FROM ONE END OF THE GLOBE TO THE OTHER – BESTSELLER TONY PARK CELEBRATES ANZ PUBLICATION AND MAJOR NEW UK DEAL FOR AN EMPTY COAST

Tony Park’s AN EMPTY COAST is out now in Australia from Pan Macmillan Australia, and will be published next month in South Africa and the UK by Macmillan. Tony will be touring in Australia in the coming weeks, heading to Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne, along with numerous events in Sydney. For more event details check the Pan Macmillan website.

Joining their Australian colleagues, Macmillan Adult Books Publisher Jeremy Trevathan and Fiction Senior Editor Catherine Richards have acquired UK & Commonwealth Rights, excluding Australia, New Zealand and Canada, for AN EMPTY COAST and a further novel by Tony Park from Isobel Dixon at Blake Friedmann.  AN EMPTY COAST will be out in southern Africa in November, along with extensive author appearances. In the UK the e-book edition will be available before Christmas, with the print edition out in 2016. Tony Park said: ‘I’m thrilled to have this new deal with Macmillan Publishing in the UK and South Africa. I’m already published by Pan Macmillan in Australia so there are many benefits to being “in the fold” internationally. Macmillan was initially responsible for getting my books established in South Africa so I’m looking forward to re-connecting with old friends there and in the UK. I think this deal is good news for my readers in these markets.’

Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann said: ‘This year Macmillan have won Publisher of the Year in the UK and also in Australia, where Tony Park is already a bestseller, and I’m delighted that with this deal they’re joining forces to sell his hugely popular thrillers and bring them to even more readers. It’s a return to Macmillan South Africa as well for Tony, and I know together they’ll be pulling out all the stops with AN EMPTY COAST and beyond.’

Catherine Richards of Pan Macmillan UK said: ‘We’re so excited to be publishing Tony in the UK – he brings the locations he loves to life so vividly through the eyes of his characters, and I know fans existing and new are going to love AN EMPTY COAST.’

Terry Morris of Pan Macmillan South Africa said: ‘We’re absolutely delighted to be publishing Tony in southern Africa again and look forward to building on his successful brand across the region. AN EMPTY COAST is guaranteed to thrill Tony’s fans and new readers alike and we look forward to publishing it this year.’

AN EMPTY COAST is Tony Park’s eleventh novel, and features the return of two of his most popular characters, Sonja Kurtz and Hudson Brand. Retired mercenary Sonja Kurtz is in Vietnam carrying out a personal revenge mission when her daughter Emma sends a call for help. Emma, a student archaeologist on a dig in Namibia, has discovered a body dating back to the country’s liberation war of the 1980s. The remains of an airman, identified as Hudson Brand, may help reveal the location of a modern day buried treasure – a find people will kill for. Sonja returns to Namibia to find her daughter, but then discovers that Emma has gone missing, and that former CIA agent Hudson Brand is very much alive, having been drawn back to solve a decades-old mystery, whose clues are entombed in an empty corner of the desert.

Tony Park grew up in Australia and fell in love with South Africa on a short trip in 1995: he and his wife now divide their time between two homes, one in Sydney and another in South Africa on the border of the Kruger National Park. Author of twelve bestselling thrillers, he has worked as a newspaper reporter in Australia and England, a government press secretary, a public relations consultant, and a freelance writer. He is also a major in the Australian Army Reserve and served six months in Afghanistan in 2002. His work has been sold in translation in seven countries. 

You can find out more about Tony Park on his website and his Facebook page and you can follow him on Twitter (especially if you want to see some marvellous images of African wildlife) on @tonyparkauthor. 

Job Available: Part-time Media Department Assistant

We’re looking for a new part-time assistant to work with our team of media agents three days per week across film, TV, theatre and radio writing clients. The right candidate will be enthusiastic about writers and writing, as well as film and television, and will ideally have some experience working or interning for either a production company or an agency.

The job will involve administrative tasks such as data entry, scanning, invoicing, word processing etc but will also involve script reading and coverage writing, liaising with clients and working on presentational material and correspondence.  We’re looking for someone with good presentation skills who can express themselves clearly, take the initiative, be meticulous, and handle clients with aplomb.

