Legend Press

Nick Griffiths - The new Doctor?

After David Tennant's announcement that he will no longer be playing Doctor Who next year, it was no surprise to us yesterday at Nick's book signing in Borders Charing Cross when a little boy declared

"Dad is that man the next Doctor?"

Maybe Nick will be the next time lord who knows!

The book has got an excellent review from the Doctor Who Review 

"the best bits of Who Goes There are not the descriptions of the locations themselves, but the people and places he encounters on his way. It makes you realise just how amazingly diverse this country still is: how much of our history still remains unchanged, but also how much has changed in a relatively short time. The most wonderful moments Nick describes are the less-trodden paths (and nettles) and the unexpected discoveries, and he gives us plenty of background history along the way. There are also some very funny moments that will doubtless strike a chord with many readers, such as the queue-jumping biddies!"

The book has also got a mention on Adventures Through Time and Space

Order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

Who Goes There - at Borders, Charing Cross Rd tonight!

Nick Griffiths will be speaking this evening at Borders on Charing Cross Rd at 7pm. Who Goes There has been getting some excellent publicity this week including a mention in the London Paper on Tuesday. Nick will also be doing a signing this Saturday at Waterstone's Redhill, near two of the locations Nick visited while writing the book.

Buckland Sand & Silica (Hanson Sand), Surrey (Trip 9)

Appeared in: The Seeds of Doom, 1976, used as Antarctica

Doctor: Tom Baker

Monsters: Krynoid

Nick’s trip: Eventually finds side-road to quarry, where spots a bloke playing golf with self. Disappointed by amount of sand on display, compared with vastness of Binnegar.

 

Betchworth Quarry, Surrey (Trip 10)

Appeared in: Genesis of the Daleks, 1975; The Deadly Assassin, 1976

Used as: Skaro (Genesis); Matrix dreamscape (Assassin)

Doctor: Tom Baker (both)

Monsters: Daleks & Davros (Genesis); the Master (Assassin)

Nick’s trip: Aware that Betchworth Quarry has been landfilled and levelled off, still expects to find the site, it being large enough. Fails.

Order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

Deadline looming!!!!!!!!

The deadline for the 2009 short story collection is looming... in fact it is this Friday (31st October). All entries need to be submitted to submissions@legend-paperbooks.co.uk following the guidelines listed on the 2009 short story page, linked on the right. We are really looking forward to reading all the entries and selecting another excellent collection!

Happy writing!

Lucy

A Son Called Gabriel - 'a stunning debut'

 A Son of Gabriel has got an excellent review from Caroline Smailes blog site In search of Adam and much much more:

"I read this story and found myself wanting to befriend Gabriel. His words held such sincerity, the voice carried beauty that engaged and pleased on so many levels. This is a stunning debut, with linguistic beauty that captures and evokes. I highly recommend this book to you all."

The site also features an interesting interview from Damian.

Order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

Who Goes There getting everywhere!

   

News about Who Goes There has been spreading all over the web this week, with the help of the BBC article posted on Sunday and news feeds on various Sci-fi sites. Below is a selection:

http://www.kasterborous.com/news.asp?ac=11&id=1866
http://www.newstin.co.uk/rel/uk/en-010-006249273
http://content.usatoday.com/topics/article/Culture/Television/Programming/Doctor+Who/0c2O7ek4ri0DS/1
http://article.wn.com/view/2008/10/26/Book_explores_Doctor_Whos_haunts/?section=StoryResults&template=cheetah-source-search%2Findex.txt
http://popculturesafari.blogspot.com/2008/10/pop-links-plastic-man-dvd-doctor-who-on.html

Nick also appeared on BBC Kent and BBC Oxford radio shows yesterday which should still be available by clicking on the links.

The fetching reading shots above were taken at the launch of the book last Thursday, to view the rest of the pics click here!

That's just about enough links for now... except:

Order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

Take a minute to visit Luke's website

A special message today - it is the 2nd anniversary of Luke Bitmead's sad death. As many will know, the superbly talented and charismatic Luke was the first novelist I signed up for Legend Press and whatever is achieved in the future of the press, Luke will have played an absolutely invaluable role.

Following the launch of his fantastic novel WHITE SUMMER, Luke sadly died in October of the same year, aged just 34. Set-up by his family, this year saw the first winner of the Luke Bitmead Bursary Prize - Andrew Blackman.

I spoke to Luke's Mum a week or so ago and she has asked that everyone visit Luke's website at some point today - www.lukebitmead.com So, please take a second or two to go and visit. Luke would have loved the staring role!

Tom

Nick Griffiths on the BBC!

I was just contemplating Leicester dropping two points to Northampton Town when I took an exciting call from Nick Griffiths at Saturday teatime - he had just been interviewed by the BBC; yes, the great Auntie herself.

