EDWARD CAREY’S LITTLE SHORTLISTED FOR THE AMERICAN LIBRARY IN PARIS 2019 BOOK AWARD

Edward Carey’s novel LITTLE, published by Gallic Books in October 2018, has been shortlisted for the American Library in Paris 2019 Book Award. The award, now in its seventh year, recognises the most distinguished books of the year, in English, about France. In this cycle, eighty-two titles were submitted by authors, publishers, and others for consideration. The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 7 November 2019 at the George C. Marshall Centre on Place de la Concorde in Paris. See more on the award here.

From the gutters of pre-revolutionary France to the luxury of the Palace of Versailles, from casting the still-warm heads of The Terror to finding something very like love, LITTLE is the unforgettable story of how a ‘bloodstained crumb of a girl’ went on to shape the world.

Born in Alsace in 1761, the unsightly, diminutive Marie Grosholtz is quickly nicknamed ‘Little’. Orphaned at the age of six, she finds employment in Bern, Switzerland, under the charge of reclusive anatomist, Dr Curtius. In time the unlikely pair form an unlikely bond, and together they pursue an unusual passion: the fine art of wax-modelling. 

Forced to flee their city, the doctor and his protégée head for the seamy streets of Paris where they open an exhibition hall for their uncanny creations. Though revolution approaches, the curious-minded flock to see the wax heads, eager to scrutinise the faces of royalty and reprobates alike. At 'The Cabinet of Doctor Curtius', heads are made, heads are displayed, and a future is built from wax.

LITTLE has also been shortlisted for the 2019 Chautauqua Prize and the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Award for Best Independent Voice 2019, with the winner to be announced at the Capital Crime Festival in September. Carey’s novel was also longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown 2019.

Born in England, Edward Carey is a novelist, visual artist and playwright who teaches Creative Writing at the University of Austin, Texas. He was awarded the prestigious Italian Fernanda Pivano Prize in 2016. His novel LITTLE has been internationally acclaimed, with film rights optioned and rights sold in 16 countries. Picador will be re-issuing his classic early novels OBSERVATORY MANSIONS and ALVA & IRVA in the UK.

Visit Edward Carey's Website here.

Follow Edward on Twitter here. 

Praise for Edward Carey

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

‘Edward Carey is an enormously talented writer…’ — Publishers Weekly

‘Edward Carey is one of the strangest writers we are privileged to have in this country. There are echoes in his work of other great idiosyncratics from Angela Carter to Russell Hoban, but he supersedes even them in the downright oddity of his mind.’ — Observer

Praise for LITTLE

‘Don’t miss this eccentric charmer’ — @MargaretAtwood

'I marvel at the achievement of this book... I loved this book best when it showed me, with its stylised dialogue, its garrotting commas, its punctuating illustrations, history as an art form, history as an argument... LITTLE isn't about history... it's about humans, and bodies, and art, and loneliness, and it's deeply, painfully sad. I could talk about it forever.' – NPR Books

'Told with extraordinary panache, and illustrated by Edward Carey, this tale of the founder of Madame Tussauds is a macabre joy.' — The Times, Books of the Year

'You will weep, you will applaud, you will wonder if your nerves can take it... Guts'n'gore galore: I bloody loved it... in Carey's subtle, modelling hands, Paris is gay and gloomy, debauched and deathly, fabulous and fearful. Marie is the eyes, ears and hold-your-nose of this book, a delightful guide to a mad, macabre world.' - Spectator

'A gripping novel of shy wit and darkly humorous occurrences, mesmerising in its virtuosity. On top of which the author's own illustrations are wonderfully bizarre, as indeed is the story he tells.' — William Ryan, Irish Independent (Author Top Books of 2018)

WEEPING WATERS BY KARIN BRYNARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA INTERNATIONAL DAGGER AWARD 2019

Credit: Europa Editions

Blake Friedmann is delighted to announce that Karin Brynard’s WEEPING WATERS has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger Award 2019. The prize recognises crime novels not originally written in English but translated for UK publication. WEEPING WATERS was translated by Karin’s agent Isobel Dixon along with Maya Fowler, and is published in the UK and US by Europa Editions and in Italy by E/O.

The CWA Award winners will be announced at an award ceremony at the Grange City Hotel in London on 24 October 2019. See more information on the International Dagger shortlist here.

