Whilst in New York earlier this year, Lee Child and Marcus Sakey met up to discuss Marcus’s latest book The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes which is out now.

Lee is a huge fan of Marcus’s writing, especially for this new book. Here is a short interview of them talking about the book, Marcus’s rather extreme research and also what they love most about writing crime and thriller novels.

Youtube link

The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes by Marcus Sakey is available now.

Kate Atkinson’s new novel Life After Life is to be published by Doubleday in March 2013

Life After Life poses compelling and thought-provoking questions.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually  be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

 During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.   During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.

Life After Life  traces the story of Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. Here is Kate Atkinson at her most profound and inventive. With wit and compassion, she finds warmth even in life’s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. This is a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.

Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and has been a critically acclaimed, Number 1 bestselling international author ever since. Her four most recent bestsellers featured the former private detective Jackson Brodie: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog. She was appointed MBE in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £18.99) ISBN: 9780385618670

Last night saw the announcement of the CWA awards and longlists at the annual Crime Writers’ Association dinner in London and we can say with pride that Transworld had an excellent line-up of winners and potential future winners.

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan won the CWA Dagger for Non-Fiction for their definitive book about the events leading up to 9/11,The Eleventh Day, which will be published in paperback on 30th August.

Carrying our winning streak on, Cath Staincliffe was joint winner of the CWA Short Story Dagger for a story in the Murder Squad anthology, Best Eaten Cold. We published Cath Staincliffe’s novel Dead To Me earlier this year, which told the dramatic prequel story to the hit ITV1 TV series Scott & Bailey.

Debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash, has been longlisted for two awards – The CWA Gold Dagger, which is for the best crime/thriller novel of the year; and for The John Creasey Award which is for the best first novel. Inspired by a horrific true event and set in the deep South of America, A Land More Kind Than Home is a haunting story about cruelty and innocence, and the failure of faith and family to protect a child. Click here to read a little more on Wiley’s inspirations on writing this first novel. We will find out in August if it has reached the shortlists in these categories. The winner is announced at the Crime Thriller Awards in October.

And last but not least in any way, Frederick Forsyth was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger which acknowledges a lifetime’s achievement in crime and thriller writing.

CWA Chair Peter James declared, “There has been a truly stellar line up of nominees and the judges in all categories had a very tough time selecting the winners. The Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards are the longest running literary awards, and the quality of the entries, judges and those attending the ceremony demonstrates just how sought after and prestigious they are. Many crime writers, including such great names as Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Elmore Leonard and of course tonight, Freddie Forsyth, have held these prizes – and, so far as we know, never yet stabbed anyone with them. But there’s always the first time…”

If you’d like to see the winners and longlists in full visit: www.thecwa.co.uk

This summer up to 300,000 people will be living
off-grid in the UK – i.e without mains power or water.
They use solar energy, rainwater harvesting, composting loos, wind power, ground source heat pumps or just a wood fire. They live in houses, shacks, boats, caravans, camper vans, huts, tents and yurts.

Nick’s book How to Live Off-Grid was published in 2007, the idea was not on the cultural radar. These days use of the phrase “off-grid” is a fast-growing phenomenon, especially in America. So much so that Nick is currently running a campaign to change the rules on planning permission via his web site www.off-grid.net

Part travelogue, part manual, Nick Rosen’s book is a tour of the country’s off-grid population – why they do it, how to avoid the pitfalls and where to find the best solutions – including the latest gadgets. Nick’s own experiences revealed information you can use – how to get Ocado to deliver to your Yurt, running a wireless modem off the car cigarette lighter to be online off-grid – how to do your bit for the environment and still live luxuriously.

Maverick ecologist Nick Rosen is a documentary-maker, journalist and broadcaster. He devoted the early years of his career to a study of the power of global corporations. In 1995 he founded one of the UK’s first internet companies. After a decade of living in squats and unlicensed warehouses, these days he has a proper house. He and his family are still in London — for now.

On Sunday 22nd July at 5pm, Nick Rosen will be speaking at the Port Eliot Festival.