As a refreshing break from news involving the words 'crunch', 'recession' and 'credit', the BBC had seen Nick's fantastic companion website to his just-released book, WHO GOES THERE, and wanted to cover it, plus even with a picture gallery illustrating his travels through Britain in search of classic and new Docter Who locations.

See the article here and the picture gallery here.

Great news that the book is receiving so much (deserved) interest and we expect it go on to be this year's Christmas present of choice. Exciting times for WHO GOES THERE and you can't say any better than the BBC itself!

Tom

RG competition on thebookseller.com

Have a look on The Bookseller website, and you'll see details of the ReadGeneration competition!

Click on the link below to see the article in full.

 Competition Announcement

Entries are already flooding in, so be quick to email in your details, and you may be one of the lucky winners!

For details about the competition, have a look on the ReadGeneration page, or contact Lauren on laurenparsons@legendpress.co.uk

Lauren

Sarah on the BBC

Sarah, author of the fantastic In Dependence is being interviewed tomorrow by the BBC World Service. We are not entirely sure when it is going to be aired yet, but we will keep you posted so you can listen! In Dependence is Bookgroup.info pick of the month at the moment, so hopefully is being enjoyed by lots of bookgroups up and down the country.

In Dependence is also the book of choice for the free Legend Press and Paperbooks online bookclub this month and information about how to order your special half price members copies can be found by following the link in the right-hand column.

Order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

Launch of Who Goes There

Who Goes There launches this evening at the Phoenix Artists Club in London! The book has been getting lots of publicity this week and Nick is busy doing interviews with local press from the different areas the book is set in. Surrey Today interviewed Nick about the different local locations he visited:

"As part of the trip, Nick travelled to Buckland Sand and Silica quarry, better known to Doctor Who fans as where the classic episode the Seeds of Doom was filmed in 1976.

The site was transformed to resemble Antarctica and featured Tom Baker and a nasty Krynoid monster.

But when Nick accessed the site all he found was a man playing golf.

Nick said: "It was a disappointment because in the show it looked like a huge mound of sand and industrial machinery but [when I got there] it bore no resemblance at all to the Doctor Who site," he said."

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

ReadGeneration competition!

To celebrate the launch of ReadGeneration, we've decided to announce a competition. First prize is a bottle of champagne, or you could be one of ten winners to receive two ReadGeneration books! (I'll leave it to you to decide which prize is better...)

You can also enter your details, and buy books at an exclusive student discount, three books for only only £11.99.

Details of how to enter either competition can be found by clicking on the link below.

ReadGeneration Competition

Good luck!

Lauren

Back from Frankfurt...

Sorry for my absence over the past week (if in fact it was noticed - probably not!), but I was on the annual pilgrimage to the Frankfurt Book Fair, the big Father/Mother of all the book fairs. Thousands of publishing/agent sorts, plus many members of the public (many inexplicibly though happily in assortments of fancy dress) spend several days crammed in together though the eight halls and then evenings crammed into various hotel bars, parties and stands offering free drink (maybe I am judging this on my own behaviour... though I think it is fair to say).

Although tiring, it's also a great opportunity for work and I had numerous very useful meetings with publishers and others involved in the publishing process, from all around the world. Hopefully the expense of going, and the nights out, will be covered by a deal or two to start with, and hopefully even more to make it a very successful trip.

I always enjoy it, in a slightly feeling sickly and tired by the end manner, although was definitely ready to come home by Saturday and made it back at midnight that day to play football Sunday morning - a late 3-2 loss to our long rivals, definitely back to reality with a bump.

Another memorable week but enjoying now being back at my desk trying to catch-up with everything!

Tom

Nick at the Doctor Who Shop tomorrow!

Nick will be signing copies of Who Goes There (pre-release date) at an exclusive signing at the Who Shop in East Ham tomorrow from 12 noon. For those of your who aren't familiar with the shop, visit the website by clicking here to get the full address.

The book is launching in Central London next week!

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

Irish book of the month

We have just heard this afternoon that a Son Called Gabriel has been chosen as Bookcentre's Irish Book of the Month for November and will be promoted front of shop in their stores in Ireland. This is great news for this fantastic book and well-deceived! The book has been getting lots of press attention in Ireland with reviewers emailing me to tell me they are mid-read and gripped!

“Comic, courageous and often painful, this is a beautifully paced and balanced novel that will have an assured place in contemporary Irish writing.” Seamus Deane, Shortlisted for Booker Prize

‘Incredible writing…with a debut as delightful as this is, I can only imagine what Mr. McNicholl is currently working on.  I know I will be anxiously awaiting it." Roundtablereviews.com

The book is of course available to pre-order...

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

Lucy

Tonight at Stoke Newington

  

Mark Piggott and Nick Griffiths will be talking this evening at Stoke Newington Bookshop (159 Stoke Newington High Street) at 8pm tonight. Mark will be signing copies of his fantastic novel Fire Horses and Nick will be signing copies of the equally brilliant 'In The Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose'.

