Authors Electric

  If that's the view from the front door, I'm staying in. That Storm Goretti was some storm.    And that's the view from the back door. It weighed down and broke my rose arch.            Still....   The Ghost Drum My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.         In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky! In the north of that country all the winter is one long night, and all that long night long, the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight.      In winters there, the cold is so fierce the frost can be heard crackling and snapping as it travels through the air. The snow is so deep that...

The Amber Heart on Kindle - Polish & Christmassy When I was wondering whether to do a Christmas 'special offer' on one of my books and also wondering which one to choose, I found myself trying to decide between a couple of suitable books. But really, when it came down to choices, it was a no-brainer. It had to be the Amber Heart . Even the cover seems kind of Christmassy and in my heart, when I think about this book, I think about Poland at Christmas. It is a big doorstop of a book but then it's a big story. Epic. Romantic. Heart rending. When one of my previous agents sent it out, she relayed a letter from an acquisitions editor who said that she had stayed up all night reading it and weeping. They didn't acquire it though. Poland was a non starter as a setting. Now if it had been Russia ... No point at all in telling them that Eastern European borders have been so fluid and so deadly, in consequence, that this novel, set firmly in that part of mid-ninete...

I'm juggling between two books at present. I found Jostein Gaarder's 'SOPHIE'S WORLD' in a charity shop. Originally written (in Norwegian), as a Young Adult book in 1991, and hugely successful in translation, I didn't read it at the time because my kids were grown up. It's a potted history of philosophy framed by an intriguing mystery - fifteen year old Sophie begins receiving  lectures delivered by a dog, from an anonymous philosopher. It's fascinating, and not in the least bit dated (unless you feel that Aristotle's no longer in your area of cool). The second book I rescued in a rainsoaked condition from a neighbour's front garden wall. It's Eimear McBride's 'A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing', and very 'now'. I had to wrap it in kitchen roll and then straighten it beneath a heavy RHS encyclopaedia of plants. It's a debut novel which seems to be doing very well, so that's a treat in store. Mentioning debut nove...

     Bob Newman ( Old Possums’ Book of Practical Pigs)  wrote a  delightfully surreal novel, with nods to Garcia Marquez and Conan Doyle. The characters ranged from a glyptodon to a javelin thrower from an obscure Amazonian tribe, and the story had its denouement at the 2012 Olympics. Unfortunately, he finished it too late to have a hope of publishing it in time. There are ways round it – a solution of sorts is the tag-line “…this book tells the full story behind the javelin final at the London Olympics – not as it was, but as it should have been…” But it would have been much better to get the forward planning right!             Thinking ahead can be very important. Tying in publication to something you know is on the horizon can be a good move. Major anniversaries are excellent inspirations for non-fiction, and a quick search on the web can be very fruitful. However, it’s the monthly short st...