Strong IT skills are a must, and enthusiasm for social media and updating the website will be an advantage (training will be provided).

If you’re looking for a part-time, entry-level position in which you can learn the ropes of a busy media agency, then do drop us a line at filmsubmissions@blakefriedmann.co.uk including your CV (listing full GCSE, A-level and degree results) as well as your cover letter, and the date you’d be available to start.

We’d like to find someone for an immediate start, though we can work with a month’s notice for the right applicant. The salary level would be subject to experience. We are a relaxed and friendly team with a strong work ethic, so we’re looking for an assistant who will fit in well with that dynamic.

We look forward to hearing from you, and will endeavour to contact applicants selected for interview promptly. We cannot guarantee a response to every application, so if you have not heard from us within 6 weeks of emailing, your application was not successful.

JELLYFISH BY JANICE GALLOWAY SHORTLISTED FOR THE SALTIRE FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR

JELLYFISH, by Janice Galloway, has been shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Widely regarded as Scotland’s most prestigious book awards, the Saltire Society Literary Awards champion and support literary achievement. With awards for Fiction, Non- Fiction, First Book, History, Poetry, Research and an overall Book of the Year Award they aim to celebrate as broad a range of Scottish writing as possible. The final award ceremony will be in Edinburgh on the 26th of November, during Scottish Book Week.

JELLYFISH is a collection of short stories, published in the UK by Freight Books. Three stories from the collection were recently broadcast by BBC Radio 4, and the book has already been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize 2015.

In this sparkling and powerful new collection, Janice Galloway takes on David Lodge's assertion – ‘Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life's the other way round’ and scent-marks her multi-layered fiction with what she believes to be the greater truth. These are razor sharp tales of two of the most powerful human experiences, by a master of short fiction.

Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire in 1955. She is the author of three novels, two collections of short stories and, most recently, two memoirs. She has won and been shortlisted for numerous literary prizes, including the Whitbread First Novel and Scottish Book of the Year. She has been writer in residence to four Scottish prisons, Research Fellow to the British Library, resident at Jura Distillery, and was recently the first Fellow in Residence at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Praise for JELLYFISH:

 ‘Foreboding floats through the fourteen tales … Reminiscent of Sylvia Plath in its black humour and visceral imagery … These deft short stories show why publishers should have more faith in the form … Exquisite similes and witty metaphors rise up and sting the senses like the eponymous jellyfish. With this electrifying volume Galloway proves herself a truly powerful writer who deserves to be much better known.’ – The Independent

 ‘An exquisite short-story collection … Previously very much a city writer, here the natural world encroaches on Galloway’s work from the title onwards, both indifferent and essential.’ – The Guardian

 'This is a short story collection to savour, by one of the foremost Scottish writers of her generation.' – Irish Times

South African Launch of RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER

Sally Andrew’s debut RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER: A TANNIE MARIA MYSTERY was launched last Wednesday at Kalk Bay Books in Cape Town, after being published in Australia by Text last month. It will be published in November in the US by Ecco Press, in Canada by HarperCollins and in the UK by Canongate – a wonderful handful of English language publishers around the world!

Alexander McCall Smith hailed the novel as ‘a triumph’ and this ‘culinary and linguistic treat’ (The Bookseller, Editor’s Choice) with ‘fascinating setting, engaging characters and a full complement of drool-worthy recipes’ (Library Journal, Starred Review) has also been described as ‘a delightful debut, tender and funny’ (Kirkus, Starred Review).

Kalk Bay Books is in a beautiful stone building between the mountain and the sea in Cape Town, South Africa. The bookshop was packed (‘no room for a flea’ as @LieslJobson said) and the evening was chock-full of laughter, love, and amazing cakes. Umuzi gave Sally a beautiful birthday cheesecake with the face of Tannie Maria on it and delicious cakes as featured in the book were baked for the event.