In WEEPING WATERS, Inspector Albertus Beeslaar is a traumatized cop who has abandoned tough city policing and a broken relationship in Johannesburg for a backwater post on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. But his dream of rural peace is soon shattered by the repeated attacks of a brutally efficient crime syndicate, as he struggles to train and connect with rookie local cops, Ghaap and Pyl, who resent his brusqueness and his old-school ways.

The original Afrikaans edition was published by Human & Rousseau as PLAASMOORD and won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Fiction and the M-Net Literature Award, Film Category. Film and TV rights in the Albertus Beeslaar series are optioned to Three River Studios. Karin has completed two more novels in the series, OUR FATHERS and HOMELAND, published in Afrikaans and English in South Africa by Penguin Books. Formerly a political and investigative journalist, Karin Brynard is now one of South Africa’s most successful authors, a bestseller in her home country, with her work translated in Dutch, French, German and Italian.

Praise for Karin Brynard

‘Karin Brynard has established herself as one of a handful of great thriller writers in South Africa. The fact that she has won many literary awards attests to the depth and staying power of her work. … Brynard’s observations of people are subtle and deep; she reads the small things.’ – Jane Rosenthal, Mail & Guardian

'The queen of South African crime fiction is Karin Brynard... Her journalism background is tangible in the way she fills out her characters and storylines with relevant factual details in a subtle yet effective way.’ — Dey There, 12 South African Crime Writers to Add to Your Reading List

Praise for WEEPING WATERS

'Brooding. Riveting. Brilliant.' — Deon Meyer

‘WEEPING WATERS is brimming with authenticity. A lucent tale of farm murder and rural society in the vice of social pressures, with the translation beautifully done by Maya Fowler and Isobel Dixon.’ – William Saunderson-Meyer, Sunday Times, 2014 Best Reads

‘Karin Brynard's WEEPING WATERS is that rare crime fiction novel that transcends the genre.  The heir apparent to J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE, Brynard's book, set in South Africa, unfurls over the reader with glorious, sensuous prose in a tremendous translation.  We see, feel, and smell the locations and are transported to another world.  The many characters are three-dimensional and spring to life with crackling dialogue that has the ring of verisimilitude. Though a gripping whodunnit, WEEPING WATERS is geologically layered with complex interpersonal relationships, the backdrop of South Africa's fraught post-Apartheid politics, and a main character in Inspector Beeslaar – world-weary, fiercely independent – who anchors the book, and through whom Brynard paints a country's history, past and present, with the accretion of nuanced details.  Built for a blockbuster miniseries.  The best novel I've read all year.’ — Rex Pickett, author of SIDEWAYS

Visit Karin’s website.

Follow Karin on Twitter.

Charles Lambert’s PRODIGAL shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2019

Charles Lambert’s novel PRODIGAL, published by Gallic Books in August 2018, has been shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2019. The prize honours writers “whose work explores the LGBT experience, whether in poetry, prose, fiction, or nonfiction”. While there has previously been a Polari First Book Prize, this year is the first time that there will be an award given to an established writer also. The winner will be announced 22 October 2019 at the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival, in an event headlined by Tracey Thorn.

VG Lee, author and one of the judges of the prize, said: “Six very different and exciting voices make up the shortlist for The Polari Prize, taking us from the English countryside to Soviet Russia and Post 9/11 New York, a Brighton garden to music-making in Berwick-on-Tweed, and a teenage rites of passage towards selfhood. Any one of these books is a potential winner because each is perfect in its own right.”

PRODIGAL is a fearless, elegantly written exploration of family, trust, death, and what we do to one another in the name of love, told within the wider context of a beautiful yet troubling, queer coming-of-age tale.

Jeremy, a hapless man in his late 50s, scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of ‘Nathalie Cray’. When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside.

Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family’s chequered past. The journey takes him back to the unexpected death of his mother in a provincial Greek hospital years earlier and, further back, to the moment at which the Eldritch family fell apart.

It’s a journey composed of revelations, of secrets disclosed and not disclosed, and of something that might, or might not, be reconciliation...

Read a Q&A with Charles on PRODIGAL here.


Last year Charles’s novel THE CHILDREN’S HOME was included in a New York Times list of 13 Haunted Books to read before watching THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE.

