Difference between revisions of "Forthcoming Publications"

From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to search
(275 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
−
[[image:Bookbag-banner-obooko1.jpg|center|link=https://www.obooko.com/]]
 
 
__NOTOC__
 
__NOTOC__
−
=='''21 JULY'''==
+
=='''25 APRIL'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
−
|isbn=1529125790
+
|author=Sylvie Cathrall
−
|title=The Family Remains
+
|title=A Letter to the Luminous Deep
−
|author=Lisa Jewell
+
|rating=5
−
|rating=4
+
|genre=Science Fiction
−
|genre=Thrillers
+
|summary= There are few greater joys than a book which lives up to a compelling premise. And this is one of them.
−
|summary=In July 2019, Jason Mott was mud larking on the banks of the River Thames when he came across a bag of what appeared to be human bones. Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu and Saffron Brown from forensics were there to investigate.  The bones were indeed human: a young woman had been killed by a blow to the head many years ago - probably as long as twenty-five - but the bones had not been in the river longer than a year. There was no identification but the bag contained vegetation, some of which was quite unusual.
+
|isbn= 0356522776
 
}}
 
}}
 +
=='''9 MAY'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
−
|author=Will Carver
+
|author=Tom Percival
−
|title=The Daves Next Door
+
|title=The Wrong Shoes
−
|rating=4
 
−
|genre=General Fiction
 
−
|summary= Five strangers come together in one moment as a suicide bomber prepares to detonate his vest on a London tube line. As their fates overlap, the story is told in backwards order, leading up to the fateful moment.
 
−
|isbn= 1914585186
 
−
}}
 
−
=='''28 JULY'''==
 
−
{{Frontpage
 
−
|isbn=1408712172
 
−
|title=The Cliff House
 
−
|author=Chris Brookmyre
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
−
|genre=Thrillers
+
|genre=Confident Readers
−
|summary=''Many of them didn't know each other, one of them didn't know anybody, including Jen, one of them quite possibly hated her, and two of them definitely hated each other.  What could possibly go wrong?''
+
|summary=Will's life is difficult, in a multitude of ways.  He is bullied because he has 'the wrong shoes', he has the wrong shoes because his dad can't work and doesn't have enough money for even the most basic of things like food, and his dad can't work because he lost his job at the college, was working a cash-in-hand job on a building site and had an accident.  Throw into that mix the fact that his mum and dad are separated, and Will's life seems bleak in every direction.  And yet, he still has a tiny amount of hope.  He is good at art, and clings to the moments of joy when he is drawing, that feel like a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
−
 
+
|isbn=1398527122
−
That's the round-up for Jen's hen party which is to take place on Clachan Geal an island just south of Barra.  They're all staying in The Cliff House, hosted by Lauren, and it's the utmost in luxury living but then Jen can afford it.  She's just sold her muffin business for millions but is staying on to run it.  She's got her doubts about the long weekend: fiance Zaki Hussain has been acting a little strangely of late and wouldn't explain to her what the email he was hurriedly deleting was about.  Added to that, he's just about forced her to bring his sister, Samira, whom Jen's never met, on the trip, on the grounds that she's been stuck at home with newborn twins for the last six months and desperately needs the break.
 
 
}}
 
}}
−
=='''2 AUGUST'''==
+
=='''23 MAY'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
−
|isbn=0760379912
+
|author=Onyi Nwabineli
−
|title=Super Easy Quilting for Beginners
+
|title=Allow Me to Introduce Myself
−
|author=Editors of Quarry Books
 
−
|rating=4
 
−
|genre=Crafts
 
−
|summary=I learned patchworking from necessity: old or outgrown clothes needed to be turned into something new and usable when I was in my twenties.  It would be a while before it became a pleasure rather than a chore but I've never felt completely at home with quilting.  I needed something a little more stylish than my usual buttons or knots.  ''Super Easy Quilting for Beginners'' seemed like a good place to start.  So, how did it stack up?
 
