Twelve Books of Christmas – Harper Collins proofs to give away

Posted on December 11, 2014 by vanessa
Twelve Books of Christmas - proof copies to be won.

Twelve Books of Christmas – proof copies to be won.

We’re kicking off our series of Christmas treats with proof copies of three books that are set to cause a stir in 2015, sent to me by the very lovely Ben in publicity at Harper Collins, a man who is is really enthusiastic about independent bookselling and the sort of books our customers want to read.

The first book is Blood Relatives by Stevan Alcock, due to be published at the end of March.  It’s a debut novel from an author who lives in London but grew up in West Yorkshire.  Set in Leeds in 1975, the novel begins with the discovery of a body and has been described by David Vann (author of Legend of a Suicide and Goat Mountain) as “an unforgettable portrait of growing up in the late seventies, of living through the terror or the Yorkshire Ripper’s murders and of trying to survive a family.”

Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged Dog Story by Andrea Bennett is another debut and sounds a delight which I’m looking forward to reading myself soon. The publisher’s information says: “Perhaps you’re not a member of the Azov House of Culture Elderly Club? Perhaps you missed the talk on the Cabbage Root Fly last week?  Galina Petrovna hasn’t missed one since she joined the Club, when she officially became old. But she would much rather be at home with her three-legged dog Boroda. Boroda isn’t ‘hers’ exactly, they belong to each other really, and that’s why she doesn’t wear a collar. And that’s how Mitya The Exterminator got her. And that’s why Vasily Semyonovich was arrested. And Galina had to call on Zoya who had to call on Grigory Mikhailovich. And go to Moscow. Filled to the brim with pickle, misadventure and tears, Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged Dog Story will leave you smiling at every page.”.  It sounds irrestible and it’s out in February.

Finally, A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell is the third of the three proof copies on offer and is a darkly funny confession of three sisters who have decided to kill themselves.  The Alter sisters are the last of a long line of Alters who have taken their own lives.  As they gave in the ancestral Upper West Side apartment in New York, another story emerges, of a family carrying a burden stretching back to World War One and a Nobel Prize-winner whose discovery was used for terrible purposes. People who’ve read this novel describe is a literary, profound and also very funny – sounds like a winner to me.  It will be published in March, 2013.

These three proof copies – not available to the general public and only produced in limited numbers – can be yours…

What you need to do is leave a comment below – don’t worry if it doesn’t appear straightaway, because of the amount of spam I get I manually approve all comments and it might be a few hours until I do that.

The draw closes at 11.59pm on 12th December (UK time).  More details of terms and conditions can be found on this post and by entering I’ll assume you’ve read and agreed to them.  I choose a winner via a random number generator and announce the lucky person on the blog in a couple of days.  Don’t forget to check back to see it it’s you.

Good luck.

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Twelve Books of Christmas – gifts from us

Posted on December 10, 2014 by vanessa

181012 003Christmas is a time for giving and plenty of people have been taking advantage of the Fidra Books Winter Sale to snap up some of the titles that we publish and a very gratifying number of people have been buying subscriptions from The Glenogle & Bell Book Company so it looks as though quite a few folk will be having a bookish Christmas one way or another.

However, Christmas is also a time for receiving and so we’ve got together with some of the wonderful publishers we work with to give away some books to readers of this blog.

There’s a huge range of books on offer from children’s picture books and YA fiction to thrillers, classics and some very rare proofs of books which aren’t even out until next year. I’m also going to be talking not just to the authors of these books but also some of the sales and publicity people who are responsible for selling those books into bookshops and who are some of the most passionate people in the book trade.

The first post will be up tomorrow and is unmissable – either check back here in the morning, like the Glenogle & Bell or Fidra Books pages at Facebook or follow me on Twitter to make sure that you don’t miss out.

A few Terms and Conditions before we go though – I’ll link to these as well but just to clarify…

  • To win: leave a comment on the blog post.  If your comment doesn’t appear immediately don’t worry; I get masses of spam so it will need to wait for approval and I’m not always at my desk.
  • Comments on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter don’t count.
  • Each post will state when entries close.  Times are UK times.
  • Each post will state whether the prize is available nationally or internationally – it varies largely because of postage charges/weight of books.
  • Winners will be announced on the blog and have 48 hours to claim their prize, otherwise I’ll choose another.
  • I can’t be held responsible for lost parcels.

Thanks to all the authors and publishers who’ve been so generous and good luck

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Serial – a weekly podcast from the creators of This American Life

Posted on November 18, 2014 by vanessa

serialI found the Serial podcast via a mention on Twitter and I’ve been gripped from the first episode.  Looking in detail at a possible miscarriage of justice – did a Baltimore teenager really murder his ex-girlfriend or was he simply the easiest person to pin the conviction on – the series is made by journalist Sarah Koenig and produced by the creators of This American Life, a weekly show on national public radio in the USA and available to the rest of the world via podcast.

What makes Serial so compelling is the detail.  45 minute documentaries about these sort of things obviously reduce the narrative down so much that there’s no space to look at the nuance, the inconsistencies, the tiny details upon which these things hinge.  With a single documentary we also know where things are heading – the quashing of a verdict, the vital new evidence, the joy of the released prisoner. We know where it’s going and we generally have an opinion on what we’re about to hear.

