The Carnegie Medal Awards longlist is out, but, appallingly, the UK’s most prestigious children’s book awards longlist includes not a single BAME author. Badly done, British publishing.
But if you’re looking for another villain this week, look no further than the landlord of the specialist French’s Theatre Bookshop, who is raising the rent by a crippling 200 percent, causing the shop to close in mid-April despite a 15% growth in sales over the last couple of years.
On the more positive side, Norwich’s Book Hive is joining Read Up! Fight Back!, an American movement which reaches out to people “beyond the bubble of those who already share our opposition to Donald Trump”, which first began in Haight-Ashbury, California.
New Books
Kim Slater’s much-buzzed thriller, Blink, is out today on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Doll Funeral by Kate Harmer is out today in the UK and coming in September 2017 to the US. Frankie Gray of Transworld Books talked about the novel in the Open Book series in which industry insiders discuss books they wish they had published.
The Guardian reviews Tiffanie Dark’s book, Now We Are Forty: Whatever Happened to Generation X? It is published in both in the UK and the US on 23rd February.
Also in the Guardian, a review of Theresa May: An Enigmatic Prime Minister, by Rosa Prince, out last week.
Podcasts
The Today Programme interviews Rowan McCabe, who goes door to door to ask people if they would like a poem written about them.
Louise Doughty describes her latest book, Apple Tree Yard, as well as Black Water, on the latest Spectator Books podcast. (Rhe best-selling Apple Tree Yard is currently just $6/£4.80 on Book Depository, which incidentally is a great place to get British books if you don’t live in the UK.)
Topics on this week’s TLS podcast include poetry and prose forged in the aftermatch of the Russian revolution of 1917.
And on The Readers, Simon and Thomas look back over 2016 and forward to 2017.
