Archives de catégorie : Fiction

UNSERE GLÜCKLICHEN TAGE de Julia Holbe

Four girlfriends and an unforgettable summer that changed everything …

UNSERE GLÜCKLICHEN TAGE
[Our Happy Days]
by Julia Holbe
Penguin Germany, March 2020

Lenica, Marie, Fanny and Elsa – four friends spending a never-ending summer on the Atlantic coast in France. The future lies ahead of them like a promise; they are so carefree and full of the joys of their very existence that they don’t notice life laying down its path forward. When they meet again many years later they realize that their dreams and longings still join them together like some invisible power – in spite of everything that has happened since that evening when Lenica brought Sean along.

Julia Holbe’s narrative is breathtakingly emotional – the tale of the really important things in life: love and friendship, coincidence and fate, guilt and betrayal – and that we only remember the past as we want it to be.

Julia Holbe was born in 1969 and lives in Frankfurt am Main but spends part of the year in Brittany. She spent twenty years working as an editor of international literature at the S. Fischer Verlag. UNSERE GLÜCKLICHEN TAGE is her first novel.

THE USEFUL IDIOT de John Sweeney

Based on the terrifying and tragic true story of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who first told the world about the famine in the Soviet Union in 1933

THE USEFUL IDIOT
by John Sweeney
Silvertail Books, January 2020

Moscow, 1932. Gareth Jones, a young Welsh reporter, arrives in the Soviet Union excited to see for himself how Josef Stalin is forging a new civilisation. He meets American and British journalists who acclaim Stalin’s great experiment—but when Jones witnesses people starving to death in Ukraine, his belief in the Soviet revolution is shattered. He must decide whether to report the truth or become just another useful idiot, saying only what the Communist secret police allow and smothering the evidence of his own eyes. In this special kind of hell, anyone could be an informer, and Jones knows his life will be at risk if he is even thought to be defying Stalin. And when the woman he loves falls under the suspicion of the secret police, everything Jones values is in danger. Can he reveal the terrible truth about the Ukrainian famine to the world, or will he be silenced forever?

THE USEFUL IDIOT is the secret history of the first great Soviet lie—wrapped up in an electrifying novel perfect for readers of Robert Harris, Ken Follett and Kate Atkinson. As Vladimir Putin rewrites the Nazi-Soviet pact and with the horrors of Chernobyl and the Cold War so recent, this thriller of fake news in 1932 is real storytelling of enormous significance.

John Sweeney is an award-winning journalist and a former long-serving BBC reporter. He is the author of ten books, including three novels: the 200,000-copy bestseller ELEPHANT MOON (Silvertail Books), another historical thriller based on true events, and two modern-day political thrillers, COLD and ROAD (Amazon Publishing). He also wrote an investigation into the Church of Scientology, THE CHURCH OF FEAR (Silvertail Books), and an account of his time spent undercover in North Korea, NORTH KOREA UNDERCOVER (Transworld).

Publication will coincide with the release on 14th February of Mr. Jones, a film telling the story of Gareth Jones by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, starring James Norton and Vanessa Kirby. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. You can watch the trailer at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Rz0ye5c-4

OFF: The Day the Internet Died de Chris Colin, illustré par Rinee Shah

A hilarious and timely illustrated bedtime (fantasy) story for adults (and young adults).

OFF: The Day the Internet Died (A Bedtime Fantasy)
by Chris Colin, illustrated by Rinee Shah
Prestel, Fall 2020

OFF shows us how weird and wonderful it would be if the Internet was banished from existence, in the Biblical sense, as it probably should be. It’s GO THE F*CK TO SLEEP for the tech-addicted masses and might possibly save the world!

OFF is for the millions of anxious college kids, parents, and previously functional people touched by the Internet, all around the world, ages 18 to 65. It crosses business, psychology, humor, and lifestyle. Basically, it’s a fantasy priced at the low low price of…a book.

