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PHILIP BARCLAY is a British diplomat who
was based in Harare for three years. He has used his experience to write Zimbabwe (Bloomsbury), a personal account of
this once-prosperous country's descent into political, economic, and
social chaos.
QUENTIN BATES went native in Iceland,
married a local, and worked as a seaman before turning to maritime
journalism. Frozen Assets (Constable) is the first of a series
of crime novels featuring Gunna, a feisty policewoman in a small fishing
community, who finds herself tackling the financial and political corruption
that brought Iceland to its knees. Cold
Comfort (Constable) sees
Gunna promoted to the Serious Crime Unit and dealing with the murder of a
high-class escort with many influential clients. www.graskeggur.com
HELEN BLACK is the pen name
of a solicitor specialising in child care cases. Damaged Goods (Avon)
is the first in a series of hard-hitting crime novels featuring Lilly
Valentine, a solicitor who defends a child accused of killing her own
drug-addicted mother. A Place of Safety (Avon)
sees Lilly dealing with people trafficking, rape, and murder. In Dishonour
(Avon), Lilly tackles
intimidation and death among the Muslim community. Blood Rush (Constable)
concerns the terrifying violence of girl gangs. TV
rights optioned. www.hblack.co.uk
S.J. BOLTON trained as an
actor and dancer. Sacrifice (Bantam), her fictional debut,
is a contemporary thriller in which a series of kidnaps and murders in a remote
island community are linked to an ancient Shetland legend. Film
rights optioned. Nominated for the International Thriller Writers' Best
First Novel Award. Awakening (Bantam)
is about an idyllic village thrown into turmoil by a series of
inexplicable deaths involving snakes. Blood
Harvest (Bantam)
is a frightening tale of the secrets of a small town on the Yorkshire
moors. www.SJBolton.com www.booksattransworld.co.uk
DRUIN BURCH is a working
doctor. Digging Up the Dead (Chatto), which received a Jerwood
Award for Non-fiction, uses his own experience, combined with
meticulous research, to recreate the gruesome world of 19th-century
medicine in a biography of Astley Cooper, celebrity surgeon and radical
vivisectionist. His second book, Taking the Medicine (Chatto),
is about our relationship with medical drugs and the ways we have learnt
to understand them. www.randomhouse.co.uk
MARTIN
CONWAY
is the pen name of an actor and scriptwriter whose first novel for
children, Olaf the Viking (Oxford), is an epic comedy about
a 12-year-old boy who gets involved in battles between the Norse gods and
giants, as well as the carousing, marauding, and pillaging of his fellow
humans. Olaf’s adventures continue in The Pig Who Would Be King (Oxford). www.oup.com/oxed/children
ANDREW CULLEN is a playwright
and screenwriter whose first book, From Here to Paternity (Fusion
Press)is the painfully truthful travel diary of an expectant
father’s journey to parenthood. www.andrewcullen.net
www.visionpaperbacks.co.uk
VANESSA CURTIS
is a freelance journalist and the author of two books on Virginia Woolf. Zelah
Green (Egmont), her debut children’s novel, is a
striking, funny, and touching record of a 14-year-old battling Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder. Winner of
the 2010 Manchester Children's Book Awards. Zelah
Green: One More Little Problem (Egmont)
is the second book in this distinctive series. The
Taming of Lilah May (Frances Lincoln) is one of two books about a girl coming to terms with her anger. The Haunting of Tabitha Grey is Vanessa’s first ghost story, a contemporary tale
that is as surprising as it is haunting. www.vanessacurtis.com
www.egmont.co.uk
J. D. DAVIES is a leading authority on
maritime history in the seventeenth century and has written the
definitive work on the ships, men, and organisation of Pepys's navy. His
first novel, Gentleman Captain (Old
Street) ,
begins an absorbing adventure series featuring Matthew Quinton, a
Royalist officer whose career spans the naval wars and great events of
the Restoration age.
