DeVito to direct ‘Charlotte Doyle’

DOGGIE DAY CARE MURDER: A Melanie Travis Mystery

by Laurien Berenson

(click on cover for book detail)

Kensington, $22 (256pp)

ISBN 978-0-7582-1604-5

            At the start of Berenson’s warm and fuzzy 15th dog mystery (after 2007’s Hounded to Death), Melanie Travis, standard poodle lover and dedicated amateur sleuth, checks out the Pine Ridge Canine Care Center in Stamford, Conn., on behalf of Alice Brickman, a mom recently returned to the work force who needs a place to park her golden retriever.  On Melanie’s second tour of the posh doggie day care center, she discovers the corpse of “seriously cute” Steve Pine, who co-owned Pine Ridge with his sister, Candy.  On Alice’s wacky recommendation (“She’s like Nancy Drew.  Melanie finds murderers and makes them confess”), Candy asks Melanie to catch the killer.  Who cares if Melanie isn’t a licensed PI or the local police department doesn’t appear to investigate anything?  With winning pluck and lots of luck, Berenson’s cluehound pursues another cute tail-wagging puzzler.  (Sept.)

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder of Road Hill House

by Kate Summerscale

(Click book cover for detail)

We are so happy to let you know that Kate Summerscale has won the very prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize!  

Please find below some of the articles from the press on Wednesday, July 16, 2008:

The book has already been a bestseller in the UK and US and the rights sold so far are as follows: UK: Bloomsbury (pub April 2008), US: Walker & Co.; Brazil: Companhia das Letras; France: Bourgois; Germany: Bloomsbury; Holland: Nieuw Amsterdam; Italy: Einaudi; Russia: AST; Spain: Lumen (Random House Mondadori).

The book has been published in France by Christian Bourgois Editeur, under the title “The Road Hill House Affair”.  They currently have 6,000 copies in the bookstores and it has been getting some wonderful reviews.  Here is one of them translated into English and please scroll down to find it and seven other French reviews quoted in their original French. 

“More novelistic than a work of fiction and more original than an essay. Like Truman Capote, in his time with In Cold Blood, could it be that Kate Summerscale has also invented a new literary genre?” - Elle (France)

Interestinglythe book is being published in Spain as “The Murder at Road Hill House” and both the Spanish and French publishers are publishing it as though it were a work of fiction.

MANUSCRIPT AVAILABLE!

An excerpt from Burn Chart: A Memoir by Tom Hansen 

“I had been giving my customers nicknames, usually based on physical appearance because there were so many it was easier to remember them that way. But there were a few who didn’t need a nickname, like Dylan. One of my musician customers, he had a band called Earth, a noise band signed to the Sub Pop label. Shortly after I started selling to him, he’d seen me play while I was hanging around his apartment, and asked me to play on an album he was recording. We went down to Triangle Studios one night, stoned out of our minds and I played, badly I think, on a couple of songs for the album Pentastar: In the Style of Demons. It was Dylan who introduced me to his best friend Kurt Cobain, another customer who didn’t need a nickname.”

In over 20 years as an agent, I have never seen a manuscript like this one. It came to me from the author’s profs at the Canadian university where he wrote it as his master’s thesis. But it tells a quintessentially American story. It has gone out today to 18 US editors, and will be added to our Frankfurt catalogue.

What if James Frey and J.T. LeRoy included documentary proof of their claims in their books? That’s what we have here — an astonishing, often gruesome, no-holds-barred tale of heroin addiction and recovery in Seattle in the 1990s that is documented with medical charts and newspaper articles. The passage excerpted above, selected to get your attention, is the only one that offers us a major celebrity. The book opens with a burn chart that looks as if it must have been written post-mortem: in 1999, Hansen’s skeletal, malnourished body was nothing more than a collection of open sores and dissolving bones, with three kinds of hepatitis. Burn Chart documents his recovery, with flashbacks telling us how he got to the state he is in. Along the way we learn about outrageous youthful escapades, the discovery of the amazing facts of his parentage, and the hard truth about his own responsibility for his fate.

Tom Hansen is real writer, and has a degree to prove it (see the cover page of the manuscript).  Not just another junkie memoir, Burn Chart is a short, tightly written, powerful, and often painful-to-read document that is sure to become a classic. I can see it becoming required reading for every high school kid who is attracted to the “glamour” of the junkie lifestyle. Far from romanticizing it, Burn Chart offers the brutal truth. It will serve not only as a gut-punching deterrent between covers, but also as a clarion call for enlightenment in the way our culture deals with drugs.

