Kindle Post

Marian Keyes on Her Kindle

In this guest blog for Kindle Post, Marian Keyes gives the fairytale story of how she came to love her Kindle. Marian's new book, The Mystery of Mercy Close, is available now.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, (about 2 years ago) there was an average-looking maiden. This maiden loved reading books but because of her busy job herding swans, there wasn't much time for her hobby. Our maiden, we'll call her Marian because we might as well call her something, looked forward very much to her holidays when she could read to her heart's content.  Books she would gather, many many books and pile them into her suitcase and fly away to a sunny place and wallow in words for seven happy days.

But lo! A decree was issued by the big-wigs in power. A new law was being brought into force: it was called The Baggage Allowance. Suitcases would be permitted to weigh 20 kilos, no more. And sometimes, especially on the airlines that declared themselves 'Budget' even less than 20 kilos. Books were heavy items. Very heavy. Marian's abundance of holiday reading would have to be pared back to the bone.

Marian was downcast. What if she ran out of reading material on her holidays? Her beloved (for he always accompanied her on these jollies) had completely different reading tastes to her--she had no desire whatsoever to read of the campaign in North Africa during the Second World War.

Perhaps she could buy some books while in the foreign holiday land? But bitter experience had shown her that the likes of books on sale in these places were, not to put too fine a point on it, a load of old rubbish.

And then came news of a magic device. It went by the name of Kindle. It weighed a tiny amount, little more than a breath of a baby unicorn, but hundreds of books could be stored upon it. The people of the land were aghast and afeerd. "It be witchcraft!" They cried. "It b'ain't natural!" And they ran away to pray to the saints.

Marian, a young woman of great courage, on account of her daily dealings with swans who are highly temperamental, did not run away. She stepped forward, picked up the Kindle and after studying it from every angle, spoke in a clear true voice. "Can anyone show me how to turn this thing on?"

A minion rushed forward and demonstrated the workings of the Kindle and Marian watched with interest. She saw the library of books that resided within. She understood that she did not have to go to the market to purchase a book she liked the sound of; by the pressing of a few buttons, she could have it delivered instantly. "I like it," Marian said. "I want it."

The people of the land watched in horror as Marian slipped the Kindle into her pocket. "No, no, no!" A great wailing and a-clamouring rose. "It be witchcraft!"

"Hush, you closed-minded peasants," Marian commanded. "It b'ain't witchcraft. It be technology."

--Marian Keyes

"Seldom Seen" by Sarah Ridgard

Selected for Amazon Rising Stars 2012, Seldom Seen by Sarah Ridgard is a mesmerising debut novel set in Suffolk. In this guest blog, the author describes the seeds that led to the book's fruition.

There were three books that lived permanently on my desk while I was writing Seldom Seen: All About Goats, The Story of the Potato and English Field Names: A Dictionary. There were obviously many more that came and went, but I became very fond of these books and they stayed on long after I'd stopped using them for research.

Goats feature in my novel, so All About Goats was a reference bible from the beginning. But I also enjoyed thumbing through the book, not least because the author, Lois Hetheringon, had been a neighbour up the road when I was growing up. My parents were starting their own herd at the time so we were always asking her advice on husbandry matters, and the photos of hoof trimming and goats in show rings bring back that time so clearly when life was about goats kidding at night and our kitchen swimming in milk. 
 
When I moved to Norwich funds were tight for a while, so my partner and I lived on a cheap diet that involved a lot of soup and spuds. We got used to living with sacks of potatoes in the hall, the names changing from Nicola and Charlotte to Maris Piper, King Edward and Desiree. The Story of the Potato by Alan Wilson lists all sorts of rare varieties from Gladstone to Red Nosed Kidney, with illustrations and a history of their development. I settled on Desiree as the narrator, a red skinned variety, which does extremely well on heavy land, firm texture but can be prone to blight and virus infection.

I was some way through the novel when my dad happened to mention one day that fields used to have names. The Suffolk landscape was already central to the story at that point, but when he told me about some of the field names and their derivations and that a dictionary existed, I went to find a copy in the UEA library. I remember staring at the author's name on the cover, John Field, wondering if his work came about because of his name. Just a few exhilarating minutes later, after poring over the entries for fields called Twistgut, Make Me Rich and Lovelands, I knew that fields were about to become characters in the novel. The final piece of the story had fallen into place. 

