Spring has sprung!
Some nice news to celebrate the arrival of spring: Endeavour Press will republish Barbara Else’s wonderful historical pastiche Wild Latitudes, a tragi-comic romp about identity, family, inventions, and greed set in Dunedin, New Zealand, at the time of its gold-rush (the same period as Eleanor Catton’s Booker-winning The Luminaries).
Film Manufacturers Inc. have exercised their option to make a film/tv series of Georgette Heyer’s Regency Buck, and we await news of progress on the movie of The Grand Sophy. We’ve recently received several expressions of interest in bringing Heyer’s Regency novels to the screen, both little and large, and are looking forward to good news on that front too.
Outside our own little island, S. Williams’ Tuesday Falling has outsold J K Rowling, Lee Child and pretty much everyone else in the Czech Republic! An extraordinary achievement for a word-of-mouth smash hit.
Peter has finished editing the translation of Pol Koutsakis’s crime novel Athenian Blues: it’s now a superb example of contemporary Greek noir, and Bitter Lemon Press will publish it early next year as the first in a series featuring an unholy trio who work as a “caretaker” or contract killer, a high-ranking police detective, and a transgender hooker.
He has also signed up three exciting new authors: Padraig Cinnamond, who is writing a series of action-packed historical novels set in the reign of the boy-king Richard II, which should appeal to fans of Bernard Cornwell; Rob Woodhouse, who has written a crime novel featuring the Romany community which we would describe as a cross between Damon Runyon and Martina Cole; and Melissa Josias, a young South African whose debut novel, “We Looked Like Giants”, draws you straight into the world of a young girl who thinks she has nothing to live for, until she lands in Los Angeles.
Elsewhere, Adrian Selby’s terrific epic fantasy debut Snakewood published in March, with Orbit. The lovely people at Goldsboro sold out of their special hardback edition within hours of it going on sale, so a brilliant start has been made to what we are sure will be a glittering career.