An author has cancelled a book signing in protest at a shop’s apparent refusal to sell Donald Trump’s autobiography.
Susan Hill, who wrote the horror novel The Woman in Black, which was later turned into a stage play and a film starring Daniel Radcliffe, accused the owners of The Book Hive in Norwich , eastern England, of refusing to stock titles by authors with whom they disagreed.
Writing in The Spectator, Hill said she believed that a “general bookshop” should stock a variety of books whether or not it agreed with the authors’ views, leading to her refusing to sign copies of her latest work,
She wrote: “I do not expect a bookshop to have posters and a Twitter feed and a Facebook page telling me it is so against what the President of the United States stands for/believes/is/is doing that it is stocking only books devoted to those writers who oppose him too, and what is more, will give them away free.”
But Henry Layte, the owner of The Book Hive, responded in a statement on the shop’s Facebook page that accused the author of “fabrication”.
He said: “This extraordinary article by Susan Hill in The Spectator has left us astounded. She has never been to the shop, has fabricated almost everything she has said about our stock, has claimed we have imposed a ‘ban’ on books we don’t approve of with no evidence to support this at all.”
Last week Hill gently mocked those in the UK who disapprove of Trump by tweeting that his forthcoming state visit to Britain – which has proved controversial for many – was a matter of routine rather than an endorsement of his politics on the part of Britain: