Kindle Post

Debut Novels in the 12 Days of Kindle

It's the time of New Year's Resolutions. If yours is to write a book, remember that every author must start somewhere. So to inspire you, we're featuring debut novels today in the 12 Days of Kindle. Regardless of whether the authors went on to write more books, these are the ones they'll remember as being their first published novel.

The Woman Before Me by Ruth Dugdall (£0.99). For almost a decade, Ruth Dugdall worked as a Probation Officer in prisons with numerous high-risk criminals. Her professional background is used to stunning effect in this psychological thriller about a woman who had it all, then lost it.

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist (£1.29). Short story writer Ninni Holmqvist makes her debut as a novelist in this story about a woman sent to live out her days in comfort in a state-of-the-art facility. When her peaceful submission is blown apart, she is forced to fight for her freedom--and life.

Pride and Premiership by Michelle Gayle (£0.99). Former EastEnders star and popular TV celebrity Michelle Gayle introduces readers to Remy Louise Bennet. Aged 17 ½, her one goal in life is to become a WAG--but is WAGdom all it's cracked up to be?

The Silver Bridge by Paul Michael Francis (£0.99). Paul Michael Francis won several writing competitions as a boy. His first novel takes readers from Hollywood to Greece, to unexpected territory where dreams meet cold, condemning reality--and righting past wrongs doesn't guarantee love's sweet symphony.

Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann (£0.99). Born and raised in New York, Hilary Thayer Hamann spent time working in the film industry before writing her arresting and provocative coming-of-age debut about the experience of growing up female in America.

Kindle Daily Deal: December 31

The Kindle Daily Deal for December 31 is Homicide by David Simon. Only £1.09, you save 77% off yesterday's price (terms apply).

From the creator of The Wire comes a highly acclaimed journalistic masterpiece and true crime classic that illustrates a year in the life of the detectives of Baltimore's Homicide Unit.

Don't want to miss a Kindle Daily Deal? Bookmark amazon.co.uk/kindledailydeal or follow us on Twitter. Deals will also be posted frequently on Facebook and Kindle Post.

Gordon Ferris's 'Unquiet Heart'

Fans of Crime, Thrillers & Mystery are in for a treat: more crime novels have been added to the 12 Days of Kindle, including The Private Patient by PD James, Bad Debts by Peter Temple, I Am God by Giorgio Faletti, The Mark by Jason Pinter and The Third Antichrist by Mario Reading. Gordon Ferris's The Unquiet Heart was also added and he appears on Kindle Post to talk about his writing style.

I'll let you into a secret. Some authors don't know what they're doing. Or perhaps it's fairer to say that some of us don't know where they're going with a story. It's the only way I can write. I start with a broad idea or a theme but not a detailed plot. I'd freeze at my keyboard if I mapped everything out before starting to write. Instead I kick off with a scene featuring my hero caught up in something violent and mysterious and see how he responds. That way I'm as engrossed as the new reader, desperate to find out what happens next. It's a high-risk approach, but it's exciting, and it seems to work for me. I'm learning to trust that the plot will emerge from my fevered imagination as I hit the keyboard.

Take my novel The Unquiet Heart. It began life as a gang-busting tale set in post-war London. The dark alleys of the East End and the bombed-out streets seemed a perfect background for my hero, Danny McRae, to be locked in deadly combat with villains and charlatans. Not to mention dangerous women. (See Danny's first outing in Truth Dare Kill.)

I let Danny drive the story knowing that sometimes he runs away with it. He takes a corner and is confronted with a new dilemma and he responds in an unexpected way. The girl he's chasing isn't who she seems. She turns out to have a surprising past and an uncertain future. Suddenly it's a different story all together. This happened with a vengeance in The Unquiet Heart. At the time Britain was staggering to its feet through rationing and unemployment. Europe was awash with refugees. From the Urals to the Rhine, and throughout the Middle East, civilization lay in ruins. Berlin was the divided and bombed out arena for the clash of capitalism and communism. Palestine was the long-hoped for safe home of the Jews after the Holocaust. Pity Britain was in charge of it.