For more details visit the Port Eliot website

Nick is available for interview – for any press inquiries please contact: info@transworld-publishers.co.uk

Left to right: Barry McGuigan, Spencer Oliver, Darren Barker, Joe Calzaghe, Tony Bellew, Jamie Moore, Glenn McCrory, Adam Smith, David Price, Carl Froch, Johnny Nelson, Jim Watt

Family and Friends came together last night to celebrate the launch of Adam Smith’s Beautiful Brutality. Among those in attendance were six World champions and four British, European and Commonwealth champions at ten different weights.

iFilm London were also at the launch, and have produced a fantastic video to celebrate Adam’s launch.

Here’s the trailer for the film adaptation of Tom Bradbury’s Shadow Dancer. Released on the 25th August 2012, the film will star Clive Owen and Andrea Riseborough.

For more information about Tom Bradbury, you can visit The Random House Group website here.

Sir Terry Pratchett has today, been named the winner of the 2012 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for his novel Snuff. Praised by The Independent for being ‘As funny as Wodehouse and as witty as Waugh’, the judges felt it seemed only fitting for him to win a prize that celebrates fiction that captures the comic spirit of P.G. Wodehouse.

The prize includes the naming of a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig after the novel.

This is the first time Pratchett has won the prize, although he has been shortlisted on three previous occasions for his novels Thief of Time (2002), Going Postal (2005) and Thud! (2006). As the 13th winner of the prize, he joins previous winners including Paul Torday, Ian McEwan, Marina Lewycka and DBC Pierre in an impressive canon of comic fiction.

Snuff is Terry Pratchett’s 50th book and the 39th in the Discworld novels. The book, which sees Commander Sam Vimes investigating a country house murder whilst on holiday, has become one of the fastest-selling hardback novels since records began. AS Byatt, in a review for The Guardian, commented ‘Pratchett is a master storyteller… He is a master of complex jokes, good bad jokes, good dreadful jokes and a kind of insidious wisdom about human nature (and other forms of alien nature).’

Peter Florence, a judge of the prize and Director of The Telegraph Hay Festival, comments: ‘I am thrilled he’s won in this 25th anniversary year of the festival. He’s consistently funny, inventive and with an acute, satirical view of the world.’

Terry Pratchett will be presented with the Prize – a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and a set of the Everyman Wodehouse collection – at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Wednesday 6 June. He will also have the honour of having a locally-bred pig named after the novel.

This great news following the BAFTA that Terry Pratchett won last weekend for Best Single Documentary for his deeply moving and highly provocative BBC Two documentary Choosing to Die.

For more information on Terry Pratchett visit his website: http://www.terrypratchett.co.uk/
To order your copy of Snuff click here

Announced today, Rachel Joyce’s novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry has joined the shortlist of 3 for the 2012 Desmond Elliott Prize. The Prize celebrates the very best of debut fiction by the rising stars of the literary world.

The shortlist for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2012 is as follows:

• The Land Of Decoration by Grace McCleen (Chatto & Windus)
• The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness (Seren)
• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)

This year’s shortlist has been selected from a longlist of ten, announced in April. The three shortlisted authors are: poet and academic Patrick McGuinness, whose novel The Last Hundred Days was inspired by his years in Bucharest in the lead up to the Romanian revolution; Transworld’s award-winning radio playwright Rachel Joyce, whose book The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was originally drafted as a radio play for her dying father, and Grace McCleen with The Land Of Decoration, a story based on the author’s own upbringing in a Christian fundamentalist sect in Wales.

Sam Llewellyn, 2012 Chair of Judges and one of Desmond Elliott’s own protégés, commented:
‘It has been extraordinarily hard to choose a shortlist of three from such a powerful and diverse longlist. Desmond Elliott once told me that his ideal novel was a cross between a treasure hunt and a race. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is both these things, and a lot more besides. The Last Hundred Days, written with wit and irony, is a really fine and original addition to the literature of disintegrating empires, and The Land of Decoration is unlike anything you’ve ever read. It’s a rollercoaster of a book that makes the reader laugh and cry at entirely unpredictable intervals.’

Sam Llewellyn is joined on the judging panel by Tom Gatti, Editor of The Times Review section, and Caroline Mileham, Head of Books at Play.com.