−
}}
 
−
{{Frontpage
 
−
|isbn=0760379874
 
−
|title=Super Easy Knitting for Beginners
 
−
|author=Carri Hammett
 
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
−
|genre=Crafts
+
|genre=General Fiction
−
|summary=I learned to knit in the nineteen-fifties: it wasn't a choice, it was a requirement.  Girls learned to knit and to embroider and boys did wood and metal work.  My knitting wa accompanied by a lot of criticism and quite a few tears: it was a long time before I realised that there was pleasure to be had in the skill.  Nearly seventy years later it's the only thing that keeps my hands at all supple.  The turning point was a booklet published by Patons which gave all the basics and some patterns.  I've been looking for something simple to recommend to people who'd like to master the skill.  So, how did ''Super Easy Knitting For Beginners'' work out?
+
|summary=Anuri spent her childhood on display to the world, thanks to her step-mother Ophelia's increasingly popular presence on social media, where she posted every step of Anuri's childhood for sponsorships and influencer deals and, basically, monetary gain.  Now Anuri is in her twenties and she is slowly trying to regain her confidence and to get her life back, suing her step-mother to take down the content about her.  Anuri is battling alcoholism, failing to start her PhD, undergoing therapy and secretly abusing people online and receiving money from them for doing so.  Most importantly, she is desperately worried about her little sister, who is the new focus of Ophelia's online empire.  Can she save her sister, and perhaps herself and her relationship with her father at the same time?
 +
|isbn=0861546873
 
}}
 
}}
−
 
+
=='''6 JUNE'''==
−
=='''4 AUGUST'''==
 
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
−
|author=Sarah Todd Taylor
+
|author=Kieran Larwood and Joe Todd-Stanton
−
|title=Alice Eclair, Spy Extraordinaire! A Recipe for Trouble
+
|title=Dungeon Runners: Hero Trial
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Confident Readers
 
|genre=Confident Readers
−
|summary=Meet Alice Eclair.  A perfect eye and very careful hands have made her one of Paris's best young cake makers and decorators, making sure her mother's establishment is a classy affair.  Not bad for a thirteen year old.  Oh, and a perfect eye and a very careful handler and remote trainer have also made sure she is a very competent young spy.  Her first real mission will be to chase a traitor across the country – working behind the scenes on a posh sleeper train to the south of France, and hoping against hope that she can prevent documents allowing foreign agents to creep into the country from getting into nefarious hands.  But while nobody would have her down as a spy, can she possibly leave behind her rookie status and find the baddy?
+
|summary=Meet Kit.  Like most of the people in his world, it seems, he is an avid fan of Dungeon Running – the sport where a team of warrior, mage and healer enter specially prepared, century-old, magical mazes, and race to the exit, perhaps bothering with the treasure or the big bad and the points they grant you along the way.  Unfortunately for Kit, the only thing he's seen of the latest race on the inn TV equivalent is that one team has been retired, eaten, and a new trio of questors is needed.  Possibly very unfortunately indeed for Kit, he has taken to the goading from the token bully of his world and stumbled into declaring he'll enter as a team.  What chance does this friendless, muscle-free-zone have in actually managing that, and how could he possibly hope to succeed?
−
|isbn=1839940956
+
|isbn=1839945184
 
}}
 
}}
−
=='''15 AUGUST'''==
+
=='''13 JUNE'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
−
|isbn=B0B2N7MVYM
+
|isbn=1635866847
−
|title=The Calculations of Rational Men
+
|title=The Lavender Companion
−
|author=Daniel Godfrey
+
|author=Jessica Dunham and Terry Barlin Vesci
−
|rating=5
+
|rating=4.5
−
|genre=General Fiction
+
|genre=Lifestyle
−
|summary=It's the 10th of December 1962 when we first meet Dr Joseph Marr.  Just to put what happens in context, the Cuban missile crisis is still very fresh in people's minds.  The world has barely had a chance to breathe out.  But for Joe Marr, it's not the missile crisis that's at the front of his mind.  He's been convicted of murder.  With the current state of medical knowledge, it's hard to think otherwise than that the prosecution would never have been brought but Joe Marr has spent his first few days in HMP Queen's Bench, a relatively new prison.  He's just getting used to his roommate, Mervyn, and learning to be wary of the McArthur brothers.
+
|summary=It's strange, the things that make you ''immediately'' feel that this is the book for you.  Before I started reading ''The Lavender Companion'', I visited the author's [https://www.pinelavenderfarm.com/ website] and there's a picture of a slice of chocolate cake on the homepage. I don't eat cakes and desserts - but I wanted that cake viscerally.  (There's a recipe in the book, which I'm avoiding with some difficulty!!) Then I started reading the book and I was told to make a mess of it.  Notes in the margins are sanctioned.  You get to fold down the corners of pages.  You suspect that smears of butter would not be a problem. I ''loved'' this book already.
−
}}
 
