21 August 2009

I haven’t read Liam McIlvanney’s All the Colours of the Town but already I’m looking forward to it. Set between Glasgow, where I was born and grew up, and Belfast, where I’ve now spent nearly half my life, I couldn’t fail to be drawn to McIlvanney’s crime thriller. And it’s had a great press – a quick look on Amazon shows that it’s had 32 reviews since it was published on 6 August. Good going, by anyone’s standards. I must admit I’m biased in favour of this novel, not just because of the Glasgow-Belfast content but also because I’ve met Liam and he is sharp as a tack and is blessed with that dry wit that I associate with both cities. He also comes from impressive writing stock – he’s the son of celebrated Scottish writer William McIlvanney, who wrote Laidlaw, a terrific crime novel and an inspiration for Rankin’s Rebus novels. I still remember my excitement when I read Laidlaw about ten years ago, and here’s why:

‘Laidlaw sat at his desk, feeling a bleakness that wasn’t unfamiliar to him. Intermittently he found himself doing penance for being him. When the mood seeped into him, nothing mattered. He could think of no imaginable success, no way of life, no dream of wishes fulfilled that would satisfy … He was drinking too much – not for pleasure, just sipping systematically, like low proof hemlock. His marriage was a maze that nobody had ever mapped, an infinity of habit and hurt and betrayal down which Ena and he wandered separately, meeting occasionally in the children. He was a policeman, a Detective Inspector, and more and more he wondered how that had happened. And he was nearly forty.’

Liam McIvanney is reading from All the Colours of the Town in No Alibis on Wednesday 26 August at 7 p.m.

18 August 2009

I’ve finally discovered Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, after everyone else in the world, it seems. I was having coffee with Glenn Patterson yesterday and he asked me if I had read The Twelve. I remembered that I’d heard something about it on William Crawley’s Sunday Sequence but weirdly I thought it was called The Seven! Anyway, having heard from Glenn the story of how the novel came to be published and of how gripping and interesting he thought the book was, I rushed out to get it. And when I got to work this morning I was full of excitement, ready to tell everyone about it, only to find that most people already knew about it. Damn!

The last novel I read about the North was David Park’s wonderful The Truth Commissioner. I’m interested to see what Stuart Neville can do with a similar kind of territory. Will keep you posted.

Blackstaff Press Poetry Lung Soup 14 August 2009

Lung Soup, by Andrew Elliott

Lung Soup draws the reader into a surreal and dangerously unstable world. This new collection blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction and dreams and reality to create a powerful portrait of of the creative mind. Lung Soup is an extraordinary collection of breathtaking poetic range and imaginative daring.

Here is an exclusive extract from Andrew's powerful second collection, Lung Soup.

Great Beauty

Amy is not a great beauty – lipless, hipless, I could go on –
but her red hair is to the wind what the word wind
is to the mind of a woman like Sabrina who can remember
the red flags flying from the guns of the ships in Kiel harbour

and who would later take the train to Berlin in time to hear
proclaimed too late – from a balcony of the Kaiser’s castle,
backlit by crystal chandeliers – in words that were carried away
by an east wind bringing to the twilight snow like a message

indecipherable to all but the few, that Sabrina should pass herself
off as a boy and find herself rising on a steep learning curve
at whose pinnacle her heart was to glow like a star and then
come falling back to earth like a charcoal sketch by Käthe Kollwitz

of a woman in whose eye, had you been there ... standing behind her ...
waiting for a tram ... watching her watching ... over her shoulder ...
you’d have noted like an ember ... flaring in the wind ... Berlin,
like a strongman, having brought them so close, preparing

to part them like a chest expander ... when suddenly the wind
blows Amy over (as gusts can do to all such tall, untethered things)
and Sabrina, looking neither left nor right, shouts, I’m a doctor! –
L’me through! It fools no one but people are people, what can they do?

Hail a cab! shouts Sabrina, cradling Amy, who’s a little concussed,
in her lap. A cab in its own good time pulls up and Sabrina asks,
Where do you live? Amy, oddly, can’t remember so Sabrina
says, I’ll take you to my place ... She shouts an address in Wedding

and the driver, like a Doberman pinscher, would have sniffed at it
over his shoulder if Sabrina hadn’t snapped, And where the hell
are you from driver, Dalldorf ? Had I been that driver I’d have driven
like the wind drives all before it with an eye on the rearview mirror.

'Dream On'

John Richardson 30 July 2009

We had a visit this morning from our Amazon-storming author, John Richardson. John's book, Dream On: One Hacker's Challenge to Break Par in a Year was number one sports book on Amazon for a week, and made number thirteen on the overall chart. It's still riding high and selling brilliantly, and we're all delighted.

John signed 50 copies of his book for us when he came in, and these copies are available to buy exclusively from the Blackstaff website and via our direct order line (0845 1200 386 (UK); +44 (0) 28 9073 0112 (outside UK). First come, first served, for a signed first edition!

HW

Return to The Blue Cabin 5 August 2009

When I first arrived at Blackstaff over three years ago, one of the first books I worked on was Mike Faulkner’s first book, The Blue Cabin: Living by the Tides on Islandmore. I loved this book from the first time I read the manuscript and, whenever I look at it to check something quickly – such as the way a page was laid out, or to check the ISBN – I find myself drawn back in.

Mike has written a new book for us, which we’ll publish in October. I’m enjoying it just as much as the first one, and this time it will be illustrated throughout with colour photographs. Encouragingly, lots of the readers who have reviewed the book on Amazon mention that they’re looking forward to the sequel – their wait will soon be over.

In case you haven’t discovered The Blue Cabin yet, I’m including a short extract below.

. . . Our photograph album, and my journal, are so full of easy hours stretched out on the wind-flattened grass of remote rocks and islands, surrounded by sea pinks, cow parsley and wild irises, the smell of salt and the sounds of the sea that, in retrospect I wonder how we got anything done. It was a time to consolidate and to enjoy old friendships, particularly with those we left behind, and we found that because we tended to set aside a few days to justify their journeys from Scotland, the time we spent together had more substance, unhurried and largely untrammelled, as it was, by the social niceties of arrival times, polite greetings and small talk.

And of course most of our friends, never having lived on a bona fide island, have been on adventures of their own, giving us the double pleasure of providing and sharing. It can be a culture shock for them, there’s no doubt about it. There is something either magical or unsettling, depending on your point of view, in the knowledge that the strip of water in front of you is more than just a strip of water, as in a river or a freshwater loch. For some it represents an unnatural, perhaps even scary, suspension of normal life, but for us it is a barrier on the other side of which we have been able to take leave of the rest of the world without appearing unfriendly.

(c) Michael Faulkner, taken from The Blue Cabin: Living by the Tides on Islandmore

HW

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