Tag: independent publishing

Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Exhumation: the Life and Death of Madan Lal Dhingra, Leena Dhingra | Hope Road Publishing

Madan Lal Dhingra’s great niece, Leena Dhingra, unravels the life and death of an Indian revolutionary in this haunting work that is part history, part memoir.

What was the largest movement of people in history? In 1923, over a million and a half Greeks and Turks were forcibly ‘exchanged’ as part of the Lausanne Convention. In May and June 1940, about eight million people from the Netherlands, Belgium and France fled from the blitzkrieg advance of the German army. But the sorry prize for the largest movement of people must go to the 1947 Partition of India. Seventy-five years ago, up to twenty million people travelled between the newly-created states of India and Pakistan, crossing the border formed by arbitrary political considerations in the last days of the British Raj. Partition was a distressing, painful and bloody process: estimates circulate that something like two million never arrived at their chosen destination. Continue reading Guest Review | Sharif Gemie | Exhumation: the Life and Death of Madan Lal Dhingra, Leena Dhingra | Hope Road Publishing

Review | Bestseller, Beka Adamashvili | Dedalus Books

An entertaining mocking of literary aspirations, Beka Adamashvili’s novel, Bestseller, is a rich, kaleidoscopic, polyphonic satire that looks at fame and aspirations. Georgia is little known as compared to its large Russian neighbour on the other side of the Caucasus Mountains. Its history is complex, its alphabet is unique and Georgian is allegedly based on the Aramaic spoken in the time of Jesus. Its contemporary literature is diverse, not only in terms of the authors who represent it, but also in genres and subjects and the art of storytelling.

Continue reading Review | Bestseller, Beka Adamashvili | Dedalus Books

Interview | Chip Martin, Starhaven Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My mother read novels considered important in America of her era. She wanted to be an actress, and one of my earliest memories is of hearing her perform as a singer. She had a remarkable voice. My father used to read us Civil War history at bedtime. He was not literary, but his parents’ ancestors included “the first American poet”, Anne Bradstreet. Continue reading Interview | Chip Martin, Starhaven Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Review | Fox, Anthony Gardner | Book of the Week

“Frank and Anna’s day was one of mixed fortunes. They chased a great brute of a fox down to Chelsea Harbour, finally cornering it in the underground car park, though not before several of the residents had been reduced to hysterics; then they were called to the other end of the King’s Road, where a vixen had slipped on to a bus, bringing the traffic to a standstill as the passengers poured out on to the road. The vixen had escaped in the confusion; by the time Frank and Anna appeared on the scene, she had vanished with a chicken stolen from the Cadogan Rôtisserie.
‘Call yourself a huntsman?’ the manager shouted at Frank. ‘That’s the third fox I’ve had in here this week.’
‘Give them customer loyalty cards, mate,’ Frank replied cheerfully, ‘and don’t forget to ask for their addresses. We’ll catch them, roast them with some parsnips, and your clientele won’t know the difference.’”

What if . . . the British government struck a deal with the People’s Republic of China? And acquired new and ground-breaking technology enabling them to implant a surveillance microchip in every British citizen under the guise of having a routine injection against fox flu.

Continue reading Review | Fox, Anthony Gardner | Book of the Week

Interview | Anthony Gardner | Author of the Week

Where were you born and how did it feel to grow up between Ireland and England?
I was in London until the age of ten, and then in Tipperary with school and university in England. Going backwards and forwards between the two during The Troubles didn’t feel comfortable at all. As a writer I’ve come to appreciate the advantages of not belonging entirely in one place – always having an outsider’s eye.

What did you read as a child?
C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia; Kate Seredy’s The Good Master and The Singing Tree; John Buchan’s The 39 Steps; Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s Molesworth books

Who were early formative influences as a fledgling writer?
For poetry, W.B. Yeats; for prose, Evelyn Waugh and F.Scott Fitzgerald. Continue reading Interview | Anthony Gardner | Author of the Week

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