Doug Johnstone will be celebrating the publication of the third book in his The Skelfs series, The Great Silence. He’ll be in conversation with fellow crime writer Helen FitzGerald.
The event will take place at The Portobello Bookshop at 7pm on the 26th August.
The event will be streamed live from the bookshop to attendees viewing from home. There will also be a small in-person audience of up to 25 people.
There are several ticket options for the event:
Option 1: In person ticket and signed copy of The Great Silence – £8.99
Option 2: Livestream ticket and signed copy of The Great Silence – £8.99
Option 3: Livestream ticket and £3 voucher to use in-store or online – £3
They can all be purchased from:
https://theportobellobookshop.com/event/doug-johnstone-the-great-silence/
Here’s one for summer. The first line paints the scene: ‘The October sun is as hot as the blood of the angry mob.’ In Femi Kayode’s Lightseekers, set in Nigeria, three young men are mercilessly beaten before being set alight. The question is not who committed the crime, but who was behind it and why. One of the grieving fathers hires Philip Taiwo, an investigative psychologist who specialises in the motives behind crimes and mob violence. He soon finds he’s taken on far more than he bargained for. A great piece of Sunshine Noir!
On a hot day you may prefer something to cool you down. In Snow, John Banville takes us to the Irish countryside in the last days before Christmas 1957. Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called to investigate a gruesome murder of a priest at Ballyglass House. Strafford is no Hercule Poirot, but while we watch him piece it all together, we enjoy the complex characters drawn with beautiful prose and flashes of humour, and watch as the snow deepens, eventually shrouding Strafford’s sergeant. We won’t forget our visit to Ballyglass House.
I love a big, chunky novel to get my teeth into on holiday, and nearly always take something Victorian, long and wordy with me. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell fits the bill perfectly: interlocking families, beautiful characterisation, psychological insights, plus people to root for, people to detest, and lots of comedy and tragedy. And it’s unfinished!
I always like to take some short stories with me, too – often fitting them in around other reading. Diane Cook’s collection Man V. Nature will make you look at your fellow beach-goers in new ways. Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction in some of the dystopian tales, and Lorrie Moore in the odd takes on domestic dramas, every story is strange, arresting and perfectly crafted.
Another must for me on holiday is a good graphic novel or comics collection. Everyone should read something from the Hernandez Brothers’ Love and Rockets series at some point in their lives – and there’s a massive selection to choose from. I’d recommend starting near the beginning: Jaime Hernandez’s The Girl from Hoppers sees punks Maggie the Mechanic and her girlfriend Hopey, and their friends – including female wrestlers and wannabe space heroines – getting into trouble in a Mexican suburb of L.A.. Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism takes us to Palomar, a rural town in an unnamed Central American country, where we meet hammer-wielding Luba and her neighbours as their town is ravaged by a serial killer. These comics changed the genre forever, and as one critic put it, you’ll ‘fall in love with the ink on the page’.
I’m not a fan of summer – the heat, the light, it really doesn’t benefit a pale attic-dweller like me. This summer, I found the perfect antidote – The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex. This is a wonderful, haunting tale of three lighthouse keepers. It’s based on the Flannan Isles mystery of 1900 – but it’s so much more than that. This tale of loss, of longing and of isolation amid the rise and fall of an indifferent sea will whisper winter winds around your heart.
I read Norwegian fiction mostly so I have to search a bit to find what is translated into English. Among those I found I recommend The Therapist by Helene Flood, a tremendous psychological thriller, and The Seven Doors by Agnes Ravatn, a nice mix of whodunnit and psychological thriller. Or you could pick up something by Gunnar Staalesen, e.g. Wolves in the Dark or Fallen Angels. Get these and you’ll be fully entertained this summer.
Kitchenly 434 – Alan Warner
Who They Was – Gabriel Krauze
Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell
I have to recommend that people postpone reading until they have finished watching Katla on Netflix. (Blowing my own trumpet here!) But after that I think people should go for some of the amazing Orenda books on offer; next on my reading list is Simone Buchholz’s Hotel Cartagena. I love the Chastity Riley series. She is one of my fave characters, and there is something Chandleresque about Simone’s writing that is so cool.
My current read is The End of Her by Shari Lapena. She is the queen of domestic noir and I really enjoy her books.
I found this a devastatingly beautiful and powerful novel. It’s so much more than a thriller, though yes, it is one – the kind that has you glued to the page, having to read just one more. (For the record, I read it in two sittings.) As with Dean’s previous books the language is what sets it apart. He has a gift for keeping it simple, and yet it is deviously layered too. The setting is claustrophobic, the characters pulse off the page, and it’s dark, dark, dark, the way I like even my summer reads. But it’s hopeful too. It is excellent, and I strongly recommend it.
In complete contrast to the darkness of Dean’s book is Fenwick’s captivating and beautiful tale. Once again, she has proved she is the mistress of pure escapism. Spanning generations, with an achingly intense love story and unearthed secrets about ancestry at its core, this novel is just what the world needs right now. The immersive dual timeline whisks you away, and the country setting is perfect for this time of year. It’s a glorious summer read and is definitely one to look out for in 2021.
![Dead Man’s Grave: A breathtaking, chilling, Scottish crime fiction mystery thriller (DS Max Craigie Scottish Crime Thrillers, Book 1) by [Neil Lancaster]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51UBfTh7UGS.jpg)
I’m reading this at the moment and it is the definition of a page-turner. Creepy, intriguing and compelling.
A beautifully written thriller with a highly original setting and cast of characters. Terse, tense and packed with heart.