Hope to see some of you there!

Order your copy Harrison Dextrose now - £7.99 

Order your copy of Fire Horses now - £7.99 

Lucy

Introducing Damian McNicholl

 

A Son Called Gabriel is not my first work and came into being as the result of advice given me by a friend who was involved in the world of magazine publishing in New York City. I'd written a novel about a love affair between a young Irish Catholic girl attending college in Belfast and a wealthy Protestant man and given it to my friend to read when I thought it was as polished as I could ever make it. After reading the piece, he informed me I had talent but the story was unending and needed a huge amount of editing. I was shocked (anyone wanting to get published needs to have a thick skin) but accepted his criticism, though didn't have the heart to tackle yet another rewrite as I'd spent two years researching and working on it. I set it aside. (It's now bits and bytes on a floppy disk and I refer to it as my "cutting your teeth" novel, something every published writer has stuck in a drawer somewhere.)

The next day I started work on A Son Called Gabriel. The protagonist's voice and personality must have already been fully formed in my subconscious because the plot flowed effortlessly from the recesses of my mind to my rapidly tapping fingers. I found myself transitioning effortlessly from the voice of the six-year-old Gabriel as the novel opens to the fourteen-year-old in its middle to the eighteen-year-old at its end. It was literally as if Gabriel were typing the words and dialog, and I must confess I did not had that kind of satisfying feeling with the first or my current novel. Indeed, the first draft of 'Gabriel' took only about four months or so to write. Of course a first draft of anything is very rough and needs a great deal of editing to produce a work that's publishable. That process took an additional four months.

Because A Son Called Gabriel reads like a memoir and is written in the first person, I've often been asked by media and readers in the United States (where it was first published) whether the protagonist is really me. It's a fair question because often writers in a first novel do write about their lives. The answer is that I've experienced some of the events in the novel and then developed them for the story's purposes, but the Harkin family is not my family and the novel's setting and family's dark secret is completely fictional. In writing A Son Called Gabriel, my purpose was to try and write a different kind of Irish novel, one that juxtaposed the protagonist's inner conflicts (including those revolving around his complex sexuality) as he grew up within the bosom of a conservative family with the external conflict ravaging 1970s Northern Ireland, and to do it with humor as well as pathos.

Damian

A Son Called Gabriel is published on 25th October and is now available to pre-order

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

First Legend Press and Paperbooks online bookclub!

The first ever Legend Press and Paperbooks online bookclub is now up and running! Each month a book is chosen to discuss and we will post information about the author and the book on the Online book page, accessible by the link in the right-hand column or by clicking here!

We do hope you will join and enjoy reading the books together! From 20th November we will be opening up the bookclub page for people to post their reviews and thoughts.

The bookclub is free to join, and each member can order a half price copy of the bookpick of the month. Simply email bookclub@legend-paperbooks.co.uk with your name and we will send you a special payment link to receive the offer!

Happy reading!

Lucy

Clavier in the Oldie

  The Well-Tempered Clavier by William Coles has received an excellent review in the October issue of the Oldie.

"Given the reluctance of most booksellers to stock books about classical music, it takes courage to call a novel The Well-Tempered Clavier. Yet that is precisely what William Coles has done in his first novel (Legend Press, £7.99), a brilliantly plotted and paced evocation of an affair between a 17-year-old schoolboy and his 23-year-old piano teacher in Eton in the spring of 1982, the Falklands war rumbling in the background."

Read the rest of the review by clicking here!

Order your copy now - £5.99 

Lucy

Emma Seaman debates the Booker

Legend Press author Emma Seaman has been invited to take part in one of Waterstones ‘Great Booker Debates’ next week, to coincide with the announcement of this year’s Man Booker Prize winner.

Six local authors have each been given one of the shortlisted books to read and on Tuesday evening will go head-to-head in a public debate - after which the audience can vote for their Booker winner.

Emma chose Devon-linked author Phillip Hensher’s ‘The Northern Clemency’, a huge 738-page doorstop of a novel which covers 20-odd years and dozens of characters…

"I'll be working hard to win the debate," says Emma, "Booker prize blogs show that 'The Northern Clemency' is lagging behind in the popularity stakes, maybe because readers are intimidated by the sheer size and scale of the work! But the Booker is never predictable, and with some really unusual novels on the list this year, it's going to be a fun evening for the speakers and the audience."

The event takes place at Torquay Library on Tuesday 14th October - from 7pm.

The Man Booker Prize 2008 shortlisted novels are:
Aravind Adiga The White Tiger (Atlantic)
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber)
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies (John Murray)
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate)
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton)

This year's judging panel is chaired by Michael Portillo former MP and Cabinet Minister. He is joined by Alex Clark, editor of Granta; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar's bookshops and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster.

