Archives par étiquette : Northbank Talent Management

A BETTER NIGHTMARE de Megan Freeman

A dark and absorbing allegory for the power that young people possess in their bones to change things that feel far bigger than them, A Better Nightmare is a whirlwind adventure — a story of friendship, romance, and a radical crusade for one group of teens to fight for their right to feel.

A BETTER NIGHTMARE
by Megan Freeman
Chicken House/Scholastic, March 2025
(via Northbank Talent Management)

If the entire world believes in a lie, does that make it the truth?

Emily Emerson is nearly sixteen, finally a senior at the Wildsmoor Facility. But so is Meera, isn’t she? Meera, who is nineteen and has been a senior for as long as Emily can remember? Here, the students live each day as shadows, one day blurring into the next, hardly aware of life passing them by while the symptoms of the Grimm Cross Syndrome that afflicts them all is trained out of them. Rules. Order. Repetition. Medication.

Emily was eight when she started showing signs of the disease. Odd dreams, hallucinations – impossible things that happened around her. Unconscious thoughts that could be set free into the world—flowers that covered the house, thick like a forest and sowed with nothing more than her unconscious thoughts. It was beautiful until it turned evil, when Emily did her first bad thing and found herself here. Now, she’ll do anything to get better and get back to her life. She’ll be more quiet and obedient than everyone else.

Until she meets Emir.

Emir isn’t like the other kids at Wildsmoor. He’s quicker and livelier. He says things that he shouldn’t – dangerous things. Emir is electric, magnetic in more ways than Emily can know.

When Emir introduces her to The Cure, a secret society for kids who believe that The Grimm isn’t a disease at all, but a gift, Emily starts to wake up, and so do her strange abilities. The outcome is a dream come true. But sometimes the best dreams and the worst nightmares have the same people in them.

Megan Freeman writes young adult fiction and loves all things magic and mythology. She juggles writing with her day job working for a children’s mental health charity, promoting wellbeing through surf therapy. Megan hails from the far west of Cornwall, and when she’s not working or writing, loves tramping around the moorland and swimming or surfing in the sea.

THE ROYAL STATION MASTER’S DAUGHTERS d’Ellee Seymour

A heartwarming and dramatic World War I saga of secrets, love and the British royal family for readers of Daisy Styles and Maisie Thomas. Based on the Saward family, who ran the train station at Wolferton, the local stop for the Royal Sandringham Estate.

THE ROYAL STATION MASTER’S DAUGHTERS (Book 1)
by Ellee Seymour
Zaffre, April 2022
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Roll out the red carpet. The royal train is due in half an hour and there’s not a minute to be wasted.
It’s 1915 and the country is at war. In the small Norfolk village of Wolferton, uncertainty plagues the daily lives of sisters Ada, Jessie and Beatrice Saward, as their men are dispatched to the frontlines of Gallipoli.
Harry, their father, is the station master at the local stop for the royal Sandringham Estate. With members of the royal family and their aristocratic guests passing through the station on their way to the palace, the Sawards’ unique position gives them unrivalled access to the monarchy.
But when the Sawards’ estranged and impoverished cousin Maria shows up out of the blue, everything the sisters thought they knew about their family is thrown into doubt.
THE ROYAL STATION MASTER’S DAUGHTERS is the first book in a brand-new World War I saga series, inspired by the Saward family, who ran the station at Wolferton in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through this history-making family we get a glimpse into all walks of life – from glittering royalty to the humblest of servants.

Don’t miss the second book in the series, The Royal Station Master’s Daughters at War, published in March 2023.

Ellee Seymour is an author, ghost writer and PR consultant. The Shop Girls is her first book as an author. It was a joy for her to research and write this heart-warming true story about a glamorous bygone era, based on an elegant ladies’ department store in Cambridge with its very own Mr Selfridge-styled character as the boss who the shop girls either loved or loathed. Heyworth’s closed 49 years ago and had all but faded from living memory when Ellee began researching the book. Ellee lives near Cambridge.

BEAUTIFUL SHINING PEOPLE de Michael Grothaus

A remarkable Japan-set speculative novel about quantum computing and what it means to belong in a rapidly changing world – perfect for fans of Ex-Machina and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan.

