A bargain, and some books to look forward to

   

     ~   Anyone who, like me, has had their eye on Jane Borodale's recently published novel The Knot (which I mentioned here) may be interested to know that it is currently available at a bargain price. I've just bought it.

 

     ~   Neil Gaiman fans will be glad to hear that he has a new book due out next summer: The Ocean at the End of the Lane is, he says, "a novel of childhood and memory. It's a story of magic, about the power of stories and how we face the darkness inside each of us. It's about fear, and love, and death, and families. But, fundamentally, I hope, at its heart, it's a novel about survival".

    ~    Kate Atkinson's next novel is to be published in March. Life After Life is about a woman who lives through the most turbulent events of the 20th century, and it asks: "What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?"

 

 

    ~    Maggie O'Farrell is another very popular author with a new book out in the coming months. Instructions for a Heatwave is a portrait of an Irish family in the heatwave summer of 1976: "Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he's going round the corner to buy a newspaper.  He doesn't come back.  The search for Robert brings Gretta's children - two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce - back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone.  None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share."