To make it extra-special, the launch took place on Sally’s birthday. She wore a debutante (or as she calls it, a ‘debut tannie’) red dress of silk and cotton velvet, and red veldskoene with a Karoo veld ‘polish’ of dust and scratches. Acclaimed South African actress Sandra Prinsloo, who narrates the audio edition of the novel, presented Sally with a birthday gift of oven gloves –  “because you are too hot to handle” and Sally put this to good use when signing copies afterwards.

The conversation was peppered with Sally’s thanks to all the people present who had contributed to the book, with particular praise for her parents, and added: "Thank you so much to BFLA, and to my publishers in South Africa and internationally for giving me the best birthday present of my life."

Some moments that had the audience laughing:

Sandra Prinsloo: “I see that, so far, Recipes for Love and Murder will be translated into thirteen languages: Polish, Estonian, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Chinese, Italian, Swedish, Hebrew, Dutch, German, Turkish and French. That’s amazing. I assume that you will be doing all these translations yourself?
Sally Andrew: “Yes, of course. The magic of a book is in the poetry of its words. It does mean that it will be some time before they are published, because it is a slow process to learn thirteen new languages simultaneously.”

Sandra asked Sally if it was difficult to achieve the right balance between serious and funny in the novel. Sally said that ‘serious’ was in her bones because of her history as an activist, but “the humour also came quite naturally. In fact I was christened ‘Silly’ at birth, and it was only after some bad experiences in Kindergarten that I changed my name to ‘Sally’.”

When asked for writerly advice, Sally said it was probably a little early in her career: “My life might go to pot,” she said, “and following my advice may lead you down some dangerous path.” She recommended that people rather listen to Sandra instead, but did advise, wisely: “Try and find that space in the Venn diagram where your greatest joy overlaps with the needs of the world.”

 You can see photographs of Sally reading and signing (with oven glove!) above.

Sally Andrew divides her time between the Cape Town coast and a nature reserve near Ladismith in the Klein Karoo, which she shares with her artist partner, a giant eland and a secretive leopard.  You can see her beautiful home landscape and share her pleasure in nature and food by looking at the photos and videos on her website: www.sallyandrew.co

Sue Moorcroft's Next Two Novels Sold at Auction, to Avon

Avon has acquired two new novels from successful author Sue Moorcroft, at auction. UK & Comm rights were bought from Juliet Pickering at Blake Friedmann Agency. Avon will publish the first novel for Christmas 2016 with the second novel planned as a summer read in 2017.

Publishing Director Eleanor Dryden says ‘I am thrilled to welcome Sue Moorcroft to Avon. She is a wonderfully warm and witty writer with a great track record and masses of fans and she creates very special characters who stay with you. I fell for Ava in the first novel wholeheartedly on my first read. Christmas 2016 can’t come round fast enough!’

Sue Moorcroft says: I’m excited to be joining Avon, with their reputation for successfully publishing fiction to extensive audiences. Eleanor and her team impressed me with their enthusiasm and drive, their ideas and the welcome they offered to me in my new home.

Juliet Pickering says: Sue’s novels, with their smart, funny characters and very fresh, modern dilemmas, are perfectly matched with the energetic, ambitious team at Avon. We’re very excited to embark on this new relationship, and see Sue published at the level she thoroughly deserves. Roll on Christmas 2016!

Ava Bliss is making hats in Camden, focusing on her business and freshly broken-up from a brief, troubled relationship. She is not looking for a new romance. But then she meets Sam, her best friend’s boss, who definitely seems smitten with her, and who she keeps bumping into despite her efforts to remain detached. When Sam commissions her to make a very special hat for his seriously ill mother, and her ex begins sending Ava threatening messages, Sam and Ava must band together to get
through the best and the worst of times… ending with the best and worst of them all: Christmas. A contemporary tale, THE TRUTH ABOUT AVA is a stylish and warmly funny take on friendship, family and romance.

Sue Moorcroft is the award-winning author of nine commercial women’s novels, and several novellas. Her most recent novel is THE WEDDING PROPOSAL (Choc Lit, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Festival of Romantic Fiction Romantic Novel of the Year Award. She also teaches creative writing.