The day after my book launch, I had a message on the phone from Jill, one of my closest friends. We've been friends for nearly 25 years and know pretty much everything about each other's lives and families. However, I didn't know that her sister was married to John Field's son, and had been for the last 20-odd years. This came to light because her husband had read the acknowledgements at the back of Seldom Seen and noticed my reference to English Field Names. After spending so much time on making connections within the story, it turned out to be Jill's sister's father-in-law who'd written the same book that in the end gave me the title for my first novel.  

--Sarah Ridgard

Author Francesca Brill on "The Harbour"

The Harbour by Francesca Brill was shortlisted in Round 2 of our 2012 Rising Stars Award. Her debut novel, a gripping and atmospheric story of love between a journalist and a spy, is set in China at time of imminent danger. Here she tells us about her earliest memories of writing, and the relationship between acting and writing.

 

 

The Harbour is my first book. Well, strictly speaking it’s my first book since I was about ten years old. Before then I was prolific. My first prose was nothing if not ambitious. I entered the fray with a book about a mermaid called Araminta. She had many sisters and their names each began with a different letter of the alphabet, starting at the beginning and getting quite a long way through. Fascinating! No? Well, it was to me. I had an odd obsession with the birth announcements in The Times newspaper. I followed it avidly and rushed home from school every day to make lists of the names in columns for boys and girls, and for years I had my own version of the most popular names of the year. Or at least the most popular with readers of The Times...

 

Next up was my deeply-felt opus about Queenie, a much-abused slave girl in the southern States of America. Clearly I had not heard the advice that it’s best to write about what you know. I didn’t feel the least bit restricted by the unromantic reality of being a middle class white girl growing up in a flat in late 20th-century London. The Harbour is set in China and Hong Kong in the nineteen thirties and forties so it seems that despite having heard the above advice many times I have still chosen to ignore it.

 

I started my professional life as an actress and my passion for it was fired by the incredible challenge of occupying someone else’s psyche. To be someone else. To have an insight into how it feels to live a life very different from the one I went home to. It seems to me that this transformative trick was what I was attempting with Araminta and Queenie. In addition, real life is a vortex of unforeseeable and unpredictable potential disasters and triumphs. What’s going to happen next? Who knows? However as an actor you can be sure of one thing - the show is always going to be the same. You will inevitably be going to that place, speaking those words to those people in that order and there will be a pre-ordained conclusion. (And, with any luck, some applause).

 

Perhaps my secret yearning for that unrealistic template has translated into my urge to tell my own stories. In this instance it has led me to create the world of The Harbour in which I have tried to marshal my spiky, independently minded characters through passionate love affairs, traumatic and challenging times, moral decisions and murky choices towards something resembling a resolution.

 

On many levels the step from acting to writing is a small one – it is the opportunity to be, for a short time at least, a brave mermaid, a frightened slave girl or a compromised journalist; to breathe the air of another country or see the landscape of another century. What’s going to happen next? Who knows?

 

Debut Author Charlotte Rogan on Kindle Post

Amazon Rising Star author Charlotte Rogan shares her excitement as the publication date of her debut novel, The Lifeboat, draws near.

One of the first things an inspirational writing teacher said to our class was, 'I can see that some of you want to be liked. People who want to be liked can never be writers.' My early education was far behind me, but it had been one long exercise in learning to tell people what they wanted to hear, and I understood right away that the teacher was saying something about that. I also understood that he was telling us to free ourselves from our inner critics: if we weren't willing to write something bad, we would never write anything good, mainly because all first drafts are pretty terrible--at least mine are. So to be a writer, you have to get over the polite lie and you have to take risks. Your writing has to scare you a little; if it scares you, it just might scare other people--and being scared when it comes to reading is a really, really excellent thing.

I reached a higher level of understanding when I put my teacher's warning together with that timeless writing class commandment: 'Write what you know'. Most books are about people, after all, and who are the people we writers know best? Our friends and family, that's who--the very people who like us most (or who used to like us until they started to recognize themselves in our work). Now I realized that he wasn't only saying that strangers might not like us, but that maybe nobody would.

Not that it's all roses for the family of a writer. The other day I went to hear an author talk about his latest memoir. His mother was in the audience, and after mentioning what a good sport she was, he cautioned the parents in the audience to direct their creative children toward painting or dance. 'Whatever you do, don't give them writing lessons,' he said with a hearty Southern laugh, 'because who do you think they're going to write about?'

But as the publication day of my first book approaches, I'm starting to think my teacher was also hinting at something we fledglings could not have fathomed back then, something to do with leaving the safety of the closets where we, still innocently, poured our hearts out onto the page. Most writers aren't comfortably public people--if we were, we would probably be doing something else. Sending a book out into the world is kind of like lining up against the gym wall while the critics and bloggers pick teams, and these were not inner critics. In my heart, I'm JD Salinger, self-protective misanthrope, posting a sign on my door that says 'Go away. The novel speaks for itself.' But writing is a form of communication, after all, and everyone knows that good communication requires the waving of some answering flag. Besides, I keep reminding myself, in writing as in reading, scary is a really, really excellent thing.

--Charlotte Rogan

2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Longlist

The longlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was today announced and includes The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry, Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards, The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness, Snowdrops by AD Miller, Far to Go by Alison Pick, The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers and Derby Days by DJ Taylor.

Here Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes, Ion Trewin, shares how these novels were selected and what happens next.

Judging the Longlist is the first public manifestation of the Man Booker judges’ tastes. This year’s jury had met many times for informal meetings since they first began reading entries last Christmas. As always some novels were quickly disposed of, for whatever their publishers may say not every entry is a swan.

This year’s judges, chaired by Stella Rimington, former director-general of MI5 and now a practicing novelist with six thrillers under her belt, Susan Hill, who has in the past had one of her novels shortlisted for the prize, former MP and novelist Chris Mullin, journalist and novelist Matthew d’Ancona and literary editor Gaby Wood, read 138 books over seven months. Unlike some other prizes we expect our judges to read every book. That way we ensure that all kinds of unexpected treasures emerge. 

Given that the Man Booker Prize is open to authors who are British, Commonwealth or Irish passport holders it is interesting that this year three are from Canada, and that Irish, Scottish and Welsh-based writers are represented. But this is chance: no panel of judges starts with the idea that the country of origin is an important criterion. Gender, too. This year five women made the shortlist, but I can vouch for the fact that no-one mentioned the female/male split until I did a count. Is it relevant? I don’t think so.

What happens next? The judges now go away and reread the thirteen novels on the longlist to prepare for the debate when they meet to choose the shortlist early in September. The six novels they select will then get a further reading in time for the day of reckoning on October 18. That is the day of the annual Man Booker dinner in the City of London’s Guildhall. The judges will meet that afternoon to find a winner.

At this stage I would say their decision is wide open. The judges’ remit under the Man Booker rules is to find what is, in their opinion, the best novel of the year. That is of course subjective, but with five such experienced readers from a variety of backgrounds one can be certain that the debate will be fast, furious and impassioned.

Try the longlist yourself--and see what you think.

--Ion Trewin

See previous Man Booker Prize winners and nominees on Kindle.

Jamie Ford on Silly Love Stories

Jamie Ford, author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, a round 2 pick for Amazon Rising Stars, shares with Kindle readers his thoughts on love stories.

I admit it. I’m a total sucker for a good love story. It began when I was nine years old, watching a '70s movie on NBC called James at 15. My given name is James, so I was vicariously interested in the story of this precocious teen living in Oregon (where I was living at the time), who meets the girl of his dreams. But right after James wins her heart, he and his family move to Boston. Argh--I can still feel the injustice of it all. Even at the tender age of nine, when his family slowly drove away and the credits began rolling and that sad piano music kicked in, it brought tears to my eyes (and a punch in the shoulder from my brother).

Yes, I was a painfully sensitive lad.

Take my first kiss, for example. Aged fifteen, with my first non-imaginary girlfriend--someone I was truly, madly, deeply in love with. Someone I had admired for months. There we were on her doorstep after homecoming, noses tilting in counter-rotations, the simplest of kisses in the cold Seattle night. I drove away in my rusty '77 Honda Civic feeling like I was Alexander and I'd conquered the known world. In fact, when I went to work the next day as a busboy at a seafood restaurant, I could not stop smiling. I grinned so much that the salty waitresses all thought I’d lost my virginity.

