W. F. Howes Ltd

Ours are the Streets Receives Glowing Review

4:00pm 14/05/2012

Ours are the Streets by Sunjeev Sahota has received a glowing review by Sharon Wheeler from Reviewing the Evidence recently:

"Imtiaz Raina is an ordinary Sheffield lad. He hasn't done so well as he might have done with his studies, but he's bright and has a loving wife and parents. Then he decides he has to die for his cause - and must explain to those he's leaving behind just why he made the decision.

Ours are the Streets is one of those books that I bet is far better in audiobook form than on paper, as it's totally made by Sartaj Garewal's exuberant narration. Imtiaz's story, told as a letter to his wife Becka and their young child, fizzes off the page. Garewal's accents, intonation and pitch are brilliant - and he's one of the few narrators who can do convincing women. All the characters come alive, from feisty, gobby Imtiaz, through his long-suffering but independent wife Becka, to her mum Theresa, elderly Pakistani blokes, Imtiaz's Asian peers and mouthy female cousins.

Imtiaz's journey of discovery takes him from the tatty estates, pizza takeaways and shopping centres of Sheffield to the heat, dirt and dust of Pakistan and the tinderbox that is Afghanistan. And this journey is marked all the time by what he's writing to his beloved Becka, and how he's desperate not to be misunderstood.

Sunjeev Sahota makes good use of the letter form in Ours are the Streets, as it allows Imtiaz to unfold his story in a logical manner. There's a certain amount of time-shifting between Sheffield and Afghanistan towards the end, but nothing that causes confusion for a listener or reader. By then, I was hooked, as Imtiaz is drawn ever-deeper into what he has agreed to do.

The one aspect that didn't quite work for me, though, was Imtiaz's motives. He appears to find religion after returning to Pakistan for his father's funeral, but the radicalisation seems almost incidental as he loafs around with his cousin and some local lads, going along with them for the ride. I have a feeling some readers may not be convinced by the ending, but - without giving anything away - I thought it captures what's going on in Imtiaz's over-wrought mind.

Ours are the Streets is an audiobook to lose yourself in, thanks to the author's powerful sense of place and the narrator's flawless delivery. It's one I can imagine wanting to listen to again. And it is a vital addition to a so far underrepresented canon - the young Asian male voice in the UK."

Wild Abandon shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2012 Award

12:20pm 14/05/2012

Wild Abandon by Joe Dunthorne - the bestselling author of Submarine - has been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2012 Award.

Faced with the prospect of a disintegrating community, his marriage and his family, Don sets to work on reunifying his commune by bringing it into the modern age, through self-sufficiency, charisma and a rave with a 10k sound system.

Three Titles Shortlisted for UK's Premier Comedy Fiction Prize

1:25pm 10/05/2012

Three of our titles have been shortlisted for the prestigious 2012 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction - the UK's leading comic fiction award: The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend; The Man Who Forgot His Wife by John O’Farrell; and Capital by John Lanchester. In keeping with the comedy theme of the prize, the winner will be honoured with the presentation of a locally-bred Gloucestershire Old Spot pig, who will be named after their winning title!

The Testament of Jessie Lamb wins premier Sci-Fi Award

11:00am 04/05/2012

Winner of the 2012 Arthur C Clarke Award - the most prestigious award for Science Fiction in Britain. Taking place in a world in which a deadly virus - Maternal Death Syndrome - affects all pregnant women, putting the future of the human race in jeopardy, one 16-year-old decides she wants to save humanity... Also nominated for the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

The large print edition of The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers is available now.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt wins Pulitzer Prize

2:50pm 01/05/2012

Stephen Greenblatt - one of the world's most celebrated scholars - has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. The book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic - On the Nature of Things by Lucretius - a thrillingly beautiful poem of the most dangerous of ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion.

The copying and translation of this ancient book - the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age - fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno, shaping the thoughts of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and influencing writers from Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes Tops the Richard and Judy Spring 2012 Book Club

9:00am 27/04/2012

Me Before You by bestselling author Jojo Moyes has been voted top of the Richard and Judy Spring 2012 Book Club selection by the public. From the award winning author of The Last Letter from Your Lover, this unconventional and moving love story about a woman who becomes a carer to quadriplegic former city worker won 60% of all votes.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes is available on CD, Playaway and Large Print.

