Alex Scarrow Adaptation LAST LIGHT Debuts on Peacock

After many years of hard work behind the scenes, the miniseries adaptation of Alex Scarrow’s brilliant 2007 novel LAST LIGHT has premiered on the US streaming service Peacock. The five-part series, directed by Dennie Gordon (Jack Ryan, Madame Secretary), stars Matthew Fox (Lost) and Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey).

LAST LIGHT was co-produced by MGM International, Make It Happen Studio, Cactus Films, Entertainment 360, Film United, Twentieth Century Fox and Viaplay. It is expected to air in the UK on NOW TV and the Sky app, as part of their offering of Peacock content.

Set in the near future, LAST LIGHT is a thriller unfolding over the course of just a few days: it seems to be a very normal Monday morning. But in the space of only a few days, the world's oil supplies have been severed and at a horrifying pace things begin to unravel everywhere. And this is no natural disaster: someone is behind this.

Jenny is stuck in Manchester, fighting desperately against the rising chaos to get back to London, where her children are marooned as events begin to spiral out of control: riots, raging fires, looting, rape and murder. In the space of a week, London is transformed into a lawless and anarchic vision of hell.

Jenny's estranged husband, oil engineer Andy Sutherland, is stranded in Iraq with a company of British soldiers, desperate to find a way home to his family, trapped as transport links and the very infrastructure of daily life begin to collapse around him.

Against all this, a mysterious man is tracking Andy's family. He'll silence anyone who might be able to reveal the identities of those behind this global disaster. It seems that the same people who now have a stranglehold on the future of civilisation have flexed their muscles before, at other significant tipping points in history, and they are prepared to do anything to keep their secret - and their power - safe.

About Alex Scarrow

Born in Hertford, raised in Hong Kong and then Essex, Alex is an ex-rock guitarist, graphic artist and creative director of a games company; now a full-time writer. His TIME RIDERS series is a huge international success sold into 20 languages and his new projects pack the punch to go bigger and better.

ELLIE QUIN is a Sci Fi thriller series featuring a remarkable heroine in a bizarre and dangerous futuristic world that is closer than you think.

He is currently developing ICARUS, a feature film script, with Forefront Media and working on potential adaptations of some of his novels.

BFLA handles the media rights in Alex's books as well as his screenwriting.

Praise for LAST LIGHT   

‘Alex Scarrow's depiction of Britain as only a few hours away from disintegration is chillingly plausible’ – Daily Telegraph

‘LAST LIGHT is sensational’ – London Lite

‘Scarrow keeps his foot on the accelerator in this apocalyptic thriller, which is reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth and John Wyndham’ – Birmingham Post

‘Few books have made my heart race and blood pressure soar like this one... it had me on the edge of my seat.’ – Peterborough Evening Telegraph

‘This has everything, from conspiracy theories to highlighting environmental issues facing the world today ... Scarrow made my head zing.’ – The Truth About Books

‘A terrific thriller ... the thriller of the summer. It should be the novel that airport booksellers can't get enough of.’ – materialwitness.com

‘Alex Scarrow is a crime writer of real distinction.’ – Good Book Guide

Visit Alex’s website

Follow Alex on Twitter

Edward Carey’s PLAGUES AND PENCILS: A Year in Pandemic Sketches published by University of Texas Press

Edward Carey’s PLAGUES AND PENCILS: A YEAR IN PANDEMIC SKETCHES is published in North America by the University of Texas Press today. Casey Kittrell, Senior Acquisitions Manager at University of Texas Press, bought North American rights from Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann. The collection of Carey’s beautiful, haunting lockdown drawings includes a foreword by Max Porter and was published in the UK by Gallic Books as B: A YEAR IN PLAGUES AND PENCILS.

Edward will be in conversation with Austin Kleon and signing copies of PLAGUES AND PENCILS at a launch event at BookPeople in Austin at 7 p.m. on Wednesday 14 September. More details here.

In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey raced home to Austin, Texas. The next day, he published on social media a sketch of “A Very Determined Young Man.” The day after, he posted another drawing. One year and one hundred and fifty Tombow B pencil stubs later, he was still drawing.