But it was just a kiss.

There's just something magical about first kisses and last goodbyes--something subtle, something… universal. So Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a throwback for me. To a time before relationships were spit out like sausage from that meat-grinder we call reality TV. Before Facebook replaced notes, nervously passed in hallways. When crushes hurt and first loves were all consuming, rather than all consummating.

Still, you'd be surprised at how many people couldn't understand that my novel could be a love story with only one real kiss. In fact, an agent I'd queried early on said, "I like the story, but you need to make the main characters older--so you know... they can fully explore their relationship." As in, bow-chicka-wow-wow.

I blanched. It’s not that I couldn't write a sweatier version of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. It's just that I kept thinking about the sublime nature of classic love stories. I mean, would Casablanca be a better film, would it be more entrenched in the firmament of cinema if we saw a flashback of Rick and Ilsa making the beast with two backs in some Paris hotel? Would Gone with the Wind be a more powerful love story if Rhett Butler had said, "Frankly my dear, I don't have a condom?"

Doubtful.

Because, as the philosopher McCartney once said, "You’d think that people would've had enough of silly love songs / I look around me and I see it isn't so..."

--Jamie Ford

Author of "The Godless Boys" on Kindle Post

Naomi Wood's debut novel, The Godless Boys, is featured in Round 2 of Amazon Rising Stars. 

Writing started with a break-up. The idea of 'being' a writer was always pulsing in my mind, but I hadn’t done much about it. When a relationship ended--and my job wasn’t really going anywhere--I thought, Just what am I going to do with myself?

So I started writing: sketches at first, short stories; little things like that. When my ex found himself a new girlfriend, I grandly told everyone I was upgrading to a novel. When he moved in with her and bought her a kitten, I quit my job, moved to Paris, worked as a nanny and wrote during the day. Nothing like a bit of rage to spur your ambition.

The days spent in Paris weren’t full of Hemingway-style excitement. Mostly I got my work done while the kids were at school and became fluent in the phraseology of French parenting. ('Tu me casses les oreilles', is my favourite one that I can remember. Literally: you’re breaking my ears). I lived in a minuscule studio on the 7th floor with no lift, had no money and few friends, but I committed myself to 500 words a day.

I was reading a lot of the 'God quarrel' literature at the time--Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.--and I was interested in what the possibilities of extremist atheism might look like compared to extremist faith. The novel developed slowly until I came up with the main idea: that it would be based in an England partitioned between the religious and the antireligious.

I wanted to write The Godless Boys because, as a person of no faith, I’ve always been fascinated by my friends that do believe. Though it seemed that the world, post 9/11, was divided by an Islam–Christian tension, I wondered whether the real troubles might be between those with a Book and those without.

From Paris, then, to very bookish Norwich.

Doing the MA course at UEA was rather magical. It’s the students that make this course: the discussions in the workshops are driven by your peers; it’s their input that shapes your work. Norwich is a perfect place to do this kind of thing. It’s cheap, there are lots of bookshops, people live a short walk away. And your fellow students make excellent tutors as well as bedfellows.

After the MA I found myself an agent through--ahem--Facebook. Having the UEA tag is always a good way to catch someone’s attention: it doesn’t mean you’ll get an agent, but it does mean you’ll go to the top of the reading pile. Together, we did another year of editing.

Selling the book to Picador was hugely exciting because it was an imprint I had always loved. I remembered seeing their name on the spines of books I’d long cherished, and desperately wanted to become part of that 'family'.

As soon as The Godless Boys was acquired we sat down to another round of edits. (They always try and prepare you, at UEA, for a l-o-n-g edit, but I don’t think I really believed them). But finally, after four years, it was done.

In the end, there’s little to say about publishing your debut novel apart from the feeling is so good that it makes years of hard work seem like a mere blink of the eye.

