Rebecca Fleet’s The House Swap took domestic noir to a whole new level when it was released in 2018, called “dark, smart, sexy, gripping, and totally brilliant”, and her long-awaited follow-up, The Second Wife, is out in bookshops and available to buy online this week – as always, with free P&P and a sizeable discount…. Read more »
Called the most elegant and atmospheric of literary festivals by none other than Colin Thubron, the Oxford Lit Fest is one of the highlights of the bookish year, and as usual it’s packed to the elegant sandstone domes with a vast array of our authors talking wisdom on a vast array of topics. And so,… Read more »
We’re delighted that our wonderful fiction agents Carrie and Caroline, plus our author Anna Hope, writer of last year’s critically acclaimed Expectation, will be judging this year’s Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award. The Award is open to unrepresented and unpublished authors for a novel in any adult fiction genre, with a deadline of May… Read more »
We are delighted to see that Gill Hornby’s “magnificent” (Spectator), “richly imagined” (Mail on Sunday), and “entirely Austenian” (Observer) novel Miss Austen has made the Sunday Times hardback bestseller list, coming in at number six in its first week of release, on only three days sale. The news comes on the back of a weekend… Read more »
We are delighted to announce that Steve Coogan’s production company Baby Cow has optioned Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen for a long-form TV drama. “Gill has brought such wit, ingenuity and heartbreaking tenderness to this literary mystery, turning it into a terrifically compelling and relevant novel,” said Baby Cow CEO Christine Langan. “Not only does she… Read more »
It was a pleasure to tune in this morning to hear Gill speak so eloquently and passionately about her new novel on Radio 4. The full interview is available to catch up with on BBC Sounds – after the moving and inspiring interview with Gail Porter – but here are a few choice snippets… GILL:… Read more »
1840: twenty three years after the death of her famous sister Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury. She knows that, in some dusty corner of the sprawling vicarage, there is a cache of family letters which hold secrets she is desperate should not be revealed. As Cassandra recalls her youth and her… Read more »
Last year, Jonathan Coe grew a beard. Since this distinguished chin-growth, he’s been shortlisted for the Prix Fémina and won the Prix du Livre Européen, and now, on Monday night, he added the Costa Best Novel Award to his cabinet. Some might say this is due to the literary qualities of Middle England, the third… Read more »
Everyone is back to work, your overflowing recycling bin has finally been emptied, and you’ve (hopefully) polished off the last of the now-slightly-stale mince pies… yes, it’s the first week of the new year, and what else can that mean but lists of 2020’s upcoming literary highlights? SPOILERS: every single newspaper piece contains at least… Read more »
It’s the final month of the final year of the decade… and you know what that means. Yep, in just under three weeks we’ll be in the Roaring Twenties 2: Roar Harder™. Flapper hats and Charleston swingsteps at the ready! But first, there’s the little matter of the 2019 Books of the Year and the… Read more »