Do you feel the itchy glare of CCTV cameras as you walk down the street? Do you wonder, post-Snowden, who else might be reading your emails and tweets? For anyone who enjoys a little Orwellian paranoia, there’s a new stage production for one of the earliest and possibly best dystopian novels out there: 1984. And […]
This morning the jackets for Mary Nichols’ A Different World arrived from the printers: The woman holding her hat and looking up instantly makes me think of her searching the sky for planes – such a simple image that manages to convey quite a lot about the book. Not only is it a great image, but […]
How many of you had to study the same text at school year in year out? I suppose English teachers fall back on the classics for a reason. But Jane Eyre was amongst those that I never grew tired of studying and similarly, as an adult, I love watching a brand new TV/film production when […]
I do like putting on an audiobook from time to time, although it isn’t my go-to reading format. But it’s rare these days that storytelling is an event, a night out, which is why the mention in a weekend paper of Pin Drop Studio jumped out at me. The Pin Drop Studio hosts authors and […]
I was astounded the other week to learn that one of my favourite childhood reads: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory turns a whopping fifty years old this year. Isn’t it wearing well, isn’t it? I do hope that copies of Roald Dahl’s classic are having surreptitious / riotous after-hours parties on bookshelves around the world. […]
Last week I became an auntie for the very first time to a beautiful little girl called Rowan. With a new member of the family comes lots of things to look forward to: cute baby clothing, learning first words, birthdays and many more. But something I’m really looking forward to is story time. I can’t […]
In April we have a title coming out that is sure to put a little ‘spring’ in your step: Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries. The author is Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the first person to hold the title of Central Park Administrator in New York who now writes history of landscape design […]
Ralph Fiennes has a talent for giving me to heebie-geebies. I recall seeing him in The English Patient (ouch – those burns), he was the creepy and conflicted Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, and let us not forget his turn as the nasally challenged He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. But he might be about to break his freaking me […]
Whilst ploughing my way through most of this years’ film awards-season offerings, I’ve also been enjoying some fantastic documentaries lately. Last weekend I was invited to Open City Docs Fest’s ‘History of Documentary Weekend’, by a friend (who is way more in the know about these things). We headed to UCL for a screening of […]
Win a set of PRINCE OF SHADOWS goodies.
What do The Bell Jar and Where the Wild Things Are have in common? Very different books of course, but they were both published in 1963. Literary web magazine and blog Bookslut have decided to step in and right the wrongs of book awards past, creating the Daphnes or ‘The Corrections‘, choosing the best book […]
We’re in the midst of the fourteenth annual National Storytelling Week. As a publisher it’s not surprising that this initiative to promote the oldest artform appeals to us here at A&B. Why not see if there’s an event happening near you, like Stories by Candlelight at the Polar Museum, Cambridge tomorrow (Friday) or the Anti-Valentine […]
For a while now I’ve had my eye on The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell. I saw the eye-catching hardback in Waterstones and immediately picked it up. Something about the title, together with the woman on the front, made me think of the 1920s Jazz age. And I wasn’t far off. Set in New York […]
I recently finished The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz – a book that has been following me everywhere for the past month or so. I kept seeing giant posters on the Underground and wondering what it was about. Grosz has been a psychologist for the past twenty-five years, over 50,000 hours spent listening and responding to […]
Last Friday, a giant book-shaped bed, set within a night-time dreamscape, rose up as the centrepiece of the first exhibition to take place at Peckham Platform (next door to the iconic Peckham library). Bookbed, by local artist Ruth Beale, explores learning, imagination and the book-as-symbol alongside current thinking in culture, education and public space. As […]
We’ve got our fingers on the pulse, we’re ahead of the curve here at A&B. I would like to draw your attention to a blog I posted this time last year in which I urged you to check out the sporadic posts over at Fiction to Fashion. Julie, the brain behind the site, works for […]
I can scarcely believe it. But today is my last day at Allison & Busby. After many happy years here, the time has come for me to leave this lovely home and its large family of authors. I’ve followed A&B around London, from the humble pad in Brixton, to the lovely offices in Charlotte Mews […]
Last week you might have seen that the entire office was cooing over the advance covers for Rachel Caine’s brand new, post-Morganville novel, Prince of Shadows. And who can blame us, not only does our cover girl look rather lovely in her Elizabethan outfit, but the shadow of a boy cast behind her hints nicely at […]
If you’re anything like me, information enters your brain, is processed and then drifts out again approximately one week later. And although I know that learning is as much down to the efforts of the student as the teacher, wouldn’t it be fantastic if everything you needed to know was presented as beautifully and engagingly […]
I was prompted by some discussion on twitter last week to think about who, not what, I’m reading. At the moment that’s Simon Garfield and his To the Letter, as well as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. While I wouldn’t have said that I read more male than female writers, there’s been much discussion online […]
We are nearing the end of January and the sugary pink displays have popped up: Valentine’s day is fast approaching. But if you’d like to avoid the trappings of what’s arguably the most over-commercialised holiday, I’d like to point you in the direction of International Book Giving Day. Run entirely by volunteers, the initialive is […]