All these events crowded in on my subconscious and drove The Unquiet Heart along a surprising and shocking path. Exactly whose heart I'm talking about is explored in this story about the seemingly perfect partnership: gang-busters by day, lovers by night. Danny McRae, private detective scraping a living in ration-card London. Eve Copeland, crime reporter, looking for new angles to save her career. It's an alliance made in heaven, until Eve disappears, a contact dies violently and an old adversary presents Danny with some unpalatable truths about his missing lover. Danny's desperate search for Eve hurls him into the shattered remains of Berlin, where terrorism and espionage foreshadow the bleakness of the Cold War. Danny is drawn into a web of black marketeers, double agents and assassins, and begins to lose sight of the thin line between good and evil....

--Gordon Ferris

Kindle Daily Deal: December 30

The Kindle Daily Deal for December 30 is The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. Only £0.99, you save 75% off yesterday's price (terms apply).

Heralded as one of the most outstanding children's books of the 20th century, Rosemary Sutcliff writes with such passion and attention to detail that Roman Britain is instantly brought to life and stays with the reader long after the last page has been turned.

Don't want to miss a Kindle Daily Deal? Bookmark amazon.co.uk/kindledailydeal or follow us on Twitter. Deals will also be posted frequently on Facebook and Kindle Post.

Shaun Sewell on "The Real 'Dad's Army'"

Shaun Sewell is an avid antique dealer and social historian who discovered the diaries of Lt Col Rodney Foster, now published as The Real 'Dad's Army'. The diaries paint a rare picture of life during WWII through the eyes of the Home Guard platoon and company leader on the Kentish coastline.

Don't panic, don't panic! The quest to discover and restore another lost voice from the past was becoming more difficult than I had envisioned. Hours spent scanning through countless auction catalogues had proved fruitless and as a last resort I tried eBay just in case there were an archive waiting to be unearthed that day. Usually, January is a pretty slow month in terms of buying and selling but today the world of eBay was offering a life-changing item and I'd somehow managed to stumble upon it.

There, hidden amongst the prop diaries of The Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Wimpy Kid Diaries was a heading and photo which required further inspection. 'Home Guard Diary Scrapbook WWII 1939-1945' was enough information to get excited and sure enough the description described a series of diaries detailing the Second World War adventures of an unknown author based in Kent and enrolled in the Home Guard. My only understanding of the Home Guard was watching Dad's Army on a Saturday afternoon after the football scores had been read out and the BBC Grandstand titles had finished. Were these the scribblings of a Private Pike or the dour mutterings of Private Fraser? I decided that this was too good a lot to pass by so with fingers paused and readied I entered amount after amount as the usual bidding frenzy took the diaries from a modest couple of hundred pounds to the heady heights of nearly a thousand pounds. Luckily for me, my final bid secured the item and the next day via Special Delivery a parcel of eight small diaries written in the same hand and populated with contemporary newspaper clippings arrived and my new project had begun in earnest.

Like Private Pike, the author of the diaries had decided not to inform the rest of us who he was, and why should he--he knew! Unfortunately, there was no Captain Mainwaring on hand to reveal his identity so it meant a trip to Hythe to discover the writer's name. Piecing together the names of his neighbours and the name of the street in Hythe where he lived, the Voters Register and Kelly's Directory soon revealed that the Home Guard author was Lt Col Rodney Foster who lived at No 4 Hillcrest Road, Hythe with his wife Phyllis and daughter Daphne. The residents' names matched those Rodney had mentioned and the mystery was solved. Further research unlocked more information about Rodney's life and I made contact with Rodney's great niece who was as delighted as I to know that Rodney's diaries had survived and that he might one day be published and his amazing adventures and experiences read and enjoyed. Two years later The Real 'Dad's Army' war diaries and Rodney's Home Guard escapades are ready to add to the wartime story of the struggle facing Britain during the dark days of the Summer of 1940.