Serial isn’t like that.  Koenig has been researching the case for about a year and has been combing through the statements, evidence, tapes of trial testimony, police reports and talking to the individuals at the centre of the case, including Adnan Syed, who was convicted and imprisoned in 2000.  Each episode is around 40 minutes long and each looks at one element of the case, whether that’s alibis, the routes between the locales where the crime happened or the inconsistencies in the State’s main witness’ evidence.  And that long-form exploration of what happened is what’s so great – it’s possible to fully explore the discrepancies. It’s satisfying as a narrative because there’s someone there asking the question that’s niggling at you and because it doesn’t reduce everything to black-and-white.  It’s a format that is aware of the shades of grey and knows that the truth of what happened is probably to be found in those grey areas.

I don’t know how many episodes there are going to be and the series producers don’t know how this is going to end.  We the listeners are only a couple of weeks behind them.  On the basis of what we’ve heard so far I really couldn’t say whether I think Adnan is innocent or guilty – as I said, that’s one of the best aspects of this, that we’re finding out what happened without knowing where that leads. There have been 8 episodes already so catching up is a bit of a commitment but do try to – download and listen to it in the car or walking the dog or whatever.

Here’s the trailer to get you started. But do try to listen, it’s the best documentary I’ve come across in a long time.

 

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Rembrandt – The Later Works, at the National Gallery, London

Posted on November 5, 2014 by vanessa
Rembrandt, self-portrait at the age of 63

Rembrandt, self-portrait at the age of 63

Once again I’ve been rather slack.  We’ve been away on another home exchange – this time to London – and I’ll blog soon about that, but it’s also been half-term, we’ve bought another house, work’s been busy etc…. I have a million excuses.

While in London, we planned to visit as many museums and galleries as possible and a highlight was the Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery, on until mid-January.  It is the winter’s blockbuster show and it’s been impossible to ignore the hoo-ha in the media about it.  The Simon Schama documentary on the BBC was excellent.  We booked our tickets in advance, assuming that this would enable us to look around it in relative peace and if I had a criticism it would be that the sheer number of people there made it nigh on impossible to look at the paintings properly.  One shuffled from drawing to etching to painting, elbowed regularly by other people and shoved by people with headphones and audio guides (something about headphones that makes the wearer oblivious to others) and although I’ve seen some of his amazing later works, I remember few.  Certainly there was little opportunity to stand and simply absorb the great man’s genius.

However, just as we reached the end, The Husband noticed that the first room was almost empty, the crowd having shuffled on, and we nipped back in.  That first room, hung with a small etching and four self-portraits showing Rembrandt in defiant middle-age, his rueful older years and his last portrait, painted not long before he died at the age of 63, was worth the ticket price alone.  They’ve been cleverly hung and if you stand in the centre of the room and look around, all four portraits are looking directly at you, confronting you with his humanity, his complex life-history. As Jonathan Jones says in this piece from The Guardian in 2004, it’s like meeting him and ‘you have no idea what to say to him, and fear what he is about to say to you.’

It’s rare that I’m moved by a painting, but this portrait brought tears to my eyes, such is the feeling of sadness in the subject’s eyes. It is as though despite his pride in his genius, there is terrible pain. You feel – I felt at least – that he would have traded that talent and all the highs and lows of his spectacular career if it meant that he wouldn’t outlive his wife and children, the last of whom, Titus, passed away that same year.  It’s a portrait of dignity, pain, long-suffering, heartache and I could have looked at that painting and its immediate companions for hours. I’ll go back when it’s rehung in the main collection so that I can do just that.  If you get the chance to see the exhibition do go and I hope it’s quieter when you do.

I came home with a postcard of that painting to put on the wall near my desk, to remind me of its humanity, although a postcard can’t hope to convey the subtleties and richness of the real thing. The National Gallery shop has an extensive range of Rembrandt merchandise if a postcard can’t tempt you – you can remind yourself of this stunning painting with a fridge magnet or a cushion or an Iphone case. The banality of that almost made me weep too.

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Friday Favourites

Posted on October 31, 2014 by vanessa

Although I’ve been away, I’ve been reading and browsing and here are some of my favourite things from the last week or so…

Johnsonville, Connecticut. A whole ghost town for sale...

Johnsonville, Connecticut. A whole ghost town for sale…

From the ever-fascinating Messy Nessy Chic blog comes the story of this entire abandoned town, Johnsonville in Connecticut, that is up for auction with a starting price of just $800, 000.  You could have a whole town with a school, church, general store, restaurant and dozens of houses totalling 62 acres in all for less than the price of a townhouse in the Edinburgh New Town.  And only two hours from New York.  The story of how it became deserted is intriguing and it looks like the creepiest place ever, but also rather sad.  I hope these lovely houses find an owner who can made the town live again.

We rescue neglected children’s classic books and one of the first publishers to set up with the mission of republishing neglected (mostly) mid-twentieth century books by (mostly) women writers were Persephone Books.  When we staying in London last week we were just around the corner from the Persephone shop and offices and so I popped in to buy a couple of presents and a couple of their new autumn titles.  Their website is a mine of information and their books, so stylish with their matching grey dustwrapper, are wonderful.  As well as their charming shop – vintage retro style before that was even a thing – they have a very efficient mail order service.

This made me smile. 30 Signs Your Kid Is Turning Into A Hipster at the Huffington Post is a nice reminder that as our kids get older we have to accept that they’re cooler, more socially aware and smarter than we were at their age.  Mind you, back in the mi-80s, I’m not sure sourdough starters even existed.

A short list today as we’ve been out but I’ll be back next week with details of our latest home exchange, new books and more.

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