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Behind-The-Books Blog
The End of a Popular Era
Tuesday, June 18th, 2013
I recently read in The Bookseller that Penguin will be dropping their Popular Classics list and couldn’t help but feel a little sad. As a child my parents house was littered with them; I remember my mother’s beloved copy of Pride and Prejudice and taking the popular classics edition of Macbeth to school for English [...]
Colourful Reading…
Monday, June 17th, 2013
The skies may have stubbornly been deaf to my requests to change from a very dull grey to a more mediterranean blue, so I will try to inject a little colour into everyone’s day by sharing this interesting piece I found via twitter last week. Jaz Parkinson is a graphic designer who has begun a [...]
Rediscovering a neglected literary art form…
Friday, June 14th, 2013
Once the literature of the masses (back when the novel was considered a lightweight, ‘feminine’ art form) but now often ignored, I’ve found myself unintentionally rediscovering poetry recently. And as I’m living and breathing novels at A&B, it’s interesting to look at something a bit different… Like most of us, I can’t say I’ve sat [...]
A crime-filled holiday
Thursday, June 13th, 2013
I’ve just returned from sunny Mykonos where I indulged in questionable amounts of feta cheese and devoured several wonderful books. While lounging on the beach I was kept entertained by Germans and their bumbags, people’s faces when they ventured into the unexpectedly cold sea and two great authors, master of the art Gillian Flynn and [...]
Wednesday Cover Story: The Wonders of 3D
Wednesday, June 12th, 2013
It was only about a week ago that I saw my first movie in 3D. Yes, finger on the pulse, that’s me. It was Star Trek: Into Darkness, Benedict Cumberbatch was in fine form and it was an enjoyable couple of hours. The 3D effect took a little bit of getting used I must say, [...]
The simple beauty of a bird’s nest
Tuesday, June 11th, 2013
Sometimes there are things of such utter beauty that they must be shared. This is one of them. Look at the care and effort this bird has taken to build her nest. I must clarify that this is not a stylised magazine photo – [...]
Envelope Exhibition, anyone?
Monday, June 10th, 2013
Recently, while browsing on Twitter, I discovered upcoming book release Letters to Klaus. The book is a collection of illustrated envelopes which have been sent to Klaus Flugge, founder of Andersen Press, by the various children’s book illustrators he’s worked with over the years. Not only does it sound like a lovely little coffee table [...]
Famous Last Words…
Friday, June 7th, 2013
I received some promotional postcards today from Plainpicture.com, and one of them looks like this: It has got me thinking about that last page in a novel: how an author must feel reaching the end of their 100,000 word manuscript; how long they may have spent thinking about those last words on the page; how [...]
Why I Despise…
Thursday, June 6th, 2013
After reading this article from New York Magazine recently, ‘Why I Despise The Great Gatsby‘, I started thinking about the topic of ‘great literary classics you secretly can’t stand’ and our reluctance to admit to them. It seems to be something of a literary taboo – confessing which novels, whether from centuries ago or those [...]
Wednesday Cover Story: Mary Nichols’ Hungarian look…
Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
Mary Nichols’ books, The Summer House andThe Girl on the Beach have interestingly been very popular in Hungary. And now we’ve just recently sold rights to The Kirilov Star. The cover design to a foreign edition can look extremely different to the UK version, and more often than not wouldn’t appeal to a UK market [...]
A smörgåsbord of your favourite writers
Tuesday, June 4th, 2013
The past few years have seen an explosion in the ‘scandi-crime’ phenomenon, as the rest of the world discovered some top-notch crime novels and television drama coming out of the frozen north. Hands up anyone who’s lost a weekend in front of a box-set of The Killing, Bergen or The Bridge? Or have followed the [...]
Twitter Favourites: Very British Problems
Monday, June 3rd, 2013
It’s the first Monday morning in June, and lo and behold the sun is finally out! And what’s more, we all have the opportunity to be extremely British by talking too much about the weather. Will it last? Is summer finally here? Or is the sunshine merely plotting to lull us into a false sense [...]
A Different Kind of Trip
Friday, May 31st, 2013
On Monday evening I was having a nice run around Tooting Bec common; the sun was shining, the weather was warm-ish, and people were basking in the lush green surroundings. All was going well until I tripped up. Not a little scuffle, but a full blown arms splayed and landing spread-eagled on the ground kind [...]
You know you’ve made it when…
Thursday, May 30th, 2013
It’s not all that often that a new book will permeate the general culture so much that the characters’ names become common parlance or the newspapers will borrow plot twists to illustrate their point. I know when a book has hit the big time when my dearly beloved, but not-precisely-a-bookworm other half knows anything about [...]
Wednesday Cover Story: Sneak peek of new Lake District mystery
Wednesday, May 29th, 2013
The new Lake District mystery by Martin Edwards, The Frozen Shroud, will be out in June and advance copies came in the other day. We originally started printing this series with matte covers but gave the last book, The Hanging Wood a glossy finish instead to make the yellow tone more vibrant and eye-catching. It [...]
London Lines
Tuesday, May 28th, 2013
If you’re a book lover who lives in or near London, you may already know that the London Literature Festival is currently underway. Taking place on the South Bank, this annual celebration of all things literary offers a huge array of events to keep bookworms busy. One that’s particularly caught my eye is London Lines, [...]
The Next Big Thing
Friday, May 24th, 2013
I had a very excited email last week from a friend telling me she’d finished her novel. I paused for a second and thought, what an astonishing sentence. We studied literature and creative writing together at university and she went on to do a Masters in the latter at Oxford. Now at the young age [...]
Larger than life – Falstaff
Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
The description ‘larger than life’ is one of those potential jellyfish, back-handed compliments that I know I wouldn’t be all that enthused to receive. But it’s a phrase we used in the blurb for one of our books in the past year, and is aptly applied to the character of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Not only does [...]
Wednesday Cover Story: Making hardbacks extra beautiful…
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
During the Fall of Night Book Tour, after Rachel Caine had finished signing books for fans at Waterstones in Bournemouth, I was admiring the cover to A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré (with its embossed gold foil) and chatting to the manager about how much effort is going into hardbacks now. Gone are the [...]
Old Favourites
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
Last week I found a treasure I didn’t even know had been written. Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Prisoner of Heaven from his series set in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in 19th century Barcelona. I read the first two in the series, The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game about six years ago [...]
Currently we are...
…Reading
The Gin Lane Gazette, by Adrian Teal
Lesley: Think tongue-in-cheek, illustrated 18th-century version of Heat and you’re pretty much there. True historical events and anecdotes retold with relish and accompanied by bawdy illustrations, great fun.
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