−
=='''18 AUGUST'''==
 
−
{{Frontpage
 
−
|author= Kit De Waal
 
−
|title= Without Warning and Only Sometimes
 
−
|rating= 4
 
−
|genre= Autobiography
 
−
|summary= As Philip Larkin so eloquently put it, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal focuses on this idea of parenthood and the bonds that bind family. This book is a memoir focussing on the author’s formative years as a teenager living in a lower class area of Birmingham. Her father is from St. Kitts in the Caribbean and her mother is an Irish woman ostracized by her family for becoming pregnant by and marrying a black man. This intersectionality plays a large role in the autobiography. Kit De Waal faces multiple hurdles due to her race, her class and her gender. Her parents loom large and are written with care, love, and the kind of anger only a child can express to their parents.
 
−
|isbn=1472284836
 
−
}}
 
−
{{Frontpage
 
−
|author=David Lagercrantz
 
−
|title=Dark Music
 
−
|rating=3
 
−
|genre=Crime
 
−
|summary=How far from the original can a book allegedly inspired by Sherlock Holmes get before the allusion breaks?  This does have a wonder-mind at the heart of what little investigating is going on, but there is not a lot that Conan Doyle fans could really pin down as on their exact wavelength.  For one, the main focus of the narrative, Micaela, is no John Watson MD.  She's a Chilean in the Stockholm police, put on a murder squad as she knows the prime suspect of old, in a case where a referee of a junior football match was found stoned to death shortly after the match, and just outside the stadium.  Beppe, the suspect, was drunkenly antagonistic to the ref during the closing minutes, but refuses to admit anything, through days and weeks of interrogation.  When some disreputable coppers (the kind who dismiss anything their superior comes up with, the kind who think they can judge Micaela from her fringe and how she might dress – that kind) are told to go and see what brainbox Professor Rekke thinks of it all, she can only smirk when he says Beppe is innocent and the investigation is a shambles.  But taken off the case, she can no longer help solve the crime, and with Rekke the most erratic, irregular kind of guy, she can't get his full verdict on it all.  Until, that may be, she manages to stop him in the middle of an apparent suicide attempt...
 
−
|isbn=1529413192
 
 
}}
 
}}
  
−
=='''6 OCTOBER'''==
+
=='''4 JULY'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
−
|author=Alison Hughes
+
|author=Max Boucherat
−
|title=Fly
+
|title=The Last Life of Lori Mills
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Confident Readers
 
|genre=Confident Readers
−
|summary=This is a very impressive read, as it does a lot of what mainstream teen and tween fiction still struggles with.  Its focus is courtesy of the first-person narration from Fly, a secondary school lad with cerebral palsy, a down-on-her-luck single mom nearing retirement from being a cleaner, a carer while at school, and a bundle of assumptions people lay on him.  First they assume that with a broken body comes a broken mind, then they decide he's a maths savant – they even believe they can get away with calling him Fly, which isn't his real name, but everybody just uses it.
+
|summary=We meet Lori on the first evening she's got the house to herself – no neighbour to pop in, babysitter poorly, mother at work, just an avidly rule-breaking eleven year old, on her lonesome.  What could possibly go wrong?  Snuggled in a blanket fort, she has one main intention, and that is to log on to Voxminer, the world-building, critter-collecting game that is a hit in Lori's world.  But first Lori has a tiny inkling that this stormy night doesn't find herself entirely on her own, and then she finds something even more spooky.  For the server she and her bestie and nobody else should be able to enter shows signs of tampering. When malevolent eyes spark up on her phone screen, and her safe place in the game has been doctored – well, where is a girl to turn?
−
|isbn=1525305832
+
|isbn=0008666482
 
