Mother and daughter Adele and Jenny Geras are at opposite ends of the book trade: Jerusalem-born Adele is a novelist who has written more than 100 books, for children, teenagers and adults, while Jenny is the managing director of a new kind of publisher, Bookouture, which publishes digital commercial fiction. Adele is the widow of the academic Norman Geras, and their elder daughter is the novelist Sophie Hannah, whose latest book, The Couple At The Table, is on prominent display in the publishing offices where we meet. Jenny and Sophie, who grew up in Manchester, are married to two brothers.

Jenny on Adele

I think when I was growing up I was considered one of the quieter members of the family”. (Adele interjects: “The quietest, for sure”.) “I don’t know about that, it was quite a noisy family, certainly compared to my mum and my sister, I was quiet. I’m the youngest: people who know me now are surprised to hear that I was the youngest and that I was quiet. It’s obviously all relative.
Often, over dinner, we would all be arguing over issues. We call it the Geras Debating Society. A bit like that scene in Annie Hall where he [WoodyAllen] remembers his family and they’re all fighting, and she [Diane Keaton] remembers her family, and they’re all sat there in silence saying, could you pass the ham? Our family was definitely more on the fighting side. Well, not fighting, but arguing… capital punishment, the Birmingham Six.”
I had to fight for space to talk. My sister is six years older than me, so it’s a big gap. We went to the same school, but didn’t overlap for very long… essentially we were not together at school.
“I never knew what I wanted to do, though people always said to me, are you going to be an author too? I’m sure they asked my sister that, and she did! But nobody ever asked if I was going to follow my dad and become a university lecturer. I briefly went through a phase of saying I wanted to be a lawyer, but only because it was the sort of thing that people like me said, people who were into arts and politics.
I read history at university. When I left university, I was temping for a bit, doing admin jobs… and then the first job that I got was in a publisher, a small publisher called Verso. I’d been applying for lots of other random jobs, in charities — but after I got my first job, I just went from one publishing job to another. It wasn’t intentional.
But now I head Bookouture, we are 10 years old and we are a digital publisher. In 2017 we were acquired by Hachette and we are now one of its divisions. We publish commercial fiction primarily, and some non-fiction. We publish e-books, primarily, though we do publish print-on-demand editions of all our books, but digital is the main thing.
“Obviously we are a very book-y family, but it’s not like I felt publishing was something I had to do. But since I and Mum and Sophie are all in the same world, we can talk about things going on in the industry, it’s often useful. And the way we talked and debated taught me to hold my own in the publishing business.
I like Mum’s incredible enthusiasm in response to… well, pretty much anything! If we — my husband and I and our two kids — have any sort of good news, we say, let’s tell Granny and she’ll enthuse in the most incredible manner. She’ll come in the house and hug and kiss everyone; the little one is still dealing with that”.

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Jenny and Adele in Jenny's office (Photo: Ben Angel)

Adele on Jenny

I have written a lot of books, but some of them are extremelyshort. One, for example, is a poem: if you were to write it out it would just take a page of A4, but it’s a book. If you write for all age groups — and particularly for very tiny children —the children’s books tend to be very short. I never used Jenny and Sophie as guinea-pigs for the children’s books. I never told them bedtime stories, either: I left that to my husband. They were also the wrong age at the wrong time, so I couldn’t have tried the books out on them.”
I was born in Jerusalem and because of my father’s work in the Colonial Service,lived in at least eight different countries during childhood.
At 11 I went to Roedean School as a boarder and then read modern languages in Oxford, where I acted and sang — I should have been a star, this is the thing you need to know — a cross between Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland.
Half the fun of writing books lies in the public appearances which follow publication. I love all that, festivals, book tours, radio interviews… just a media tart, or I would be if I had the chance!
I do like enthusiasm. You know when certain people read your book, they’ll tell you they like it but they say it in such a quiet way that you think, did they REALLY like it? It’s partly an English thing, English reserve. I’m not reserved.
One word which sums Jenny her up is her integrity. She’s the same person through and through, you don’t get nasty surprises. She would be a very good person to work for: she’s very clever, she knows what she wants. The opposite of me. I’m basically a drip. I like people to like me and I am — pathologically — afraid of conflict. I don’t like being at odds with people”.

Adele Geras’s latest book is Dangerous Women — writing as Hope Adams. It is published in paperback by Michael Joseph this week.

Read more: 'We drive eachother mad'