--Shaun Sewell

Escape to Another Time and Place: 12 Days of Kindle

Books transport us to another time and place, whether it's an exploration of history or total immersion in an author's world. The books added today to the 12 Days of Kindle sale will take readers away from the everyday and ordinary.

Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett

More than 60 years after the Spanish Civil War ended, the appearance of mass graves containing victims of Francisco Franco's death squads finally broke what Spaniards call "the pact of forgetting". Readers will embark on a journey around Spain and through its history to discover why some of Europe's most voluble people have kept silent so long.

Spirit Hunter by Katy Moran

Travel the dangerous Silk Road--the age-old trade route that runs from Europe to China--with Asena, a young woman who is captured by Swiftarrow, a Shaolin devotee. Asena is taken to the ancient city of Chang'an, where she is forced to begin her life anew and learn the ways of the Shaolin.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine

Fly across the pond to Westport, Connecticut in this playful and devoted homage to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Betty Weissmann has just been dumped by her husband of 48 years. When she is exiled from her elegant New York apartment by her husband's mistress, Betty and her two daughters regroup in a run-down beach cottage in Westport.

A Carpet Ride to Khiva by Christopher Aslan Alexander

Take a magic carpet ride through Khiva, a remote walled city in Uzbekistan. Christopher Alexander's entrancing travelogue sees him stripped naked at a former Soviet youth camp, crawling through silkworm droppings, tackling a carpet-thieving mayor, bluffing his way through My Heart Will Go On for Uzbek TV and seeking sanctuary as an anti-Western riot consumed the Kabul carpet bazaar.  

Silk Road by Colin Falconer

Colin Falconer takes readers back to the historic era of the Mongolian empire. Winding through the plains of Palestine and over the high mountains of the Hindu Kush, from the empty wastes of the Taklimakan desert to the golden palaces of China, the novel weaves a spellbinding story of sin, desire, conflict and human frailty onto the vast tapestry of the medieval orient.

12 Days of Kindle: Top Customer-Reviewed Books

Find top customer-reviewed books today in the 12 Days of Kindle. See why the books below were rated with nearly 5-stars, and be sure to see the full list of new additions.

The Last Exile by EV Seymour

"Only six reviews for The Last Exile, but each one 5 stars… that sounds too good to be true … This is an absolute cracker of a book--a quick paced thriller with a few unforeseen twists. It's fabulously written and manages to weld detailed characterisation with an original and totally believable storyline. Without doubt one of the best thrillers I've read in a long time. If this genre appeals to you, I think you'll be hard pressed to read better." --Amazon.co.uk customer review

 

Wesley by Stacey O'Brien

"You will never read another book like this one. Nineteen years of intimate friendship between a barn owl with a complex, intelligent character, and an observant, witty young woman with a gift for narrative. Wesley was never tamed, he was a wild animal to the end, but few domestic animals form such a bond with a human being. Funny, sometimes scary, occasionally sad, and with surprises and insights into animal and human behavior on almost every page, Wesley is a gem of a book." --Amazon.co.uk customer review

 

Tortured Rake by Sarah Morgan

"I had to force myself to put this book down. We had a visitor turn up halfway through--how dare they ;-) and I was itching to get back to it. I am a sucker for a tortured hero and a good old Cinderella type story and this book delivers on both in spades … This is the first book in the Bad Blood Collection and I can't wait to read the rest of them. The Wolfe siblings will make for explosive reading I think." --Amazon.co.uk customer review

 

Rosie's War by Rosemary Say

"This is the amazing true story of a young English woman's courageous journey through occupied France during the Second World War. The story is told by her daughter and is unlike anything I have read before about the war. Rosie is an ordinary person who is inadvertently caught up in the war and this is the story of her bravery in the face of all she experiences. Read it! I promise you will enjoy it." --Amazon.co.uk customer review