BEAUTIFUL SHINING PEOPLE
by Michael Grothaus
Vulkan, March 2023
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Tokyo, late 2040s. It’s an ordinary world, one where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in hamburger shops. There are two superpowers and a digital Cold War, but all conflicts are safely oceans away. The new frontier: quantum computing – and it will change the world.
17-year-old coding genius John arrives in Tokyo, invited by Sony, who want to buy his quantum algorithm. One cold night he enters a small, strange cafe – a cafe run by a disgraced sumo wrestler accompanied by a peculiar dog with a spherical head. And then there’s the waitress, who hides a striking secret. There’s something different about her – a kind of splintering inside her, like there’s something in there that doesn’t belong. John might be the only person that can help her discover the truth – about what’s inside, where her missing father went, and who might be looking for them now. It’s a discovery that will take them from the neon streets of Tokyo to Hiroshima’s tragic past to the snowy mountains of Nagano, and from the safety of family to the machinations of Big Tech and man’s incessant struggle for power.

Michael Grothaus is an author and journalist from Saint Louis, Missouri, now living in London. He spent his twenties in Chicago where he earned his degree in filmmaking from Columbia and got his start in journalism writing for Screen. After working for institutions including The Art Institute of Chicago, Twentieth Century Fox, and Apple he earned his postgraduate degree with distinction in creative writing from the University of London. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Litro Magazine, Fast Company, VICE, the Irish Times, Screen, Quartz, and others. His debut novel, Epiphany Jones, was published in 2016 and his first non-fiction book, Trust No One, was published by Hodder in November 2021.

THE ELEVATOR de Claire Cooper

A fast-paced thriller with a killer twist, for fans of The Lying Room by Nicci French and Those People by Louise Candlish.

THE ELEVATOR
by Claire Cooper
Bookouture, August 2023
(via Northbank Talent Management)

THE ELEVATOR follows two women trapped in a lift over one sweltering, claustrophobic day in a New York office building. Trying to rebuild her life after an incident at work, HR director Cerys transfers to a new role in her company’s New York office. On the day of an important meeting, she steps into the lift with Maeve, a woman she had noticed arguing with the receptionist in a British accent. A few seconds later, the electronic voice stutters, then stops, and the elevator grinds to a halt.
Unbeknown to Cerys, Maeve is driven by a dark secret which has brought her to New York, and she won’t leave until she gets what she wants. Could Cerys be the person she’s been looking for? As the hours tick by, one thing becomes clear – one of them might not make it out alive.

Claire Cooper grew up in a small village in south Wales before moving to London. She worked for the Civil Service for seventeen years before realising that she much preferred writing novels about psychotic killers to Ministerial speeches. She lives in London with her husband and two cats.

THE DICTATORS de Iain Dale

Were the signs that Putin is a ruthless dictator there all along? How should we deal with President Xi of China? THE DICTATORS will contain 64 essays detailing the lives of some of the world’s infamous dictators, going back to 600BC up to the current day.

THE DICTATORS:
A Warning from History
by Iain Dale
Hodder & Stoughton, April 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

THE DICTATORS will feature essays on 60 of the most significant and notorious dictators from the 4th century BC to the present day. Unlike the subjects of the previous three books in this series, which were self-selecting, the decision about who to include will be subjective. It will be Iain’s personal choice, and he will include a mixture of ‘usual suspects’ and less familiar figures. The essays will be written by a range of academics, historians, commentators, political journalists and serving politicians. Each contributor will be carefully chosen. Most have either written about their subjects before or have a personal connection of some sort.
THE DICTATORS will be selected according to a defined set of criteria, and will include elected and unelected dictators, wartime and peacetime dictators, those driven by ideology and those with a reputation for sheer brutality. How did these tyrants, autocrats and despots seize power and how did they exercise it? Are there specific character traits that all dictators share? What can we learn from them in order to spot the warning signs in future?
By studying a wide variety of dictators in different parts of the world and throughout history, themes and patterns will inevitably emerge. The book is acutely relevant to world politics today.
As the subtitle states, it will serve as a warning from history.

Iain Dale is an accomplished broadcaster, presenting his own daily radio show on LBC, and several podcasts including the Iain Dale Book Club and The Presidents and Prime Ministers to accompany the Hodder books. He is a regular on CNN, Question Time, Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, the Jeremy Vine Show on Channel 5, The Andrew Marr Show, Politics Live and a myriad of other political programmes too. He is a regular columnist for the Telegraph, Evening Standard and the ‘i’ newspaper and has a weekly column in the Eastern Daily Press and East Anglian Daily Times.