Carey’s pencil fills the page with the marvellous and intriguing, picturing people, characters, animals, monsters, and his favourite bird to draw, the grackle. He reaches into history and fiction to escape grim reality through flights of vivid imagination – until events demand the drawings “look straight on.”

Breonna Taylor, the Brontë sisters, John Lewis, King Lear, and even the portraits that mark the progress of the year for the Very Determined Young Man combine into a remarkable document of the pandemic and its politics. For Carey, though, trapped inside a home he loves, these portraits are something more, a way to chart time, an artist’s way of creating connection in isolation.

Casey says: ‘We’re delighted to be publishing Edward Carey’s latest work, and I’m personally delighted to be working with someone whose art I’ve admired for years. I would buy it just for the grackles, but, really, it's a gift for anyone, especially creative folks, who felt the need to do something, to somehow mark the time and resist the torpor, of the pandemic.’

Edward Carey says: ‘I'm thrilled that the University of Texas Press, whose books I've loved and cherished for years, will publish this book of pandemic drawings. I sat in a small corner of Texas during the pandemic and drew every day to communicate, to travel, to mourn, to celebrate and to keep busy. It's so fitting that UT press is giving this book a home in America – its starting point is Texas and it contains various grackles. I'm so delighted to be working with them again.’

Isobel Dixon says: ‘With great determination, artistry, empathy and generosity, Edward gave his many followers a great gift during lockdown. So many brilliant daily images – thought-provoking, rousing, delightful, a rich range that endures far beyond the instant online moment. I’m so happy that Casey Kittrell and the University of Texas Press have joined in to spread the word – and image – further afield. All power to publisher, artist and (B) pencil, and here’s to many more happy readers.’

Edward’s previous book, THE SWALLOWED MAN, was published in the UK by Gallic Books in November 2020, and in the US by Riverhead in January 2021. Edward is completing his next novel, EDITH HOLLER, which will be published by Riverhead in the US.


See more about Edward as an illustrator here.

Praise for B: A YEAR IN PLAGUES AND PENCILS

‘B is for Black, the kind of pencil [Edward Carey] … used to draw and endite this charming lockdown memoir. Perfect gift for doodlers and illustrators – one day RBG, the next a walrus – made me want to take up drawing again!’ – Margaret Atwood

‘There is so much sharp grace and so much generosity in Carey's art; I loved this book, for its beauty, and for its tenacity of heart.’ – Katherine Rundell

‘Once again Edward Carey has produced a remarkable book, this time blend of words and drawings about both outrage and consolation. Noted mask wearers, shut-ins and plague witnesses rub shoulders with monsters mythical and all too real. Those house arrested days when we mourned together, feared together, loved together as planet are recorded. Birds and writers gather. Injustices howl and graves multiply. And still human beings add beauty to reality – and hope. As Carey writes ‘’There’s magic in the ordinary.’’ The best of us uncover it and pass it on. This book contains magic.’ – A.L. Kennedy

‘Edward Carey probably didn't know what he was getting himself into when he committed to tweeting a daily lockdown drawing, but the results are the best thing by far to come out of a horrible year. Whether a startled moggy or a panda-eyed Hamlet, each drawing is stamped with Carey's unique style and off-kilter sensibility. B: A YEAR IN PLAGUES AND PENCILS is a constant delight.’ – Graeme Macrae Burnet

‘These characterful images are bound together here with words of wistfulness and modest hope.’ – Hephzibah Anderson, The Observer

 

Praise for Edward Carey

‘If this were music, Carey would be Eric Satie. If it were film, he would be Tim Burton.’ – Newsday

‘All of Edward Carey's work is profound and delightful.’ – Max Porter

‘A novel that takes the shape of a constellation of memories recalled amid idle waiting… Carey is a playful writer whose charming sentences are works of careful craftsmanship… his isn’t the “Pinocchio” of your childhood. Instead, Carey has written something more cerebral, an existential fairy tale for adults told by an old artist considering the tragedy of life.’ — Eric Nguyen, The Washington Post