In Dependence praised on bookgroup.info

In Dependence by Sarah Ladipo Manyika has got an excellent review on Bookgroup.info. It has been chosen as the featured guest review on the site for October:

"IN DEPENDENCE is an ambitious debut novel, crossing and re-crossing continents and spanning four decades. It brims with great characters, and a great sense of time and place. More than a love story, it is a sharp and thoughtful exploration of inter-racial relationships, and a perceptive look at the chaotic and complex history of modern Nigeria."

To read the rest of the review click here.

Order your copy now - £5.99 

Lucy

Nick Griffiths = style icon

  

Nick was featured in the Times Magazine this week speaking about style. Nick Griffiths, 43, writer: (jacket £20, Brighton Indoor Market, combats Bloomingdale’s, Storm watch £130, ring made by a jeweller friend, Kerry September ) declares himself a hater of socks.

The release of Nick's Doctor Who inspired travel book Who Goes There (on 25th October) was also featured in the Bookseller this week.

Pre-order your copy now - £5.99 

Silence - Book Cover of the week

 Silence has been voted as Book cover of the week on www.erinaislinn.com. Voting for Best cover of October starts on November 3rd, so I will post a link up for everyone to vote for Gudrun's fantastic cover at the start of next month! 

"The second you look at this, the creepy feeling is upon you, and if you're a lover of murder mysteries, the creepier the cover, the greater your desire to read the book."

If you missed Josie's interview on BBC Radio Wales listen by clicking here!

Order your copy of Silence now - £7.99 

Lucy

Officially launched!

Legend Press, in conjunction with Arts Council England, is happy to announce the launch of two pioneering schemes to support the reading of fiction.

 

The first strand to the project entitled 'Exclusively Independent' aims to combine talents between independent publishers, and independent bookshops and develop a firm relationship. From here we will elect a panel to decide the 'Independent picks of the month', these will be placed in each shop (initially London area) providing a consistent exclusive choice of raw talent, that too often goes unnoticed.

 

The second strand is entitled 'ReadGeneration'. The project plans to incorporate reading into the everyday lives of young people, and enhance the creativity that isn't encouraged enough. Targeting people between the ages of 18-30, we aim to communicate with the gap that publishers are renowned for ignoring.

 

You can read more about each sheme by clicking on 'ReadGeneration' and 'Independent Bookseller Initiative'.

 

If you would like to take part, and be on the panel for the Independent Initiative, then please do get in touch.

 

For more information email laurenparsons@legend-paperbooks.co.uk

 

Lauren

Josie on Radio Wales tonight

Josie Henley-Einion will be appearing on BBC Radio Wales Arts Show tonight at 6:30-7pm. The show is presented by Nicola Heywood and the theme of the evening is Storytelling. It will also be available on 'Listen Again' if you miss it! Josie was asked onto the show after her novel was named Waterstone's Welsh book of the month for August.

The book is of course available to buy on the online shop!

Order your copy now - £5.99 

Lucy

Switched on!

Nick's book Who Goes There, which is out on 25th October has got another mention in the press on Switched On! It is great to see the book getting lots of attention in the media. We have been busy arranging events for Nick to promote the book. Here's what he is up to in the next few weeks:

9th Oct - Signing at Stoke Newington Bookshop
18th Oct - Signing at the Doctor Who shop in East Ham
23rd Oct - Launch party
30th Oct - Talk and signing at Borders Charing Cross Road 7pm
1st Nov - Signing at Waterstone's Redhill from 11am
12th Nov - Signing at Waterstone's Leadenhall from 12:30pm
22nd Nov - Doctor Who Day at Ealing library

Pre-order your copy now - £5.99 

Lucy

Sarah on Waterstones.com

 Sarah Ladipo Manyika has been featured on Waterstones.com in a feature about black history month, to view click here.

Sarah provided an interesting introduction to the page "Several years ago, I found myself wondering why there were so few love stories written about contemporary Africans or about Africans in the diaspora. Yes, there were stories of war and civil strife; of tyranny; and of corruption. But where were all the grand amours, the tales of love and heartache? Unable to find the sort of stories that I was longing to read, I resorted to writing one myself, which resulted in the completion of my first novel, In Dependence.

Along the way, I have been inspired by a wide range of writers from Olaudah Equiano to Samuel Selvon, Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith - whose novels have brought to life the long history of Britain's black population. Looking across the Atlantic (in both directions), I have been influenced by writers such as James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe and an ever-growing group of dynamic new writers including Chris Abani, Patrice Nganang, Helon Habila, and Chimamanda Adichie. These are exciting times for black writers and artists; and Black History Month provides a much needed space and time in which to recognise and celebrate this burgeoning talent."

Order your copy now - £5.99 

Lucy