![Written In Bone: hidden stories in what we leave behind by [Sue Black]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41DACnz5zVS.jpg)
Nothing combats bone-chilling cold like talk about bones! I’m enjoying anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black’s Written in Bone. The case studies and very human stories she weaves around them are fascinating.![The Liar's Dictionary: A winner of the 2021 Betty Trask Awards by [Eley Williams]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41jALH6nc5S.jpg)
I adore words and their origins and playing with them, so I got immense pleasure from The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams. In this novel we have two viewpoints – nineteenth-century Peter Winceworth inserting fictitious words into a new encyclopaedic dictionary, and the present day Mallory, tasked with finding these Mountweazels. But of course it’s not that straightforward.
![A Rattle of Bones: A Rebecca Connolly Thriller (Book 3) by [Douglas Skelton]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51u6IrX5PDS.jpg)
This has the Highlands of Scotland, a plot that zips along, fascinating characters – and did I mention the Highlands of Scotland? Dare I say it … a rattling good read (out 5 August).![The Blood Divide: The must-read race-against-time thriller of 2021 by [A. A. Dhand]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/418aLKuh2nL.jpg)
If I read a better thriller this year I’ll be surprised – and delighted. From the first page you know you’re in the hands of a master of their craft. Loved it!
Orenda
‘We have been absolutely 
A highly anticipated follow-up to her indie-favourite A Modern Family, Helga Flatland’s One Last Time, translated by Rosie Hedger, is an elegant, perceptive, warmly funny novel focusing on fractured family relationships that come under the spotlight when a woman – grandmother and mother – discovers she has terminal cancer. Winner of the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize and a number-one bestseller in Norway, this is an exquisitely moving book and a perfect example of why Joanna Cannon has dubbed Helga the ‘Norwegian Anne Tyler’.
Ex-Guardian columnist, Katie Allen’s immensely accomplished debut, Everything Happens for a Reason, was inspired by her own experience of still birth, and is both a profoundly moving portrait of grief and a quirky, laugh-out-loud story about a woman becomes obsessed with the idea that saving a young man’s life on the day she discovered she was pregnant is the ‘reason’ why her baby was born sleeping. Fans of Rachel Joyce and Eleanor Oliphant will love the zany characters, the moving themes and the gloriously uplifting messages.
Award-winning Hull author Louise Beech has written the searingly emotive and mesmerisingly beautiful This Is How We Are Human, sure to be her breakthrough novel with 100 five-star reviews on Goodreads before publication. In this breathtaking book, we meet Sebastian, an autistic young man who yearns for a relationship and all that this entails. Driven by love and a desire to make her son happy, his mother hires a high-class escort, whose own determination to get through the night, to pay for her father’s medical bills and her own nursing degree is absolutely heartrending. When these three lives collide, everything is changed. For everyone. This is a timely, thought-provoking story about love in its many forms. We are enchanted.
Everything Happens for a Reason is Katie’s first novel. She used to be a journalist and columnist at the Guardian and Observer, and started her career as a Reuters correspondent in Berlin and London. The events in Everything Happens for a Reason are fiction, but the premise is loosely autobiographical. Katie’s son, Finn, was stillborn in 2010, and her character’s experience of grief and being on maternity leave without a baby is based on her own. And yes, someone did say to her ‘everything happens for a reason’.
Helga Flatland is already one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize. She has written four novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards.
Alex Clark is a journalist and broadcaster, often seen in the pages of the Guardian, the Observer and the Times Literary Supplement, and heard on BBC R4 programmes such as Front Row and Open Book. An experienced chair of live events, she has also worked as an artistic director at the Bath Festival is a Patron of the Cambridge Literary Festival. The literary awards she has judged include the Man Booker Prize and the Orwell Prize. Alex lives in Kilkenny, Ireland.
Orenda Books has teamed up with Jonathan Ball Publishing in South Africa, to celebrate publication of Michael Stanley’s chilling, sophisticated, warmly funny and absolutely nail-biting thriller Facets of Death –prequel to the award-winning Detective Kubu series. The Times said, ‘The local colour is as delightful as the intriguing investigation’.
It’s Sunshine Noir meets Nordic Noir, as the Queen of Icelandic Suspense, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, guides the proceedings, introducing readers to the South African writing team who make up Michael Stanley – Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip – and quizzing them about the Botswanan setting, the breathtaking plot and everyone’s favourite detective, David ‘Kubu’ Bengu, who makes his first appearance in Botswana CID! Yrsa will also give us a preview of her chilling new thriller, The Doll, out in July.
Michael Stanley is the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Both were born in South Africa and have worked in aca- demia and business. Stanley was an educational psychologist, specialising in the application of computers to teaching and learn- ing, and is a pilot. Michael specialised in image processing and remote sensing and taught at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Author of the bestselling Thora Gudmundsdóttir crime series and several standalone thrillers, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1963 and works as a civil engineer. She made her crime fiction debut in 2005 with Last Rituals, the first instalment in the Thora Gudmundsdottir series, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her work stands ‘comparison with the finest contemporary crime writing anywhere in the world’ according to the Times Literary Supplement. In 2011 her standalone horror novel I Remember You was awarded the Icelandic Crime Fiction Award and was nominated for The Glass Key, and has been made into a film starring Jóhannes Haukur. In 2015 The Silence of the Sea won the Petrona Award for best Scandinavian crime novel, and The Legacy, the first novel in the Freyja and Huldar series, was nominated for The Glass Key and won the Icelandic Crime Fiction Award. All of her books have been European bestsellers.
