W. F. Howes Ltd

Clipper titles featured in The Guardian's Summer Audiobook Roundup

9:50am 29/07/2010

Sue Gaisford has reviewed two Clipper titles in The Guardian in her Summer Audiobook Roundup:

"Sue Townsend's finest creation is in his forties. In Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years, his abode is 'The Piggeries' in the village of Mangold Parva; next door, his mother, penning a misery memoir, longs to appear on The Jeremy Kyle Show. Working in a doomed bookshop, he develops a cancer that everyone mispronounces, to his impotent fury, 'prostrate'. Yet, brilliantly, this is very funny, and even more perceptive than its predecessors: one day, Adrian will be lauded as the supreme commentator on our age. In a truly great reading, Mark Hadfield masters more than 20 voices, from Punjabi to posh to paralytic.

Patrick Gale's subtle and elegiac The Whole Day Through turns on the reignition of an old flame, 20 years on, and is movingly read by Sandra Duncan and Ed Stoppard." - Sue Gaisford, The Guardian

Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years by Sue Townsend and The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale are available to order today.

A Simple Act of Violence wins Crime Novel of the Year

9:20am 26/07/2010

A Simple Act of Violence by R J Ellory has won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. This prestigious award recognises excellence in the field of crimewriting. Vast in scope, A Simple Act of Violence is an expose of the brutality of covert operations, the power of greed and the insidious nature of corruption. It is also a story of love and trust that somehow managed to survive the very worst that the world could throw at it.

A Simple Act of Violence by R J Ellory is available to order now on Cassette, CD, Playaway and Large Print.

The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer, reviewed in The Guardian

10:45am 19/07/2010

"Manderley, Brideshead, Cold Comfort Farm - houses that feature as the central character in novels have their own distinctive place in literature. The Landauer House, built in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, has a vast, glass-walled living area suspended above the garden from a steel frame that represents space, freedom, purity of line, the thrill of emptiness, the future. Its Viennese architect, Rainer von Abt, envisaged the steel being as translucent as water, the light as solid as walls and the walls as transparent as air - a house that would be both of nature and aside from nature.

But Viktor Landauer, its mega-rich owner, is a Jew, and by 1938 he knows that, for his family at least, the house has no future. The Landauers are lucky - they can afford to escape to America. Most cannot. Under Nazi occupation the Landauer House becomes a laboratory for ethnic and genetic research. Under Soviet rule, its shimmering glass long since destroyed by Red Army bombers, it is converted into an exercise centre for children with polio. Only in Dubcek's all-too-brief Prague spring is the architectural importance of the Landauer House recognised and plans hatched to restore it as a national treasure.

Moving in and out of its all-purpose space, Mawer's characters, as meticulously drawn as von Abt's plans, are totally convincing. You feel their terror, fury, shame, despair as their lives crumble around them. You understand why they behave as they do. The Glass Room is much, much more than a historical novel - it's a brilliantly plotted, beautifully told story about love, cruelty, betrayal, survival and, above all, the complexity and power of sex. Mays's cool, understated reading is perfectly pitched." - Sue Arnold, The Guardian

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer is available now.

Rift by Beverley Birch is reviewed by Karen Meek of EuroCrime

2:50pm 16/07/2010

"Rift is set in an unnamed African country and four children and an adult have gone missing near Chomlaya Rocks. All are British except for one local boy and all are connected to a student camp at the base of the rocks. Two days after the disappearance from the camp, one of the boys, Joe, is found but he has no memory of recent events.

Methodically, the story of the disappearances is pieced together, through new interviews and old interview transcripts, through old emails from Charly to Ella, from student journals and finally flash-backs from Joe as his memory slowly returns. The ending is stunning and not at all what my criminal mind was expecting.

I loved, loved, loved this one. I wanted to just listen to all six cds at once but I made myself eke out the pleasure over several days. The complete disappearance of the four people is a mystery that completely holds the attention. Ella is a likeable and strong character who holds up well under the circumstances. I would love to see Inspector Murothi return in another novel, teenage or adult. I loved his character: a gentle, wise policeman with great empathy for Ella and Joe.

