News
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September Website Statistics
03 Oct 2011
There were 9,176 visits to the website in September - 80% of them new visits - with 7,713 unique visitors from 130 countries and 21,376 page views. There are currently just over 3,000 subscribers to the newsletter.
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The Night the Angels Came rises to no 4
27 Sep 2011
Congratulations to Cathy Glass whose The Night the Angels Came has shot up to number 4 in the non-fiction paperback bestseller list in its second week of publication.
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The Night the Angels Came goes straight in at no 9
25 Sep 2011
Congratulations to Cathy Glass who, in a very competitive Christmas market, has gone straight in at number 9 in the PB non-fiction bestseller’s list with The Night the Angels Came .
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August 2011 website statistics
18 Sep 2011
There were 9,093 visits to the website in August - over 80% of them new visits - with 7,829 unique visitors from 123 countries and 21,190 page views.
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Crack house is currently no.2 on iTunes non-fiction chart
15 Sep 2011
Crack house is currently no.2 on iTunes non-fiction chart, just behind Derren Brown and above Andrew Marr, Bill Bryson, Mark Kermode and Stephen Fry.
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Flury of foreign rights deals
13 Sep 2011
The weeks before the Frankfurt Book Fair have seen a flury of foreign rights deals including :
US rights in Christian Wolmar’s The Great Railway Revolution and Japanese and Czech rights in his Engines of War
Hebrew rights in Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day.
Hungarian rights in Celia and John Lee’s The Churchills
Indonesian rights in Francesca Gould and David Haviland’s Why Dogs Eat Poop and Simplified Chinese in their Horny Lizards and Headless Chickens
Italian rights in David Stafford’s Mission Accomplished
Dutch, Croatian and Serbian rights in Shed Simove’s What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex.
Spanish rights in Adrian Weale’s SS: A New History
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Three book deal for Cathy Glass in Poland
13 Sep 2011
Hachette (Poland) have licensed three Cathy Glass titles - Mummy Told Me Not to Tell, I MIss Mummy and The Night the Angels Came.
Cassie Harte went to no 1 in Poland with I Did Tell I Did and expectations are high too for Cathy whose The Night the Angels Came is published next week in UK.
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Cooking the Books with Gurpareet
13 Sep 2011
Celebrity chef and nutritionist, Gurpareet Bains presents a new monthly cookery segment “Cooking the Books with Gurpareet” that will be broadcast from BBC Radio London 94.9 FM, starting Saturday October 22 2011.
Every 3rd Saturday of the month, Gurpareet will cook a dish from a recipe book authored by a Londoner, and brings it in for presenters Sunny & Shay to taste. Gurpareet will discuss the author and concept behind the book as well as go through the recipe in brief.
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Glowing reviews for Sian Rees's Moll Flanders
11 Sep 2011
Congratulations to Sian Rees whose Moll Flanders , recently published by Chatto, has received glowing reviews:
“…an eye-opening introduction to an underworld of sex and crime…” The Sunday Times
“…wonderfully colourful…” The Scotsman
“…what Rees does in this engaging book is to give us the extra historical information we need to create a richer context for Moll’s story. ” Katherine Hughes, The Guardian
” Ably and entertainingly Rees pictures Moll’s world of Stuart London. She traces the sources of her remarkable story and the overlaps between Defoe’s life and that of his heroine.This is a readable, informative and colourful account.” Express
“…lively and bracing…” Valerie Grove, The Times
“Sian Rees brings alive this fictional woman and makes her live and breathe in the teeming London of her birth. The city is a character in itself, full of thieves and vagabonds and highwaymen. For me, however, the particular fascination of this work lies in the vivid detail of what it means to have been female in the 1600s…This book raises many relevant issues such as the relationship between the state and private morality and the rights of children. Rees has written history at its most accessible: learned, informative and highly entertaining.” Catherine Dunne, Sunday Express
“…her fascinating and expertly researched new book…Rees firmly repositions Defoe’s work back in its appropriate context…Rees’s skill as a masterful researcher and a story teller truly shines. We are given a detailed tour of the workings and contexts of Moll’s world - taken from London to Virginia, and introduced to everything from the practices of midwifery to indentured servitude…Sian Rees has suceeded in painting an almost three dimensional context for Defoe’s celebrated novel. Moll Flanders is meely the peg on which she hangs a thoroughly engrossing study of 17th-century life,” Hallie Rubenhold, BBC History Magazine
“…this vivid look at both the character and the culture that created her.” Metro
“…a lucid, intelligent guide. ” Sunday Herald
“Making clever use of the online Old Bailey records and the plethora of best-selling criminal biographies from the 17th and 18th centuries, Rees uncovers all manner of entertaining stories … Foregrounding riveting historical fact to colour Defoe’s famous fiction, Rees offers a lively 17th-century history with the misfortunate Moll Flanders as its inspiration.” History Today
” Rees writes vividly about the lives of the early colonial settlers…Rees has a magpie’s eye for the details that make history sparkle. She also has the dexterity needed to turn this pick ‘n’ mix approach into a neat, coherent whole. The result is a wonderfully entertaining, enlightening book, which in its own way is just as much fun as the original.” Mail on Sunday
“Rees is an assiduous researcher with a perceptive and unflinching eye for the sordid and outrageous minutiae of 17th-century English low-life…Defoe’s novel is a compulsive page-turner and so is this latest work of Sian Rees.” Patrick Skene Catling, Irish Times
“… this slim volume is brisk, lucid and packed with color…If you haven’t read the original , this book will surely prove the necessary spur; to Rees’s credit, it’s also highly enjoyable in its own right.” The Lady
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Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan is no 4
11 Sep 2011
Congratulations to Frank Ledwidge whose Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan is number four on the Evening Standard non-fiction bestseller list this week.
The book has received widespread review coverage including:
“Losing Small Wars is an excellent book … It provides a devastating, highly readable critique of why Britain’s armed forces have fared so badly in two of the country’s most recent and controversial conflicts: Iraq and Afghanistan…. what Losing Small Wars does so well is to bring the catalogue of errors to life in graphic detail.” Sean Rayment, Telegraph
” … the author deserves applause for bluntly expressing the truths about our recent military failures that too many of those involved find it convenient to obscure… The author concludes: “We do not currently have armed forces that are equipped for conflicts… where brutally put they are actually invaders in lands far away and of which they know really very little.” I agree. A radical shake-up of the army is needed. It is only because its prestige is so low after defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan – as Ledwidge justly characterises these experiences – that the government can get away with savaging its strength in defence cuts. If much is wrong with today’s British Army, by the time the Cameroons have finished there will be precious little of it left.” Max Hastings, The Sunday Times
“…Losing Small Wars, is a savage indictment of the military leadership that got British soldiers into one impossible situation after another in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Rodric Braithwaite, Financial Times
“In many ways this is the sort of book I’d like to have written. Controversial, iconoclastic even, written by an insider, it casts a knowledgeable and critical eye over recent British military operations and doesn’t shy away from exposing incompetency and naming the guilty.” Stuart Crawford, The Scotsman