Born in England, Charles lives in Fondi, near Rome, working as a university teacher and freelance editor. His first novel, LITTLE MONSTERS, a Good Housekeeping selection, was published in 2008 by Picador, the same year as THE SCENT OF CINNAMON AND OTHER STORIES (Salt Publishing), the title story of which was an O. Henry Prize winner. His second novel, ANY HUMAN FACE (Picador), was described by the Telegraph as 'a slow-burning, beautifully written crime story that brings to life the Rome that tourists don't see - luckily for them.'

In 2014, Charles’s experimental autobiography WITH A ZERO AT ITS HEART (The Friday Project) was one of the Guardian's top ten books of that year. THE CHILDREN’S HOME, a dystopic story of a haunted house, was published in 2016 to widespread praise, followed by TWO DARK TALES, in 2017, both by Gallic Books.


Praise for Charles Lambert

‘Charles Lambert writes as if his life depends on it. He takes risks at every turn.’ — Hannah Tinti

‘Charles Lambert is a seriously good writer.' — Dame Beryl Bainbridge

‘Compelling reading.’ — Patricia Duncker

‘Charles Lambert is a terrific, devious storyteller.’ — Owen King

Praise for THE CHILDREN’S HOME

‘A thoroughly original entry into the tradition of ghost stories, eschewing convention …compulsively readable…A one-of-a-kind literary horror story.’ – Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

‘Lambert carefully constructs the restricted sphere that Fletcher inhabits, leaving the chaotic larger world and the source of his family fortune largely a mystery. After slowly unfolding Fletcher’s story, Lambert then accelerates the pace to a breathtaking climax. THE CHILDREN’S HOME is a magical, mesmerizing tale about the courage it takes to confront the unknown.’ – Booklist, Starred Review

‘THE CHILDREN’S HOME is like a strange dream in which you can’t quite tell if you’re awake…The resulting story is a weird, poignant journey reminiscent of Calvino that explores fear, power, revenge and redemption. Lambert’s story is addictive … its potent, often brutal, images have a lasting power.’ – Sheri Bodoh, BookPage


Visit Charles’ blog

You can also follow Charles on Twitter.

WILL CARVER, EDWARD CAREY AND WILL DEAN SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAPITAL CRIME AMAZON PUBLISHING READERS’ AWARDS 2019

We are thrilled to announce that three Blake Friedmann authors have been shortlisted for the Capital Crime Amazon Publishing Readers Awards 2019. LITTLE by Edward Carey (Aardvark Bureau, 2018), RED SNOW by Will Dean (Point Blank, 2019) and GOOD SAMARITANS by Will Carver (Orenda Books, 2018) have all been shortlisted for the Independent Voice award.

Capital Crime festival pass holders will be able to vote for the winner in each category from today until 19 September 2019. Winners will be announced at the Capital Crime festival in London on 28 September 2019.

The first book in Will Dean’s Tuva Moodysoon series, DARK PINES, was selected for the Zoe Ball Book Club and shortlisted for The Guardian Not The Booker Prize.

Praise for RED SNOW:

'A complex plot, suffused with the nightmarish quality of Twin Peaks, and a tough-minded, resourceful protagonist add up to a stand-out read.' — The Guardian

‘Dean masterfully ramps up the tension and claustrophobia throughout the story’s sinister series of events before delivering an unexpected and satisfying finale. Tuva is a wonderful creation and Dean’s series is not to be missed.’ — Daily Express

‘It's great. You get snow, ice, Swedishness, murder and liquorice!’ – Marian Keyes

Follow Will Dean on Twitter.

Will Carver’s GOOD SAMARITANS was selected as a Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Daily Express.

Praise for GOOD SAMARITANS:

‘An unsettling but compelling mixture of the banal, the horrific and, at times, the near-comic, wrong-footing the reader at every turn.’ — The Guardian, The Best Recent Crime Novels

‘I read a lot of novels about homicidal mania and this one made most of the others seem as reassuringly cosy as my favourite slippers. A bleak vision of life - true enough to impart the reader with the thrill of genuine discomfort presented with the chilly conviction of Simenon’s most unflinching romans durs and just as horribly addictive.' — The Telegraph

‘If you like you comedy pitch black and your thrillers more than a little bit twisted, you’ll love it… So dark, so cool.’ — Heat

Follow Will Carver on Twitter

Edward Carey’s LITTLE was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2019, and the HWA Historia Gold Crown 2019. It was also chosen as a Times Historical Book of the Month and a Waterstones Booksellers Favourite.

