Bloomsbury News, Events and Bestsellers

* What's New *

Family Britain

09/11/2009 12:38:00

Family Britain continues David Kynaston’s groundbreaking series Tales of a New Jerusalem, telling as never before the story of Britain from VE Day in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Read an extract here.

The Berlin Wall

09/11/2009 18:32:00

The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor is the definitive account of a divided city and its people. View a picture timeline of the history of the Berlin Wall here.

Watch Mariatu Kamara on BBC Breakfast News

12/11/2009 18:31:00

Bite of the Mango by Mariatu Kamara (with Susan McClelland), published by Bloomsbury is the astonishing story of one girl's journey from war victim to UNICEF Special Representative. Watch Mariatu talking on BBC Breakfast News here.

River Cottage Every Day

13/11/2009 15:02:00

Watch a video of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall discussing River Cottage Every Day here.

Colum McCann has won the National Book Award for Fiction

19/11/2009 13:05:00

Colum McCann has won the National Book Award for Fiction with Let the Great World Spin. Read more.

* Events *

Alice Roberts - Bristol University Event

23/11/2009 00:00:00

The Great Hall
Bristol University
Twilight Talk: The Incredible Human Journey and book signing.
23/11/2009

Michael Mansfield - Cardiff University Event

23/11/2009 17:15:00

Cardiff Law School
Cardiff University
Law Building
Museum Ave
Cardiff

23/11/2009 17:15:00

Will Self - Richmond Literature Festival Event

24/11/2009 19:30:00

Clarendon Hall
York House
Richmond Road
Twickenham

24/11/2009 19:30:00

Alice Roberts - Corinium Museum Event

26/11/2009 00:00:00

Corinium Mesuem
Park St
Cirencester
The Incredible Human Journey, talk and book-signing.
26/11/2009

Michael Foreman - Talk & Book Signing

03/12/2009 18:30:00

Centre for Literacy in Primary Education
Webber Street
London

David Almond & Michael Foreman, nominees for the Hans Christian Anderson Awards 2010, will be talking about their work & signing copies of their books.

The ticket price includes a glass of wine.

03/12/2009 18:30:00

Christopher Lloyd - Hay Festival Winter Weekend Event

05/12/2009 13:00:00

Hay Community Centre
A breathtaking and radical new look at the story of life on Earth. Which living things have had the greatest impact on the planet, other life and people?

05/12/2009 13:00:00

* Bestsellers *

Family Britain, 1951-1957 - David Kynaston

21/11/2009 21:34:00

As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive the narrative. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger’s Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester).

All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events – the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis – jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin’s holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock’s Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston’s Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.

River Cottage Every Day - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

21/11/2009 21:34:00

Putting food on the table for the family quickly and economically doesn’t mean you have to compromise on quality. This book shows how Hugh’s approach to food can be adapted to suit any growing, working family, or busy young singles and couples for that matter. Breakfast, baking, lunchboxes, quick suppers, healthy snacks, eating on the move and weekend cooking for the week ahead – all these, and more, will be covered in River Cottage Every Day.

As Hugh says:

'I make no prior assumptions about where you shop, what you may or may not know about growing vegetables or keeping livestock, whether you can tell the difference between a swede and turnip, or know what to do with a belly of pork and a breast of lamb. Instead, I’ll show you easy and confidence-inspiring ways with cuts of meat, types of fish and other ingredients you may not have tried before. And I’ll offer you new approaches that I hope will breath new life to familiar staples, like rice, spuds, beans, and your daily bread.

Above all, I intend to tempt you irresistibly towards a better life with food, with a whole raft of recipes that I think you will love. I hope some of them will become your absolute favourites, and the favourites of your dear friends and beloved family. I hope that the dishes you like best will infiltrate and influence your cooking, giving you increased confidence and fresh ideas. In short, I hope that before long, cooking simple and delicious food from the best seasonal ingredients becomes second nature and first priority for you, not just once in a while, but every day.’

Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer Annie Barrows

21/11/2009 21:34:00

It’s 1946 and author Juliet Ashton can’t think what to write next. Out of the blue, she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey – by chance, he’s acquired a book that once belonged to her – and, spurred on by their mutual love of reading, they begin a correspondence. When Dawsey reveals that he is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, her curiosity is piqued and it’s not long before she begins to hear from other members.

As letters fly back and forth with stories of life in Guernsey under the German Occupation, Juliet soon realizes that the society is every bit as extraordinary as its name.

Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

21/11/2009 21:34:00

Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.

Three Little Ghosties - Pippa Goodhart

21/11/2009 21:34:00

Three Little Ghosties sit on three posties bragging about how scary they are: one of them terrified a troll, one scared a witch and another spooked a giant. And to prove how scary they are they set off to really frighten some plain old girls and boys . . . but they get far more than they bargained for. Ghosts are no match for a little boy in pyjamas!

Beautifully illustrated with incredible detail, lots of humour and wonderful characters.

Ghoul at School - Mary Hooper

21/11/2009 21:34:00

A ghost appears to be on the loose in the school where our two flighty angels are still pretending to be ordinary pupils.

Life for the girls is further complicated by an Archangel determined to take them home and a rather embarrassing incident in a cookery lesson!

Fun and mayhem are dead certainties in this follow up to Down to Earth.

Ordinary Thunderstorms - William Boyd

21/11/2009 21:34:00

What is the devastating effect on your life when, through no fault of your own, you lose everything – home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, money, credit cards, mobile phone – and you can never get them back? This is what happens to a young man called Adam Kindred, one May evening in Chelsea, London, when a freakish series of malign accidents and a split-second decision turns his life upside down for ever.

The police are searching for him. There is a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone and anonymous in the huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to go but down – underground. He decides to join that vast army of the disappeared and the missing that throng the lowest level of London’s population as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so spectacularly. His quest will take him all along the River Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the sink estates of the East End, and on the way he encounters all manner of London’s denizens – aristocrats, prostitutes, priests and policewomen amongst them – and version after new version of himself.

William Boyd’s electric follow-up to Costa Novel of the Year Restless is a heart-in-mouth conspiracy novel about the fragility of social identity, the scandal of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of every city.

Araminta Spook: Ghostsitters - Angie Sage

21/11/2009 21:34:00

Araminta’s Aunt Tabby has won a Transylvanian holiday for four so she and all the adults of Spook House are going for a much-needed break… but it just so happens to be Araminta’s birthday, too. So who will keep an eye on Araminta and her friend Wanda? Mathilda, Araminta’s ‘grown up’ cousin, arrives to babysit, along with two rowdy teenage ghosts. At first, Araminta and Wanda are in heaven – staying up late, playing loud music, and ordering take aways – no more of Aunt Tabby’s rules! But they soon find themselves cleaning up after everyone else; being home alone isn’t turning out as they’d hoped.

So Araminta and Wanda come up with a plan. They have to find a way to move their unreliable ghost-sitters to another house. Maybe then Araminta can start to have a proper birthday…

Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

21/11/2009 21:34:00

Winner of the Newbery Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Book Prize 2009, and nominated for both the 2010 Carnegie Award and the Kate Greenaway Award.

When a baby escapes a murderer intent on killing the entire family, who would have thought it would find safety and security in the local graveyard?

Brought up by the resident ghosts, ghouls and spectres, Bod has an eccentric childhood learning about life from the dead. But for Bod there is also the danger of the murderer still looking for him – after all, he is the last remaining member of the family.

A stunningly original novel deftly constructed over eight chapters, featuring every second year of Bod’s life, from babyhood to adolescence. Will Bod survive to be a man?

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror - Chris Priestley

21/11/2009 21:34:00

Uncle Montague lives alone in a big house and his regular visits from his nephew give him the opportunity to relive some of the most frightening stories he knows.

But as the stories unfold, a newer and more surprising narrative emerges, one that is perhaps the most frightening of all.

Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror, it transpires, are not so much works of imagination as dreadful lurking memories. Memories of an earlier time in which Uncle Montague lived a very different life to his present solitary existence.

Burnt Shadows - Kamila Shamsie

21/11/2009 21:34:00

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders...

August 9^th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss.

In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.

In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad’s half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history – personal, political – are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel’s astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

Suspicions of Mr. Whicher - Kate Summerscale

21/11/2009 21:34:00

It is a summer’s night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks.

The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them. Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task: to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects.

The murder provokes national hysteria. The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes – scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing – arouses fear and a kind of excitement. But when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment.

A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery – a body; a detective; a country house steeped in secrets. In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.

Tales of Beedle the Bard - J.K. Rowling

21/11/2009 21:34:00

'You've never heard of The Tales of Beedle the Bard?' said Ron incredulously. 'You're kidding, right?' (From Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

Published by the Children's High Level Group in association with Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is the first new book from J. K. Rowling since the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The Tales of Beedle the Bard played a crucial role in assisting Harry, with his friends Ron and Hermione, to finally defeat Lord Voldemort. Fans will be thrilled to have this opportunity to read the tales in full. An exciting addition to the canon of Harry Potter, the tales reveal the wonderful versatility of the author, as she tackles with relish the structure and varying tones of a classic fairy tale. There are five tales: 'The Tale of the Three Brothers', recounted in Deathly Hallows, plus 'The Fountain of Fair Fortune', 'The Warlock's Hairy Heart', 'The Wizard and the Hopping Pot', and 'Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump'. Each has its own magical character and will bring delight, laughter and the thrill of mortal peril. Translated from the original runes by Hermione Granger, the tales are introduced and illustrated by J. K. Rowling. Also included are notes by Professor Albus Dumbledore, which appear by kind permission of the Hogwarts Headmasters' Archive.

CHLG is a charity co-founded by J. K. Rowling and Emma Nicholson MEP and campaigns to protect and promote children's rights and make life better for vulnerable young people.

The Children's High Level Group is a charity established under English law. Registered Charity Number: 1112575.

Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

21/11/2009 21:34:00

Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father and resolves to win the local kite-fighting tournament, to prove that he has the makings of a man. His loyal friend Hassan promises to help him — for he always helps Amir — but this is 1970s Afghanistan and Hassan is merely a low-caste servant who is jeered at in the street, although Amir still feels jealous of his natural courage and the place he holds in his father’s heart.

But neither of the boys could foresee what would happen to Hassan on the afternoon of the tournament, which was to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return, to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.

Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

21/11/2009 21:34:00

Newbery Medal Winning Novel and the Booktrust Teenage Book Prize 2009, and nominated for both the 2010 Carnegie Award and the Kate Greenaway Award.

When a baby escapes a murderer intent on killing the entire family, who would have thought it would find safety and security in the local graveyard?

Bloomsbury News, Events and Bestsellers

*** What's New ***

Family Britain

The Berlin Wall

Watch Mariatu Kamara on BBC Breakfast News

River Cottage Every Day

Colum McCann has won the National Book Award for Fiction

*** Events ***

Alice Roberts - Bristol University Event

Michael Mansfield - Cardiff University Event

Will Self - Richmond Literature Festival Event

Alice Roberts - Corinium Museum Event

Michael Foreman - Talk & Book Signing

Christopher Lloyd - Hay Festival Winter Weekend Event

*** Bestsellers ***

Family Britain, 1951-1957 - David Kynaston

River Cottage Every Day - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer Annie Barrows

Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

Three Little Ghosties - Pippa Goodhart

Ghoul at School - Mary Hooper

Ordinary Thunderstorms - William Boyd

Araminta Spook: Ghostsitters - Angie Sage

Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror - Chris Priestley

Burnt Shadows - Kamila Shamsie

Suspicions of Mr. Whicher - Kate Summerscale

Tales of Beedle the Bard - J.K. Rowling

Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

* What's New *

* Events *

* Bestsellers *