William Hill spokesman, Graham Sharpe, commented that ‘despite having dramatically varying themes, it is very difficult to differentiate between three brilliant debut novels’, but gave Rachel Joyce a narrow lead with the following odds:

• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce – 5/4
• The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness – 7/4
• The Land Of Decoration by Grace McCleen – 2/1

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the £10,000 award for a first novel published in the UK, set up in memory of the celebrated publisher and literary agent Desmond Elliott to ‘enrich the careers of new writers’.

The winner will be announced on Thursday 28 June

For more information visit the Desmond Elliott website www.desmondelliottprize.org
To order your copy of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold fry click here

Don’t miss out on the live webchat that Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat will be doing on 25th May hosted by Red Magazine as a lunch hour literary salon.

Joanne will be talking about her forthcoming novel Peaches for Monsieur le Curé, returning to , and ready to answer your questions on writing.

Here’s the link you will need which has more information: http://www.redonline.co.uk/red-women/red-chat/joanne-harris-red-book-club-red-chat

Peaches for Monsieur le Curé:

‘Her characteristic love affair with texture – scents, smells and sounds – immerses the reader in a bath of seductive imagery in a brave and grippingly confected story.’ – Sunday Times

‘Like Chocolat, this book is a feast for the senses. Every page of the book is steeped in scents, colours and tastes, without ever tipping into the pretentious or showy… Peaches for Monsieur le Curé is a wonderful return to form for Harris.’- Literary Review

‘A wide-ranging, powerful and very readable novel. I loved it.’ – Viv Groskop, Red

You can read more on her return to the world of ‘Chocolt’ on Telegraphonline

To order your copy now click here. Peaches for Monsieur le Curé is available to buy from 24th May 2012.

Today marks the publication of the two winners of the  inaugural Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now First Novel Award. To mark this occasion we asked Michael Logan, author of Apocalypse Cow what it felt like to become a published author…

“Six years after the idea crystallised and one year after winning the Terry Pratchett First Novel Award, my debut novel Apocalypse Cow is finally on the shelves, introducing social satire through the scandalously neglected medium of zombie cows to the unsuspecting, and possibly horrified, literary world.

It’s hard to escape the clichés when describing my emotions upon realising a lifelong dream. Of course, I am overjoyed, proud, excited and nervous, but I can’t shake of the sense of unreality. I wrote Apocalypse Cow largely for fun. I certainly never expected it to be published given the odd subject matter. In fact, I almost didn’t enter the competition, only doing so when my wife grabbed a firm hold of my ear and kept twisting until I pressed ‘send’ on my submission. I still have the deformed earlobe to prove exactly how much force she had to apply.

When I was shortlisted, I at first assumed it was practical joke as the email arrived on the eve of April Fools’ Day. Then, when I won alongside David Logan with his fantastic novel Half Sick of Shadows, I couldn’t shake the feeling it was an administrative error. For months, I expected to receive an email saying: ‘Can we have our award back, please?’

Now that the book is out there, I think I am ready to accept this is actually happening.

Getting here has been a long journey. I wrote my first short story – a 300-word sci-fi epic entitled ‘My Push-Button World’ – when I was nine. The trauma of failing to secure a five-book deal on the strength of this ground-breaking work – which involved a full-size football pitch that sprung up, complete with 21 robots to play with, upon my command – crushed my budding literary aspirations. I barely wrote a word, save for frequent punishment exercises, throughout the rest of school.

In fact, I didn’t really start writing again until ten years ago. Even then it was a case of squeezing it in between jobs, raising a young family, and glamorous international travel – if you count two weeks in Tajikistan nursing a dodgy stomach and being forced to wear a bracelet made from goat flesh in Northern Kenya as glamorous. I wrote literary short stories with some modest success, and a very serious novel focusing on sectarianism in Glasgow that I hid from the world, but when the zombie cows called, I had to answer.

And so, here we are. Apocalypse Cow is out there in the world. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.”

MICHAEL LOGAN

Novelist, Journalist and other things ending in -ist
APOCALYPSE COW OUT TODAY!