Karen

Weekend Writing Warriors #3

Posted by Karen at 8:00 AM 6 Responses »

May 192013

Well hello there, and welcome. It’s been a while since I did a Weekend Writing Warriors post, so I thought that I would introduce a new character. This is Debora Paveni, psychic and mind mage, who has found herself in a spot of bother.

They came for her as the sun was going down, a massive red disc setting the clouds aflame. She sensed their approach when they were still miles away. This was why she lived outside the city. It gave her time to prepare. She washed her face and changed into sensible clothing. She sent one simple message, targeted to speak into the mind of just one man. You said you would protect me. Now deliver.

You can find more writers sharing their work over at Weekend Writing Warriors – go have a look, everyone’s friendly!

Anyone who is keeping track of the passing weeks may have noticed that I am well behind my self-appointed schedule for publishing Beneath Starlight. A three month illness at the end of last year didn’t help at all, but all the threads are finally coming together. Because of the unforeseen delays that have already put me back I’m not going to make any predictions as to when it will be out, but I’m now mostly waiting on getting the financial and business side of things sorted out. Once that all comes together I’ll be there, at last!

Beautiful book of the week – Defending Politics

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May 162013

Who would have thought that a politics book would ever look so appealing?

Defending Politics by Matthew Flinders, published by Oxford University Press. Jacket illustration ‘Be Yourself’ by Jane Laurie.

The Bone Season – Samantha Shannon

Posted by Karen at 9:33 PM No Responses »

May 122013

When it comes to unwarranted hype it could be that the publishing industry is second only to the film industry. I can’t count the number of times I’ve received advance information for a book, declaring that the author is going to be ‘the best thing since Tolkien’ or some such nonsense. Almost invariably, the book is launched a few months later to a resounding ‘meh.’

So you’ll understand that, when I read that Samantha Shannon was being described as ‘the next JK Rowling,’ I approached her debut novel with a certain amount of scepticism.

Scepticism, it turns out, that was unwarranted, because The Bone Season is really very good.

Shannon wastes no time in tumbling her readers straight into an alternative future – a dystopian 2059 – and a Britain ruled by the totalitarian Scion. Genuine clairvoyance entered the world in Victorian times and, like all new, powerful and misunderstood things, clairvoyants are feared and hated.

Nineteen year old Paige Mahoney, of course, is clairvoyant, a dreamwalker working in London’s criminal underworld to pay her way. It’s not long before Scion catches up with her and Paige finds herself ripped away from her life, beginning to discover the true powers at work behind the world she lives in. Kidnapped and taken to Oxford, she finds herself in the care of Warden, one of a race called the Rephaim who wield even more power than Scion.

Shannon’s writing is vivid, her characters are believable and her ideas are original. The world she has created is complex; perhaps a little too much so as I regularly had to refer to the chart of the different types of clairvoyant at the front of the book. She has a strong hold on how much information she is revealing at any one time, and precisely when is the right moment to let her readers in on a secret. If I had to fault her for anything it would be her sense of time – I was regularly tripped up by information that far more time had passed than I had been aware of. Whole nights seem to go by in a matter of a couple of hours, and at one point Warden says that Paige has been in Oxford for several months, when I could have sworn it was a month at most. I would have loved a little more description of Paige’s surroundings in many places, though whether I would have been truly happy if this came at the expense of the zippy pace is another matter.

So all in all, The Bone Season is deserving of at least some hype. The next JK Rowling? Probably not. But the next Suzanne Collins? That I could believe.

The Bone Season will be published this autumn by Bloomsbury.

Beautiful book of the week – Notes on a Scandal

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May 092013

I do like a book jacket that looks like it has been given some proper tender loving care through every stage of the design process.

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller, published by Penguin, cover by Valerie Vargas.

In which I fall in love with a book

Posted by Karen at 8:00 AM No Responses »

May 052013

There are few perks to working in bookselling. The people are awesome, of course, which can make even the dullest of days fly past, but the material rewards are few and far between. I might go so far as to say that there is only one perk to working in bookselling, and that is free books.

Proof copies are the most obvious of these. I am lucky enough to have laid hands on an advance copy of The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon, touted (deservedly, from the first 200 pages at least) as being one of the biggest books of 2013. I’ll be posting a full review up here as soon as I’m done. Some publishers reps’ are flexible enough to bend the rules a little and provide us with specific new titles on request.

But I’m not writing today to talk about those free books. My main source of gratis reading material at the moment is not a publisher at all, but a customer. Let’s call him Luke. Luke reads a lot. By ‘a lot’ I mean that it’s not unusual to see him in the shop two or three times a week, and for him to leave with half a dozen books each time. That’s not even including the amount he has confessed to spending in charity bookshops.

Recently Luke decided he needed to clear out some old books from his house. ‘I can’t walk into a room and sneeze without knocking a pile of books over,’ he explained, to the surprise of none of us. He quizzed a few of us on what books we like reading, and started to bring them in. He empties the books from his satchel on to the cash desk in neat piles, judges from our reactions how ‘right’ he’s got it, and adjusts his next day’s offerings accordingly. He’s now got the hang of our reading tastes so well that he’s started to bring in books for people that they have already (he brought me Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness), letting us swap between ourselves and try out genres we would normally avoid.

I told Luke that I like classic science fiction. He knows already that I like old books, of the ‘they don’t make ‘em like that any more’ variety. And he brought me this – an 1884 edition of Edward Lord Lytton’s The Coming Race. (Thanks to Himself for posing for the camera.) I just had to share it, because it is possibly the most beautiful book I have ever had the privilege of actually touching. It is also concrete proof that a beautiful book needn’t have an artistic cover, or be in perfect condition. Some books are perfect just as they are. As one of my colleagues said to me, as I cradled it gently after Luke had left the shop, ‘You’ve lost a little bit of your heart to that book today.’ Yes.

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