Bookweek Round-up

NEWS
Fragments of Burnt Diary Reconstructed to Tell Horror of Warsaw ghetto.
From The Guardian:
We will probably never know who Debora was, why she decided to record her family’s horrific treatment at the hands of the Nazis, and why her friend, the Holocaust survivor Lusia Schwarzwald Hornstein, did not reveal the existence of the charred diary [...]

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The Foxes recommend: Books for Mothering Sunday.

As an introduction to a week of Mother’s Day-themed items starting on Monday, the Den have put their little vulpine heads together and come up with a list of last-minute gift buys for mothers (or alternatively, you can just buy them for yourself …).
Leena says: Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park and The Lucky Ones will [...]

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The Streets of Babylon by Carina Burman

Euthanasia Bondeson is a middle-aged Swedish authoress visiting London in 1851 – the year of the Great Exhibition. She’s accompanied by the scatty and totally map-blind Agnes, who is ‘fair and tall, pure and invincible like her saintly namesake.’
Euthanasia has employed Agnes as a companion, and yet Euthanasia spends most of her time looking after [...]

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The Victoria Plum books by Angela Rippon

From left to right: Victoria Plum on Sports Day, Victoria Plum and the Magic Spell and Victoria Plum and her Woodland Friends. All by Angela Rippon.

Webstats can be very revealing. People keep searching for the Victorian Plum books and finding our picture books feature, where I briefly mentioned Victoria Plum. Twenty-five years after Victoria’s heyday, [...]

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The Edge of Winter by Luanne Rice

At the beginning of the film The English Patient, the leading lady lists several kinds of love and points out they are “all quite different, actually”. Luanne Rice’s novel takes the opposite view; that the love between parents and children, friends, brothers, comrades and new love are all quite similar, actually. [...]

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The Suicide Shop by Jean Teule

I first heard of The Suicide Shop on Scott Pack’s Me and My Big Mouth Blog.
A coal-black comedy. (Sounded good to me.) About death and happiness. (Intriguing). From a new small publisher Gallic Books. (Fancying myself as somewhat of an outsider, I also am irrationally drawn to the idea of new small publishers.)
The first ten [...]

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St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

It’s difficult to know when the tide of popular opinion turned and Victorian architecture stopped being everyone’s favourite whipping boy and became instead something worth preserving. It’s more difficult still to understand clearly why people took against it so much. I can remember as a child that my Edwardian-born father was firmly of the opinion [...]

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Book News and “Fox in the City” Update

(A dog in last week’s Book News and a mad-looking cat this time).

Right, down to business: It’s a week after Valentine’s Day and love is out the window.
Susan Hill flags Tim Lott’s lament in The Guardian that novelists no longer write about love
Susan makes the point that:
the everyday falling-in-love/getting married/being married is part of [...]

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The truth about kids’ books (Part One)

It’s a truth not universally acknowledged that children have no taste. Consider your childhood toys. I put it to you: did you really love and cherish and take to bed with you that hand-stitched, unbleached cotton rabbit your Aunt gave you? Did you not rather give your allegiance to a horrible, mass-produced pink-nylon-haired doll that [...]

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Publisher Feature: Two Ravens Press

Two Ravens Press is an exciting new publisher of literary fiction – recently named by The Bookseller as one of the imprints to watch in 2008 – and one of the founders, Sharon Blackie, kindly agreed to answer some questions for us. The following interview is very long indeed as the interviewer (ahem) got [...]

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