Rift explores the group dynamics that occur when a mixed group is taken away from their normal environment and the leader does not behave as one would like them to. By the end of the story, changes have occurred and at least one 'rift' has begun to heal.

Clare Corbett narrates Rift exquisitely. Her children sound like children and her men sound as if a man has taken over the narration. She separates the many students by giving them regional accents and provides completely believable French and African accents, where appropriate, for the non-British adults. It's all done brilliantly well and I can't recommend this audiobook highly enough." - Karen Meek, Eurocrime

Rift by Beverley Birch is available on CD, Cassette and Playaway.

Twilight series continues with The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner

2:00pm 02/07/2010

The phenomenal success of the Twilight series continues with the Clipper Unabridged Audio edition of The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner.

From the number one bestselling author of the Twilight Series comes the riveting story of Bree Tanner, a member of the newborn vampire army created to destroy Bella Swan and the Cullen family.

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner is available to order now.

Whoops! by John Lanchester is reviewed in The Guardian

11:40am 14/06/2010

"Well-meaning friends with financial savvy have tried explaining what leveraged buy-outs are, and securitisation, or why AIG was basically screwed by CDSs on CDOs and had to be bailed out by the Bush administration for $160bn, but it's no good. I can't get my head round those sorts of numbers. What immediately endeared me to Lanchester's hugely informative and entertaining book about the causes of the global financial meltdown that everyone but Goldman Sachs employees is going through at the moment is his demystification of all that monetary bafflegab. OK, he says, try this. First, how long do you think a million seconds is - just a quick guess, don't work it out - and then a billion seconds. The answer (no, you won't have got it) is just under 12 days and almost 32 years. Now apply that to pounds, dollars and euros, and you start to understand the seriousness of the credit crunch.

Whoops! is a wonderful mix of history, facts, anecdotes and opinion. If you want a short, sharp rundown of the current economic crisis, this is it: genuinely funny money." - Sue Arnold, The Guardian

Whoops! by John Lanchester is available now.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver wins the Orange Prize for Fiction

10:30am 10/06/2010

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver has won the Orange Prize for Fiction. The award recognises the work of fiction written by women from around the world.

The Lacuna, which took Barbara Kingsolver nearly a decade to write, focuses on Harrison Shepherd - Born in the US and reared in Mexico - who is a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salome. When a violent incident sends him to North Carolina, he remakes himself in America's hopeful image. But political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.

The Winter House reviewed in The Oldie

1:10pm 08/06/2010

"Forty-something Marnie receives a call from Oliver, summoning her to the loch-side cottage of Ralph who is dying. Marnie's tangled love triangle (Ralph loved 11 Year-old Marnie, but Marnie fell for Ralph's friend, Oliver) is long over, but together again in a freezing Scottish winter, the past from which the three have never been free is finally exorcised. As Ralph weakens, cared for by the two people who loved him, the universe shrinks to the confines of the isolated cottage and the intricacies of their past intimacy is revealed. Beautifully read." Rachel Redford, The Oldie

The Winter House by Nicci Gerrard is available now.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet reviewed in The Observer

1:00pm 08/06/2010

"In 1799 on the trading post island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki, Jacob de Zoet begins work as clerk with the Dutch East India Company. Immediately, the listener is catapulted into a whirlwind of intensely vivid scenes: the graphic birth of a seemingly stillborn baby; murder; betrayal; cruel punishments; a samurai raid on a shrine where monks have used girls as baby machines; devious corruption... too relentless in the short version, it's more rewarding unabridged." Rachel Redford , The Observer

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is available now.

The Day of the Jack Russell wins The Last Laugh Award at CrimeFest

10:00am 04/06/2010

Colin Bateman won The Last Laugh Award at the recent Bristol CrimeFest 2010 for his hilarious crime caper The Day of the Jack Russell. The award recognises the most humorous crime novel published in the British Isles during 2009.