}}
 
}}
 
<!-- DO NOT REMOVE ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE -->
 
<!-- DO NOT REMOVE ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE -->

Revision as of 09:18, 8 April 2024

25 APRIL

0356522776.jpg

Review of

A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall

5star.jpg Science Fiction

There are few greater joys than a book which lives up to a compelling premise. And this is one of them. Full Review

9 MAY

1398527122.jpg

Review of

The Wrong Shoes by Tom Percival

5star.jpg Confident Readers

Will's life is difficult, in a multitude of ways. He is bullied because he has 'the wrong shoes', he has the wrong shoes because his dad can't work and doesn't have enough money for even the most basic of things like food, and his dad can't work because he lost his job at the college, was working a cash-in-hand job on a building site and had an accident. Throw into that mix the fact that his mum and dad are separated, and Will's life seems bleak in every direction. And yet, he still has a tiny amount of hope. He is good at art, and clings to the moments of joy when he is drawing, that feel like a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Full Review

23 MAY

0861546873.jpg

Review of

Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli

4.5star.jpg General Fiction

Anuri spent her childhood on display to the world, thanks to her step-mother Ophelia's increasingly popular presence on social media, where she posted every step of Anuri's childhood for sponsorships and influencer deals and, basically, monetary gain. Now Anuri is in her twenties and she is slowly trying to regain her confidence and to get her life back, suing her step-mother to take down the content about her. Anuri is battling alcoholism, failing to start her PhD, undergoing therapy and secretly abusing people online and receiving money from them for doing so. Most importantly, she is desperately worried about her little sister, who is the new focus of Ophelia's online empire. Can she save her sister, and perhaps herself and her relationship with her father at the same time? Full Review

6 JUNE

1839945184.jpg

Review of

Dungeon Runners: Hero Trial by Kieran Larwood and Joe Todd-Stanton

4star.jpg Confident Readers

Meet Kit. Like most of the people in his world, it seems, he is an avid fan of Dungeon Running – the sport where a team of warrior, mage and healer enter specially prepared, century-old, magical mazes, and race to the exit, perhaps bothering with the treasure or the big bad and the points they grant you along the way. Unfortunately for Kit, the only thing he's seen of the latest race on the inn TV equivalent is that one team has been retired, eaten, and a new trio of questors is needed. Possibly very unfortunately indeed for Kit, he has taken to the goading from the token bully of his world and stumbled into declaring he'll enter as a team. What chance does this friendless, muscle-free-zone have in actually managing that, and how could he possibly hope to succeed? Full Review

13 JUNE

1635866847.jpg

Review of

The Lavender Companion by Jessica Dunham and Terry Barlin Vesci

4.5star.jpg Lifestyle

It's strange, the things that make you immediately feel that this is the book for you. Before I started reading The Lavender Companion, I visited the author's website and there's a picture of a slice of chocolate cake on the homepage. I don't eat cakes and desserts - but I wanted that cake viscerally. (There's a recipe in the book, which I'm avoiding with some difficulty!!) Then I started reading the book and I was told to make a mess of it. Notes in the margins are sanctioned. You get to fold down the corners of pages. You suspect that smears of butter would not be a problem. I loved this book already. Full Review

4 JULY

0008666482.jpg

Review of

The Last Life of Lori Mills by Max Boucherat

4.5star.jpg Confident Readers

We meet Lori on the first evening she's got the house to herself – no neighbour to pop in, babysitter poorly, mother at work, just an avidly rule-breaking eleven year old, on her lonesome. What could possibly go wrong? Snuggled in a blanket fort, she has one main intention, and that is to log on to Voxminer, the world-building, critter-collecting game that is a hit in Lori's world. But first Lori has a tiny inkling that this stormy night doesn't find herself entirely on her own, and then she finds something even more spooky. For the server she and her bestie and nobody else should be able to enter shows signs of tampering. When malevolent eyes spark up on her phone screen, and her safe place in the game has been doctored – well, where is a girl to turn? Full Review

You can work your way through the newest review, category by category, starting here.

Retrieved from "http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/w/index.php?title=Forthcoming_Publications&oldid=170971"