Cards way, but presumably people have been buying it for their mothers on account of its title.

Between the Covers has had an idea, and is off to copyright the titles Fathers Day, Valentines Day, and Happy Birthday to the Woman/ Man who Has Everything.

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Political publisher Biteback has signed up four new volumes of diaries from Alastair Campbell, starting after his departure from Downing Street.

A week earlier they announced that they had signed David Laws’ “revealing insider account of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition from its birth in 2010 ...”, saying that Laws was “uniquely placed” to spill the beans.

Just how uniquely placed was he as an insider, given that he resigned from the Coalition the same month as joining it, and was out of government for much of 2010, 11, and 12? “David was still very close to the heart of things”, reveals a Biteback source.