Hooked on books

    I'm sure you can't have too much of a good thing, and that's certainly the case where books are concerned.

    I paid a rare visit to London yesterday to have tea at Bloomsbury, to meet authors and talk to their editors, to hear about forthcoming books, and yes, to bring home a book or two (or three or four), hence the bag!

    It was a delightful occasion in the company of some fellow book bloggers - old friends and new ones - and an opportunity to put faces to names and to talk in person to so many lovely people with whom I'm in virtually daily contact online.

    I was thrilled to meet Samantha Shannon (about whom I wrote a little last May), and to have a chance to chat to her; hers is such an exciting story - pop back to that earlier post for a brief summary if you don't already know it - and she is a charming young woman with, I'm sure, a great career ahead of her. I now have a proof of her novel The Bone Season, which has already been sold in eighteen countries with the film rights optioned by Andy Serkis's The Imaginarium, and I am so looking forward to reading it.

    I said in a recent post that authors are not always the best people to read their own work, but yesterday Kerry Young, author of Pao and Gloria, joined us to talk about her books and to read a short extract, and boy, was she good! Kerry has drawn on her Jamaican background and her Chinese/African family for her two novels - there's a third in progress - which explore the country of her birth, its rich social culture and its troubled history. She is a great advert for her books!

    Also with us was Richard Benson whose non-fiction work The Valley: A Hundred Years in the Life of a Family comes out in September (that's the first fifty or so pages of a whopping 656 there at the bottom of the pile of the books), and what he told us of his family's history and of life in their Yorkshire valley was a delicious amuse-bouche for the big meal to come.

    As well as all the above I can't wait to read Khaled Hosseini's new novel And the Mountains Echoed (out in May), and Kate Manning's My Notorious Life by Madame X, described as a cross between Call The Midwife and The Crimson Petal and the White !

    My thanks to everyone at Bloomsbury who made us so welcome, to the authors who entertained us with their stories, real or made up, and to my fellow guests for all the bookish chat - the afternoon sped by all too quickly and I was soon on a train again, heading north, my 'swag bag' of books beside me, my head full of all I'd seen and heard, my excitement at the prospect of good reading to come even greater than usual.

Comments

[Dabarai]

Gosh, I so can't wait for a new Hosseini's novel!! Also, The Bone season looks surprisingly intriguing. Is it supposed to be a YA novel or adult one?

[Belle]

Oh, Cornflower, sounds like you had a wonderful day. Books and tea and authors...does it get any better than that? And one can never have too many book bags!

[Cornflower]

Dabarai, here is a short trailer for his new book from Khaled Hosseini himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8UBKOD7hsY
The Bone Season is an adult novel but will, as far as I know, appeal to YAs, too.

[Cornflower]

And I forgot to mention the cake!
It was a lovely day, Belle, and a privilege to be there.

[Dabarai]

Oh, thanks for the link! The Bone Season definitely caught my eye, look forward to try it.

[Barbara]

That's what I call a good day out! Glad you had such a special time.

[Cornflower]

Many hours on trains but worth it, and I greatly appreciate the fact that all those involved give up their time to talk to the likes of me about their work.