Chris Colin contributes to The New York Times Magazine, Outside Magazine, Pop-Up Magazine, Afar Magazine, Wired and many other publications. He has a piece in this year’s Best American Science & Nature Writing. He’s the co-author of What to Talk About, as well as What Really Happened to the Class of ’93 and Blindsight, named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011, and This Is Camino which was nominated for a James Beard Award. He lives in San Francisco with his family.

Rinee Shah is a former art director (The New York Times, Apple) and illustrator in San Francisco, CA. Her illustration projects have been featured in Dwell, Fast Company, Juxtapoz, Mashable, and the Huffington Post.

THE COLOUR OF THUNDER de Suzanne Harrison

A stormy and atmospheric, multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-faceted mystery set in Hong Kong, full of secrets and dark pasts.

THE COLOUR OF THUNDER
by Suzanne Harrison
Legend Press, October 2020

One small island, six troubled lives, and the storm of the century is on its way. In one of the world’s most vibrant international cities, present day Hong Kong, the lives of six people become irreversibly intertwined. The past is catching up with those running from it, while the futures of others hangs dangerously in the balance. But who knows the most? And what will they do to get it? A pacey and vibrant debut novel.

‘Most people think of Hong Kong as simply high rises and a shopping mecca for cheap hand bags. But there are loads of interesting characters, plenty of political intrigue, lovely locales to reveal, cultural crossroads – and I have tried to encompass all that in to this book. There have been some great books set in Hong Kong written in English, but I do think there could be many more. The city has a lot more going for it on the story telling front and I would like to get that out there to a wider audience.’ –Suzanne Harrison

Suzanne Harrison is an Australian journalist and Editor who has lived in Hong Kong since 1999. She currently works freelance writing lifestyle and news features for the South China Morning Post.

BENEFACTION de Katie Lattari

An examination of human nature at our truest, and the inhuman lengths some take for success, some take for peace, and others, ultimately, take for justice.

BENEFACTION Book 1
by Katie Lattari
Sourcebooks, Spring 2021

Coral Dunn struggles with depression and suicidal tendencies. She inflicts self-harm to crack the tension within, but she also draws, paints, and writes what she’s feeling for release only as violent as her imagination. When she befriends a fellow artist at the Lupine Valley Arts Collective in northern Maine, she thinks she may have found true respite from her pain. But he has a use for her of his own, and it’s far too late, once he’s mined her deepest vulnerabilities, to escape his plan. Decades later, Audra Colfax is the star Painting MFA student at the Boston Institute for the Visual Arts. A gifted artist like Coral, she too is from the wilds of Maine. There, at her remote family home, she’s put the final touches on her thesis project, “Benefaction.” It’s a vivid collage of Coral’s works found scattered around the property and her own, enmeshed to tell a story of a dark past that ties the two women inextricably. It’s ready for her advisor, the esteemed Max Durant, to come up and review. He won’t know Audra obsessively engineered every last detail of his visit. Or that it had to be him from the start, advising her, so she could get to him by doing what he does best. She’d use what she’s inherited to lure him back to Maine. He has no idea she knows his worst secret, and that it’s the sole reason why he’s been invited.

What comes to light, chapter by spellbinding chapter, is that one grand, grotesque act of selfishness committed by Max as a young man, followed by years of manipulating women for art, has set into motion the machinery of his own fatal undoing. The man should pay for his crimes, and no one is more deserving of revenge than the women to whom he owes his career. Audra is well aware he’s a monster, but she doesn’t know everything that simmers beneath his surface. Spun in alternative points of view across an electric, twisty few days, BENEFACTION is a rallying call of feminist fury; a WHISPER NETWORK or BIG LITTLE LIES for artists; a GONE GIRL tale of atonement underscored by notes of MY DARK VANESSA, set in the woods during hunting season.

Katie Lattari holds a BA and an MA in English from the University of Maine and an MFA in Fiction Writing/Prose from the University of Notre Dame. In 2016 her debut novel AMERICAN VAUDVILLE was published by Mammoth Books, a small literary press; we see BENEFACTION as her commercial breakout.