 

Daughter of the Flames by Zoe Marriott

"I loved her realistic descriptions of the way people lived and indeed the way they suffered. Her hero and heroine were likeable in their uncertainty and imperfections … Zoe Marriott has taken a well-populated genre and created a distinct and engaging world with strong characters. I recommend this to anyone who sighs and rolls their eyes at female fantasy characters who demand to be taken seriously and then step back and let the men take all the good weapons." --Amazon.co.uk customer review

Kindle Daily Deal: December 28

The Kindle Daily Deal for December 28 is Drowning Rose by Marika Cobbold. Only £1.29, you save 81% off yesterday's price (terms apply).

'This wonderful Swedish novelist weaves tales of intellectual and emotional subtlety with her uniquely mischievous wit... Characteristically, Cobbold handles profound and delicate themes with a ceramicist's lightness of touch.' --Daily Mail

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New Releases in the 12 Days of Kindle

John Lawton on how Black Out, a riveting drama that captures the realities of wartime London, came into existence. Get it for £0.99 in the 12 Days of Kindle, along with other new releases that include Stealing Phoenix by Joss Stirling, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Martin Bell, Serial by John Lutz, Adventures of a Wimpy Werewolf by Tim Collins and What You Don't Know by David Belbin.

I was living in Spain, within sight of Africa, next to the Rock. A lazy living tending an orange grove and vineyard. I'd finished a screenplay based on a DH Lawrence short story that no one wanted to film and was asking myself 'what next?' I couldn't water oranges for ever.

After about a month I ran out of novels to read and caught the bus up the coastal road to Fuengirola, where, thanks to the enormous number of retired English, there was a second hand English language bookshop. There I found Gorki Park by Martin Cruz Smith. It's not often I say this of any book, but I couldn't put it down. Worse, I started thinking up Cruz-esque plots. The following year I arrived back in England with a plotline and a few pages of type. I realised that MCS would unleash a glut of imitators writing Russia-based, ice-bound cop stories. Red This, Red That, Red Bollox... How to write one that simply didn't cash in? When was England ever like Moscow?... and it occurred to me that it was in the freezing winter of 1943-1944, known to history as the Little Blitz, when the Luftwaffe returned to pound London for the last time. A regulated age... of shortages, ration books and ID cards.

I showed this to my agent who said, "No one's going to film this either, it's just too expensive. Why not write it as a novel?" Never had seen myself as a novelist--wordy bastards--what I did, so I told myself, was terse, Pinteresque dialogue. I put it aside. During slack moments in the late eighties I took it up again, wrote a couple of chapters. Got turned down by publishers. Shelved it again.

By the mid-nineties, I'd finished a knackering run at Channel 4, making programmes back to back. I can recall one occasion when I set the alarm clock for 40 minutes sleep. I got on a plane every ten days... and so on. I was working so hard, I didn't have time to spend my wages. After about five years, it dawned on me that I could afford a year off. As long as I landed a programme by the end of the year I could do what I liked for twelve months. I dusted off the 'novel'. Finished it in a straight ten month qwertybash. By the eleventh month I had a programme. In the twelfth I was on the West Bank of the Jordan filming it, and when I got back Weidenfeld had bought the book. A few months later it won a WH Smith Fresh Talent award, and was runner-up to Philip Kerr for the Literary Review Bad Sex award--with, may I add, a scene about food rationing. (I remain baffled by this.)

That was Black Out.

--John Lawton

Kindle Daily Deal: December 27

The Kindle Daily Deal for December 27 is Guinness World Records 2012. Only £0.99, you save 78% off yesterday's price (terms apply).

From the Olympic to the apocalyptic, the new, fully updated digital edition of the planet's biggest-selling copyright book is bursting with all-new photos and updated features.

Don't want to miss a Kindle Daily Deal? Bookmark amazon.co.uk/kindledailydeal or follow us on Twitter. Deals will also be posted frequently on Facebook and Kindle Post.