WILL DAVIS is an exciting new voice in fiction. His debut
novel My Side of the Story (Bloomsbury) is the
first-person account of a self-aware, witty teenager who has no problem with being gay
– though everyone else does. Winner of the Betty Trask Prize
2007. Dream Machine (Bloomsbury) tells the interlocking
stories of the women competing in a tv reality show. www.will-davis.co.uk
www.bloomsbury.com
CATHERINE
DEVENEY has been Scottish Feature Writer of the Year several times. Ties
That Bind (Old Street) is the moving story of a
woman who uses a secret win on the horses to go missing and create a new
identity, only to find she cannot escape the old one.
WINIFRED FOLEY wrote her first book, about
her childhood in the Forest of Dean, when she was in her sixties.
Republished thirty years on as Full
Hearts & Empty Bellies (Abacus), her bestselling autobiography continues in Shiny
Pennies & Grubby Pinafores (Abacus). Winifred Foley died in
2009 at the age of 94.
MANGALA GOURI is a teacher and writer who lives in a small community in the Himalayas.
City of Widows, her first book, is a collection of interviews with
women living in Vrindavan, abandoned by their families to be
“brides of Krishna”. Their stories are a powerful indictment
of the way many women are treated in the world’s fastest-changing
democracy.
CORA HARRISON lives in
Ireland where her two dozen children’s books are bestsellers. My
Lady Judge (Macmillan), her adult debut, is the first in a
series of mysteries set in the Burren in 16th-century Ireland,
featuring the learned and practical Mara, a woman Brehon or investigating
magistrate. Michaelmas Tribute (Macmillan)
and Sting of Justice (Macmillan) continue the Burren
series, of which Writ in Stone
(Severn House) and Eye of the Law (Severn House) are the latest
instalments. Cora has also written I
Was Jane Austen's Best Friend (Macmillan),
and Alfie Sykes & the Montgomery Murder
(Piccadilly Press), both the first
in new series for younger readers. www.coraharrison.com
www.panmacmillan.com
GEORGETTE HEYER
invented the Regency romance. Her historical novels remain in print all
over the world thirty-five years after her death. She also wrote a dozen
detective stories, which continue to enjoy a wide readership. www.randomhouse.co.uk
BEVERLEY JONES worked as a reporter in
print and tv in Wales before taking up her current job as a press and
media officer. Telling Stories, her first novel, is a
beautifully observed and wittily narrated tale of love, lust, and
murderous intentions in Cardiff. Holiday
Money is the story of a woman who has a one-night fling after a row
with her fiance, is then blackmailed, and has to find her own way of
dealing with it.
BERYL KINGSTON
is a hugely popular writer of sagas and romances. The Gates of
Paradise (Allison & Busby) centres on the trial for
sedition and acquittal of the poet William Blake in the Sussex village of
Felpham. Neptune’s Daughter (Transita) is a
contemporary novel about a widow learning to enjoy life until her
daughter tries to land her with a new baby. Octavia
and Octavia's
War (Allison
& Busby) follow the fortunes of an independently-minded
young woman determined to change the world from the early years of the
20th century to the dark days of World War II. Beryl's historical novel The
Girl on the Orlop Deck (Robert
Hale) tells of a newly-wed woman whose husband
is press-ganged into Nelson's navy. She dresses as a man to find him and
ends up fighting at Trafalgar. www.berylkingston.co.uk
www.allisonandbusby.ltd.uk
www.transita.co.uk
GERARD
MACDONALD has written
extensively for film and tv and spent several years in Hollywood. The Prisoner's Wife
is a taut thriller featuring unemployed American spy Shawn Maguire, who
is commissioned to find a young Iranian kidnapped by Shawn's former
employers. Atmospheric, always surprising, and horribly credible, the
action moves rapidly from Paris through Morocco and Egypt to a dramatic
climax on the Afghan border.