--Naomi Wood

Amazon Rising Star Author S J Watson on Kindle Post

Before I Go To Sleep was inspired by a man called Henry Gustav Molaison, whose obituary I read in 2009. He'd died in 2008, at the age of 82, but since undergoing surgery for epilepsy in 1953 had been unable to form new memories and so lived constantly in the past. I read about how he had been working with the same doctor for years but every time they met he had to be told who she was and why she knew so much about him. I wondered if he was equally unfamiliar with himself, and thought how terrifying it must be to wake up every day thinking it was 1953 and you were still young, only to find it was decades later. I began to research memory and learnt of other cases, among them Clive Wearing who was a conductor with the BBC until he contracted a virus which left him with one of the worst cases of amnesia ever seen. Watching footage of him is heartbreaking--he constantly lives in the present, with no idea of how he got to where he is. So the book is based on a number of cases, and I wanted very much to make the novel faithful to these people who suffer terribly because of their amnesia and didn't want to trivialize their condition in any way.

But the book isn't based on a real-life case. When I read about Henry Molaison I straight away had a very strong image of a woman looking in a bathroom mirror in a strange house to find that, instead of a teenager reflected there, she had become a middle-aged woman, and the house was her home. I knew straight away that this was the story I wanted to write, and also that that would be the opening scene of the book. I also knew that I wanted the reader to identify totally with Christine's condition and so, while it was technically very challenging to do so, I decided to write the book in the first person.

I wrote it over the next year. I don't like to plan things too much--I like to leave room for the book to surprise me, and in fact there were a few twists and turns that even I didn't see coming until I'd begun to write them! But I wanted the reader to always know only as much as Christine does, and no more. So really it was just a matter of working out how Christine would go about gradually discovering the truth and then taking the reader on the same journey.

It's a thriller, but much of Christine's disorientation comes from small domestic details that don't make sense to her. Very often in life it is the little details that trip us up, the things that we're not expecting. Christine can cope with having amnesia, but it's only when she realises she doesn't know where she lives, or how to use the phone, or who chose the clothes in the wardrobe and whether they're really hers, that she realises the true extent of her situation and how reliant she is on other people. It's these things that take a situation from the abstract to the specific and make it real. Take grief, for example. It's the first time you wake in an empty bed or realise you only need to put out one plate for dinner that really hurts. Those were the kinds of things I really wanted to write about.

--S J Watson

 

Editors' Note: Before I Go To Sleep is currently featured in Round 2 of Amazon Rising Stars 2011.

Amazon Rising Stars: Round 1 Winner

Congratulations to Elizabeth Haynes. Her first novel, the chilling psychological thriller Into the Darkest Corner, is the winner of the first quarter of Amazon Rising Stars 2011. A police intelligence analyst, Haynes started writing fiction in 2006 thanks to the annual challenge of National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) and the encouragement of the creative writing courses at West Dean College.

Into the Darkest Corner is an utterly convincing portrayal of obsession and a tour de force of suspense. Chosen by reader reviews, Haynes is guaranteed a place on the shortlist for the overall Amazon Rising Stars of 2011 award at the end of the year.

The next round of Amazon Rising Stars include:

• Before I Go to Sleep by S J Watson
• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
• The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood
• The Trouble with Alice by Olivia Glazebrook.

Amazon.co.uk customers will have until July to review and rate the shortlisted titles with the one judged as receiving the best customer feedback winning the second quarter Amazon Rising Stars title.

Round One Books Announced for Amazon Rising Stars

The Amazon Rising Stars programme aims to bring you the best debuts from up and coming authors. Over the course of the year we'll bring you 12 titles from authors we think you'll want to know about. The titles will be presented in groups of four and in three rounds, so be sure to check back regularly for updates. Remember--your vote counts. Your feedback will help determine who we name the overall winner at the end of the year.

The picks for Round One are:

• Snowdrops by AD Miller
• My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira
• The Terror of Living by Urban Waite
• Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes

Our current featured title, which will rotate throughout this round, is Snowdrops. It is a riveting psychological drama that unfolds over the course of one Moscow winter. A young Englishman's moral compass is spun by the seductive opportunities revealed to him by a new Russia: a land of hedonism and desperation, corruption and kindness, magical dachas and debauched nightclubs; a place where secrets--and corpses--come to light only when the deep snows start to thaw.

Read Snowdrops today and don't miss our Q&A with author AD Miller.