When Navy Seals track down and kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it’s obvious there was a traitor on the inside. After the false friends are revealed to be two British students, Malik and Chaudhry – former Islamic fundamentalists recruited by MI5 – they become targets themselves.
Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd must teach the pair how to survive undercover with al-Qaeda closing in. But Spider is not used to playing the handler. And with the line between mentor and friend beginning to blur, and a terrorist plot putting thousands of lives at stake, can he protect everyone before it’s too late?
This year Lanchester is up against Pratchett’s 39th Discworld novel Snuff, Townsend’s The Woman Who Went to Bed For a Year, John O’Farrell’s The Man Who Forgot His Wife and Julian Gough’s Jude in London, also shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize. All the chosen books, said judges, “share an element of Wodehousian humour”, despite covering topics from post-crash London to goblin slavery.
Rowling decided to make the Potter ebooks DRM-free, because she “personally believes that if someone’s bought an ebook they ought to be able to read it on their Sony Reader, their Kindle, their iPad, their PC”, said Redmayne – and so far, piracy has not been much of an issue. “We’re going DRM-free but have put watermarks on the books which can trace individual files back to individual sales. It was very interesting. When we first went live we saw a few files go up, and then there was a real backlash,” he said. “People were going ‘really? Finally they’ve done what we asked for and you go and stick it up there? And what are you, the stupidest pirate in the world, as they’ll know who’s done it?’ And they came down again.”
Literary dialogue comes in many forms – webs of allusion, reference and literary homage. And Ros Barber’s new novel The Marlowe Papers takes this conversation to another level.
One of the secret pleasures of reading is watching books and writers talk to each other through webs of allusion, reference and sly literary homage. It’s a conversation that can come in many forms.
You have ignored them.
Paying no attention to your staff is actually worse than negative attention.
Yes, you did read that correctly – no attention is worse than negative attention.
I wondered what was happening over at Abe Books. Here is there declared Bestsellers List for April. Funnily enough apart from George R.R. Martin there was not a lot to interest me personaly. Have a look. See what you think. Let me know. Anyone from Abe Books reading?
Book Publishing is as most of us know a lottery. It’s much simpler standing out in a sunny day waiting for lightining to strike. A new public service is emerging online: authors and readers who are sifting through the morass of self-published books out there to find the quality titles amid the dross ..Authors Dream of Electric Books?, Awesome Indies, Rock*It Reads
News of the deal sent shares in Barnes & Noble up 76% from $13.68 to $24.09 in US morning trading on Monday, boosting the bookseller’s value by almost $900m, from $823m on Friday close to $1.7bn by midday. Microsoft’s stock rose 2 cents to $32.
I was a princess from Earth and he was a rogue spaceman from a mythical world. He saved my life three times. I rescued him from a fate worse than death. We fell madly in love. We married and lived happily ever after. Ever after comes with an expiration date these days. We’d been married less than year when Kit got shot in the head.
Book Review: Intruder by C.J. Cherryh In Intruder, the political machinations continue as Bren works toward creating a lasting trade agreement (and hopefully peace) between the Western Association and the Marid, and the Marid and Ilisidi’s Eastern district. This is a very complicated tangle made even more complicated by Machigi, the lord of the [...]