The Fallen Angel by David Hewson is Shortlisted for Prestigious Audiobook Award

2:25pm 26/04/2012

The Fallen Angel by David Hewson has been shortlisted for the prestigious CrimeFest 2012 Sounds of Crime Award, which recognises excellence in the field of audiobook narration. Saul Reichlin is in line for a hat-trick of victories, having previously won the award in 2008 for The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson and 2010 for The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson.

The Fallen Angel is available now on CD, Playaway and Large Print.

The Help Receives Glowing Review in The Guardian

2:05pm 12/03/2012

"It's not often you get an Oscar-winner reading an audiobook, but even without Octavia Spencer, who bagged Best Supporting Actress this year for her part in the film of Stockett's bestseller, this would still be one of the most enthralling novels I've ever heard.

I almost didn't bother with it, having briefly sampled the movie on a long-haul flight recently. Good books rarely turn into good films. With four narrators, this is more like a radio play, which must surely be an advantage in a story where not just what people say, but the accent and the tone in which they say it, is all-important.

It's set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, when Ku Klux Klan lynchings were shrugged off by the police (exclusively white, of course - remember what happened to Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night, when he was sent from New York to help the local cops investigate a Bible Belt murder?). The book's title refers to the black domestic servants or "maids", as their genteel white employers call them. While their submissive, long-suffering, uncomplaining house slaves clean, cook, scrub, wait on and look after the children, their mistresses play bridge and work out whose turn it is to host the next baseball match party where their husbands, all alumni of Ole Mississippi University, will gather round the wooden television set in the parlour to cheer on their team, the Ole Miss Rebels. They know nothing about the harsh living conditions of their black servants. They support Miss Hillie's campaign to make outside lavatories for black maids obligatory in white homes. Getting them to use the guest bathroom is not enough - coloured people carry infectious urinary diseases. And when Miss Eugenia Phelon, worth 25,000 cotton dollars but still unmarried at 23 and nicknamed Skeeter because she looks like a mosquito, asks her mother why she has to sit with two of her help shucking oysters on the verandah, Mrs Phelon whispers: 'you cannot leave a negro and a negra together unchaperoned. It's not their fault, they just can't help it.'

But Skeeter has initiative. She writes to a New York publisher about her ambitions to be a journalist and is tersely advised that she should first find a subject she feels passionately about. So she does. The Phelons' help, Constantine, who has been with the family for 30 years, suddenly leaves. Why? No one will say, so Skeeter asks Aibileen, her friend's maid, not just about her beloved substitute mother but about what it's like to work for white people. The New York editor is impressed. Martin Luther King has called for a massive anti-segregation march on Washington for the following August. If Skeeter could produce a controversial book by then... Like Skeeter, Stockett has found her subject - a great story, beautifully written and brilliantly told." - Sue Arnold, The Guardian (audiobook review)

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is available now.

Please Don't Stop the Music wins the RoNA Romantic Comedy Award 2012

1:40pm 07/03/2012

Please Don't Stop the Music - the heart-warming and comic début novel by Jane Lovering - has won the Romantic Novelists' Association Romantic Comedy Award 2012. When Jemima Hutton's jewellery business looks set to fail she is delighted when enigmatic Ben Davies offers to stock her handmade belt buckles in his guitar shop. But Ben has secrets, and when Jemima finds out he used to be the front man of hugely successful rock band, she wants to know more. And the curiosity is mutual - which means that her own secret is no longer safe...

Highland Storms wins the RoNA Historical Romantic Novel Award 2012

1:30pm 07/03/2012

Highland Storms by Christina Courtenay - the bestselling sequel to Trade Winds - has won the Romantic Novelists' Association Historical Romantic Novel Award 2012. Set in the Scottish Highlands in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion, Highland Storms is a sweeping and romantic epic that follows the challenges that Brice Kinross faces as he takes on his family's troubled estate and Marasili Buchaan, its beautiful but feisty housekeeper.