‘Edward Carey has an imagination of tremendous range and power. He transforms the familiar stuff of life in shapes utterly strange and marvellous.’ – Patrick McGrath

‘Edward Carey, with OBSERVATORY MANSIONS] proves the potential brilliance of the novel form.’ — John Fowles

‘Carey writes with such persuasive authority, and we are inclined to believe him …The emphasis on detail in Carey’s sweetly detached, exact prose has forebears in the illuminated dreams of Borges and Calvino and Georges Perec.’ — Carey Harrison, The New York Times Review of Books

'Wonderfully weird... Carey reproduces, or invents... with relentless energy.' – Herald Scotland

‘Edward Carey is bursting with imagination and madness.’ — Lire

About Edward Carey:

Photo: Elizabeth McCracken

Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator who was born in North Walsham, Norfolk, England, during an April snowstorm. Like his father and his grandfather, both officers in the Royal Navy, he attended Pangbourne Nautical College, where the closest he came to following his family calling was playing Captain Andy in the school’s production of Showboat. Afterwards he joined the National Youth Theatre and studied drama at Hull University. He has written plays for the National Theatre of Romania and the Vilnius Small State Theatre, Lithuania. In England his plays and adaptations have been performed at the Young Vic Studio, the Battersea Arts Centre, and the Royal Opera House Studio. He has collaborated on a shadow puppet production of Macbeth in Malaysia, and with the Faulty Optic Theatre of Puppets.

He is the author of the novels OBSERVATORY MANSIONS, THE IREMONGER TRILOGY, ALVA & IRVA, THE SWALLOWED MAN and LITTLE, all of which he illustrated. He always draws the characters he writes about, but often the illustrations contradict the writing and vice versa and getting both to agree with each other takes him far too long.

He has lived in England, France, Romania, Lithuania, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, and the United States. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, which is not near the sea.

Visit Edward Carey's website here
Follow Edward Carey on Twitter here 


BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER by Alan Parks nominated for the Macavity Awards 2022

We’re delighted that BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER by Edgar Award-winning author Alan Parks has been shortlisted for the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel 2022.  

Also shortlisted in the Best Mystery Novel category are: The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly, Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby, 1979 by Val McDermid, We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker and Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead.

The nominees and winners of the Macavity Awards are chosen by members of Mystery Readers International, who vote for their favourite mysteries in five categories. It is named after the ‘mystery cat’ in T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Past winners of the Best Mystery Novel award include Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby, The Chain by Adrian McKinty, November Road by Lou Berney and Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz.

BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER is the third in the highly acclaimed Harry McCoy series and was published in the US and Canada by Europa in April 2021, following its first UK publication in 2020. It recently won the Best Paperback Original category at the 2022 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Awards.

Rights to the series have been sold in more than ten countries around the world. The fourth book in the series, THE APRIL DEAD, was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize in 2021, while the latest book, MAY GOD FORGIVE, has been longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize 2022.

BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER by Alan Parks

Who is to blame when no one is innocent?

There’s a heatwave in Glasgow and the drugs trade is booming. The whole force is searching for missing thirteen-year-old Alice Kelly. All except Harry McCoy, who has been taken off the case after a run-in with the boss, and is instead sent alone to investigate the death of rock-star Bobby March, who has just overdosed in the Royal Stuart hotel.

The papers want blood. The force wants results. McCoy has a hunch. But does he have enough time?

Praise for the Harry McCoy series

‘The meticulously described setting is so suggestive readers may even catch whiffs of stale cigarette smoke and patchouli. Fans of Scottish noir will be satisfied.’ – Publishers Weekly

‘Parks’ sprawling plot offers not tidy whodunit puzzles but a wide-angle view of a gritty city in the grip of crime, home to an entertaining cross section of characters. Broad-shouldered McCoy is suitably unflappable as he walks Glasgow’s mean streets.’ – Kirkus Reviews

‘Parks captures the feel of a city long vanished in a breathless and tense retro crime caper.’ – The Sun

‘A series that no crime fan should miss: dangerous, thrilling, but with a kind voice to cut through the darkness.’ – Scotsman

‘Pitch-black tartan noir, set in 70s Glasgow ... Compelling ... with an emotional heart that’s hard to ignore.’ – Daily Mail

About Alan Parks 

Alan Parks was Creative Director at London Records in the mid 1990’s, then at Warner Music, where he created ground-breaking campaigns for artists including All Saints, New Order, The Streets, Gnarls Barclay and Cee Lo Green. He was also Managing Director of 679 Recordings, a joint venture with Warner Music. His debut novel BLOODY JANUARY propelled him onto the international literary crime fiction scene immediately and his work has been hailed by contemporary writers and critics alike.

