Authors Electric

  Time is speeding up. A novel I wrote twenty years ago is being republished by Lume Books. It is called “Pretty Little Packages”, (although it started life as “Maisie’s Amazing Maids”). The main character is a ghostwriter, (no surprise there), and the plot is about modern slavery, which was a subject I was writing about a lot at the time. Re-reading it now, nothing much has changed about the modern slavery business – if anything it has grown worse, but perhaps we are just more aware of it than we were at the turn of the Millennium. A lot of other things, however, have changed.  I n the year 2000 mobile phones still had a certain novelty value for many of us. Most of us certainly didn’t use them for anything other than phoning one another in the age-old manner. Letters still came through the post, we bought street maps when we had to navigate around unfamiliar cities, and fax machines were commonplace.   Full body tattoos were highly unusual and when one of the char...

Fifteen years ago I was ghostwriting books for the most disenfranchised members of the global community; victims of enforced marriages, sex workers, orphans, victims of crimes, bonded labourers and abused children. Out of those experiences I wrote a novel, initially entitled “Maisie’s Amazing Maids”.  The book did okay but then slipped onto the back shelves and from there into the obscurity that envelops all but the lucky few in the book world. In the past that would have been the end of the story, but now, of course, there are a number of options for breathing life back into books that are no longer in the first flush of publication. The book has now been re-launched by Thistle Publishing as a sumptuous paperback and e-book entitled “Pretty Little Packages”. Thistle is an enormously successful imprint set up by London agents Andrew Lownie and David Haviland to keep books alive and available when the more traditional publishing organisations are no long...