Praise for LITTLE:

‘Carey, an artist and playwright who has worked at Madame Tussauds in London, has turned his experience into a startlingly original novel. He finds and treasures the ironies and macabre eccentricities of Tussaud’s world. The pages are also enriched by his beautiful and haunting illustrations of body parts and anatomical models’ – The Times

‘Edward Carey’s Gothic tale is a wry meditation on a state between life and death . . . A rattling narrative is fleshed out with visceral detail and illustrations by the author . . . it is both clever and intriguing’ — Daily Mail

‘Don’t miss this eccentric charmer’ — Margaret Atwood

Visit Edward Carey's Website here

Follow Edward on Twitter here

ABSOLUTE PROOF BY PETER JAMES CHOSEN AS A SUMMER READ IN THE LATEST RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB

Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan yesterday launched their latest Book Club summer selections, exclusive to WH Smith. We are delighted to announce that Peter James’s striking international thriller ABSOLUTE PROOF is one of Richard and Judy’s picks this Summer. Judy describes ABSOLUTE PROOF as ‘fascinating and often funny... Thought-provoking, thrilling, funny and challenging…Peter James’s most ambitious novel yet.’ A Number One bestseller in hardback earlier this year, ABSOLUTE PROOF is out in paperback from Pan Macmillan this week.

The Richard and Judy Book Club launches with another series of podcasts, providing a fantastic introduction to all the featured titles as well as an exclusive interview with each of the authors. WH Smith customers can enjoy exclusive special editions of the Book Club titles filled with added bonus content, including book club discussion points, author Q&As and more recommended reads.

Investigative reporter Ross Hunter nearly didn’t answer the phone call that would change his life – and possibly the world – for ever.

‘I’d just like to assure you I’m not a nutcase, Mr Hunter. My name is Dr Harry F. Cook. I know this is going to sound strange, but I’ve recently been given absolute proof of God’s existence – and I’ve been advised there is a writer, a respected journalist called Ross Hunter, who could help me to get taken seriously.’

What would it take to prove the existence of God? And what would be the consequences? This question and its answer lie at the heart of ABSOLUTE PROOF, an international thriller from bestselling author Peter James.

The false faith of a billionaire evangelist, the life’s work of a famous atheist, and the credibility of each of the world’s major religions are all under threat. If Ross Hunter can survive long enough to present the evidence…

Peter James is the international bestselling author of many award-winning novels. His Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, set in Brighton – translated into thirty-seven languages with worldwide sales of over twenty million copies – has given him fourteen consecutive Sunday Times Number Ones. In 2015 WH Smith customers voted him the Greatest Crime Author of All Time and in 2016 he was awarded the coveted CWA Diamond Dagger, a lifetime achievement award for sustained excellence. In 2018 he received a Specsavers Honorary Platinum Bestseller Award.

The audiobook of ABSOLUTE PROOF, read by Hugh Bonneville, was shortlisted for a Specsavers National Book Award.

Praise for Peter James

‘Peter James is one of the best crime writers in the business’ – Karin Slaughter

‘Probably the closest we’ll get to a British Stephen King’ – The Financial Times

‘Peter James is one of the most fiendishly clever crime fiction plotters’ – The Daily Mail

‘In my thirty-four years of policing, never have I come across a writer who so accurately depicts “The Job“’ – Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan, Office of the District Attorney, NYPD

Praise for ABSOLUTE PROOF

'Sensational – the best what-if thriller since The Da Vinci Code' – Lee Child

‘Peter James is the thinking man's Dan Brown.' — Barry Forshaw, Radio 5 Live

‘ABSOLUTE PROOF is a thriller that grips from the outset but it’s also incredibly thought-provoking, asking some of life’s biggest questions about science and faith, setting big pharma and high church on a collision course that could change the world. I was thrilled when Peter asked me to provide the narration for his latest, most compelling book.’ – Hugh Bonneville

'With ABSOLUTE PROOF, the King of Crime is now a miracle worker.' – Jon Coates, Sunday Express

‘We are in Dan Brown blockbuster territory, but both atheists and believers will find food for thought in this globe-trotting epic.' – Barry Forshaw, Guardian 

Visit the official Peter James website.

Like Peter James on Facebook. 

Follow Peter James on Twitter. 

Follow Peter James on Instagram. 

Watch Peter James TV.