MIRIAM MORRISON
was a journalist, and also ran a country inn in the Lake District. Her
experience informs Recipe for Disaster (Arrow), a romantic
comedy about the titanic clash of egos, attitudes and recipes when two
star chefs open restaurants in the same small town. Shortlisted
for the Melissa Nathan Comedy Romance Award 2009. Her
second novel is The Cinderella Effect (Arrow).
www.randomhouse.co.uk
SARAH OUTEN is the first woman, and
youngest person, to row solo across the treacherous Indian Ocean. An Ocean to Row (Summersdale) is an infectiously
readable account of her journey, telling of the emotional as well as the
physical pain she had to overcome. Sarah is currently planning to
circumnavigate the globe using human power alone.
RICHARD PIERCE speaks English, German,
and Norwegian, which helped when writing Dead Men, an inventive, original, and totally absorbing novel
about love, obsession, life and death, which begins with the finding of
Captain Scott’s body in the Antarctic in 1912, and ends in the same
place nearly 100 years later.
WILL RAWSON lives on England's south
coast, where he is a playwright and interactive guru. His
children’s book The Thief of Forever is about a secret rip in
the space-time continuum that threatens life as we know it. His short
story, Tremble with Fear, appeared in "Wow!
366" (Scholastic) to celebrate the National
Year of Reading.
BINA SHAH
is well known in Pakistan as the author of novels and short stories. Slum Child
(Westland)
is the tale of a young girl's journey from Karachi's slums to its richest
mansions. A Season for Martyrs is
the compelling story of a young tv news reporter caught up in the events
surrounding the return of Benazir Bhutto to Pakistan, culminating in her
assassination. www.binashah.net
NIAMH
SHAW
is a corporate escapee. Smart/Casual (Headline), her first novel, is a
romantic comedy in which a career girl is framed for sabotage and wreaks
a terrible revenge. Her second book, About Time (Headline), is also a romantic comedy,
with an international setting.
PAUL ROBERT SMITH
is an Australian whose first novel, Up a Tree in the Park at Night
with a Hedgehog (Vintage), is a brilliantly funny story about
a man avoiding commitment and feeling bad about not feeling worse. His
second novel, Sunday Daffodil & Other
Happy Endings (Vintage),
is a comedy narrated by a boy who might be dead, but doesn't know it yet,
and who is smitten by a would-be suicide called Sunday Daffodil. www.randomhouse.co.uk
MEHRNAZ STARS is
an Iranian woman novelist married to a Scot and living in Switzerland. Woman Master, based on her own
family’s history under the Shah, is the often tragic story of three
generations of strong-minded women.
IVO STOURTON grew up in
London, Washington and Paris, and has an English degree from Cambridge. The
Night Climbers (Doubleday), his first novel, is an original,
disturbing, and beautifully written story about a small group of students
who commit a multi-million pound art fraud. Film rights optioned. www.booksattransworld.co.uk
VIKAS SWARUP is an Indian
diplomat. Q&A (Doubleday), his debut novel, is about a
young Mumbai waiter who wins a billion rupees (£13 million) in a tv quiz
show and is promptly arrested and accused of cheating. It has been
reissued as Slumdog Millionaire,
after the film version directed by Danny Boyle. (Translation rights
sold in 43 languages.) Vikas's new novel, Six Suspects (Doubleday),
is a multi-layered story about crime and corruption in contemporary
India. Film rights optioned. www.vikasswarup.net
www.booksattransworld.co.uk
MIKE WALTERS is a
much-travelled management consultant whose first novel The Shadow
Walker (Quercus) is a gripping thriller set in Mongolia. In
charge of the investigation is Nergui, a detective as fascinating and
mysterious as his country. The Adversary (Quercus) is the
second book in this unique series, followed by The
Outcast (Quercus).www.theshadowwalker.com
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
CAROLINE WALTON has published several
books on Russia and is married to a Russian-Ukrainian. The
Besieged
is a beautifully observed account of her conversations with survivors of
the wartime siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg). The result is a deeply
personal and a universal story about survival in extreme circumstances. www.russianenglishtranslation.org.uk
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