BLOODY JANUARY was shortlisted for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, FEBRUARY’S SON was nominated for an Edgar Award, BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER was picked as a Times Best Book of the Year, won an Edgar Award and has been shortlisted for the Macavity Award for Best Mystery novel, THE APRIL DEAD was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year and MAY GOD FORGIVE has been longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year.

Alan was born in Scotland and attended The University of Glasgow where he was awarded a M.A. in Moral Philosophy. He still lives and works in the city that is so vividly depicted in the 1970s setting of his Harry McCoy thrillers.

Follow Alan on Twitter

Visit Alan’s website

 

Will Dean’s THE LAST THING TO BURN shortlisted for Thriller Book of the Year at the Fingerprint Awards

THE LAST THING TO BURN by Will Dean has been shortlisted for Thriller Book of the Year at the inaugural Fingerprint Awards.  The awards will be announced as part of the Capital Crime Festival in Battersea Park (29th September – 1st October 2022), recognising the best in crime and thriller writing over the past year. Nominated in the Thriller category alongside Will are A SLOW FIRE BURNING by Paula Hawkins, DEAD GROUND by M W Craven, THE NIGHT SHE DISAPPEARED by Lisa Jewell and KNIFE EDGE by Simon Mayo. Public voting for the awards is now open.

In THE LAST THING TO BURN, ‘Jane’ lives in a small farm cottage, surrounded by vast, open fields. Everywhere she looks, there is space. But she is trapped. No one knows how she got to the UK: no one knows she is there. Visitors rarely come to the farm; if they do, she is never seen. Her husband records her every movement during the day. If he doesn't like what he sees, she is punished. For a long time, escape seemed impossible. But now, something has changed. She has a reason to live and a reason to fight. Now, she is watching him, and waiting...

THE LAST THING TO BURN was published by Hodder and Stoughton in the UK in 2021, and by Emily Bestler Books in the USA and Canada, with separate deals also agreed for France, Turkey and Croatia. THE LAST THING TO BURN was also shortlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, and longlisted for the Goldsboro Books Glass Award 2022.

Will’s most recent standalone, FIRST BORN, was published by Hodder in April 2022. He is also the author of the Tuva Moodyson Mysteries, a crime series set in Sweden and published by Oneworld. The fifth instalment of the series, WOLF PACK, will be published in Autumn 2022.

Praise for THE LAST THING TO BURN

‘This is a brilliant, chilling depiction of life on the very edges of society. I read it in one sitting, and lived every second of the book with the characters. Compelling, horrifying and gripping, and written with such empathy and control, it's probably the best thing I will read this year’ — Jane Casey

‘MISERY meets ROOM ... a triumph’ — Marian Keyes

‘Ratchets up the tension to the point where I had to check my pulse’ — Liz Nugent

‘Brilliantly written... Terrifying’ — Ruth Ware

‘Outstanding. The best thriller in years’ — Martina Cole

‘THE LAST THING TO BURN is one of the best thrillers I have read in years: I consumed it in great gulps, desperate to find out how Thanh Dao’s story played out, and then read it again, more slowly, savouring her courage and her unvanquished sense of self, despite everything.’ — Alison Flood, Observer

Credit: Rosalind Hobley

About Will Dean

Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying law at the LSE, and working many varied jobs in London, he settled in rural Sweden with his wife. He built a wooden house in a boggy forest clearing and it's from this base that he compulsively reads and writes.

Follow Will on Twitter and Instagram, and visit his YouTube channel.