NEW NOVEL

CREATURE OF THE NIGHT by Kate Thompson

Newly published by Random House Children’s Books in the UK and is receiving impressive reviews. See some of the great reviews below!

[Kate Thompson] has woven a truly modern tale with a timeless theme. Totally absorbing and utterly beguiling, it is all done with a remarkable lightness of touch. Books such as this don’t come around very often.

-       THE GUARDIAN

Creature of the Night is a riveting read from page one. Thompson’s remarkable skills are brilliantly evident: both in her depiction of Bobby’s family, inner-city Dublin and her vivid and totally convincing evocation of rural Ireland. Where ordinary and supernatural meet is Thompson territory and they have never been explored so effectively or handled so well. This is an absolutely terrific book, Kate Thompson’s best. And that’s saying something. I could not fault it.          

-          THE IRISH TIMES

Fairy-tales, like much else in children’s lives, have received a make-over of late. Harder, sharper and more sinister than those that gambolled across Western consciousness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream they have become more technologically advanced in Eoin Colfer’s riotous Artemis Fowl series, more sexually predatory in Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely and more subversive in Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men. All of which is tremendous fun for readers of over 9, but Kate Thompson’s Creature of the Night is something teenagers shouldn’t miss because it goes to the heart of our lingering superstitions concerning the Little People. Thompson is an Irish children’s writer of dazzling talent and inventiveness, who is very much an all-or-nothing talent whom bright children either love or loathe at first sight. She won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award for The New Policeman, a captivating comedy about our perceived lack of time. However, the quirkiness of novels such as Switchers and Only Human have made her seem more eclectic than she is. Creature of the Night is what should bring her a much wider audience; my 15 year old kept shoving it under my nose with notes saying YOU MUST READ THIS. For a start, it’s horribly funny. Bobby, the narrator, has been moved by his ma from Dublin to the countryside. His horrified reaction, which not even the promise of a new Xbox can soften, is amplified by his leaving behind a life of minor but increasingly violent crime, “a fighting unit, an oiled machine” under the control of Fluke. Desperate not to vegetate with his maddening little brother Dennis and his impoverished, slatternly mother, Bobby actually mends the abandoned Skoda left by the last tenant, who has disappeared. But then his little brother starts talking about a tiny playmate, an old woman who comes through the dog-flap, for whom food must be left out. Is he imagining it? What is the tragedy that nobody will talk about, and why is it bad luck not to leave milk out for the fairies? The truth can’t be revealed without spoiling a tremendous twist involving murder, but Thompson’s magical voice has reached new heights of comedy, and new depths of humanity in a strikingly original and gripping piece of fiction.

-          THE TIMES

The Whitbread, the Guardian, the Irish Book Awards, the CBI/Bisto Award… Kate Thompson, the Yorkshire writer who lives in the West of Ireland, has won every award going for her ground-breaking teenage novels. Her new book, Creature of the Night, looks set to add another prize to her collection. A gripping, highly original piece of work, it’s that rare thing, a perfectly crafted page-turner. Bobby’s running wild in Dublin – joyriding, stealing on the streets, getting high. His mother decides to move the family to a rented house in the country, a house where a child was murdered and from where the previous lodger, Lars, has mysteriously disappeared. When Bobby discovers Lars’s journal, full of notes about fairy folk and their ability to change shape, he becomes convinced that something very strange is going on in the house. His younger brother keeps talking about a little woman who visits him at night, climbing in through the cat flap; and Bobby spots a badger running away from the house. Thompson seamlessly blends a gritty, urban tale of disaffected youth with a chilling tale of the supernatural. Her writing is a joy, sparse, direct, yet lyrical. But most of all it is Bobby’s extraordinary journey, his growing awareness of how his life is, and how it could be, that is so affecting. It is, ultimately, a tale of redemption. Creature of the Night is the best teenage book I’ve read since Roddy Doyle’s Wilderness…

-          THE IRISH INDEPENDENT

Professor Gerald Martin’s GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ: A LIFE, the first authorized English language biography of the celebrated author, drawing on privileged access to Marquez, himself, as well as interviews conducted with over three hundred people (including Fidel Castro, four presidents of Colombia, Marquez’s family and friends, and writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Lllosa), painting a portrait of the author in the context of the last century, and exploring the tensions in his life between celebrity and literary quality, politics and writing, and among power, solitude and love, to Sonny Mehta at Knopf, at auction, by Elizabeth Sheinkman at Curtis Brown UK.