Annabelle Slator, "Risky Business"

Annabelle Slator grew up writing stories in the depths of the British countryside. After achieving a degree in Creative Writing, she spent most of her twenties working with brands and start-ups in London and New York. Nowadays, if she isn’t spending time writing, you can almost always find her obsessing over niche internet drama, practising her fencing parry or mooching around vintage fairs and flea markets with her husband and two dachshunds, Gruffalo and Gryffin. The Launch Date is Annabelle’s debut novel, inspired by her time working in the wild world of dating apps. Risky Business is her second novel, inspired by her experiences working in the tech and start-up industry.

 

About Risky Business, by Annabelle Slator
Tech founder Jess Cole, desperate to keep her start-up afloat, is forced to pose as her brother’s assistant during a tech competition, hoping a male-led company will be taken more seriously, only to find her secret identity "Violet" compromised when she has a hot one-night stand with the head of the competition’s assistant.

You can read more about Risky Business on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the novel. 

From Risky Business

"You made it." His low timbre coats the seething anxiety flowing through my veins.

I turn my chair on the swivel, laying my phone face down on the bar and cocking my head to the side, "Disappointed?"

Oliver stifles a smile, chin lowering to meet my eyeline. "Far from it, I was hoping you'd show." His fingers pinch the sides of a sweating glass.

I balance on an elbow, glancing at the drink. "So you can throw a beer on me and finish the job?"

"How about I just buy you one instead?" He gestures to the empty seat beside me, and I nod, rolling my eyes and crossing my legs. He doesn't hold himself with the same buzzing energy most in this room do, like they are desperate to impress their bosses and one another. He has a commanding presence, a mixture of laid-back and authoritative that I can't quite get a handle on.

He settles into the chair and leans his forearms onto the bar, his shoulder muscles tensing under the crisp white shirt. I feel a quiet thrill in his company, like an echo of adrenaline.

His chin shifts to me, the tea lights in red jars on the bar casting his cheekbones in a devilish glow. "What made you decide to come?"

I shrug, glancing awkwardly from him to the shelf of bottles with brightly coloured Italian labels. "I was having a mental breakdown in the area so thought it would be rude not to."

He huffs a laugh, hazel eyes twinkling. "Bad day?" The words roll off his tongue so smoothly that I imagine he was a cigarette-lighting bartender in another life.

I contemplate lying, but something about him is making me want to tell him the truth, to drop the pretences. I lean my elbow on the bar, resting my chin in my palm. "Bad year."

He whistles, almost impressed. "We better make it a double then." He gestures to the bartender with two fingers.

I shake my head, the background noise returning to the room with a pop as I come out of the minor trance. "You don't need to buy me a drink."

He shoots me a fake-appalled look. "Listen, I'm just trying my best to charm you over from the actively disliking me camp to a more neutral zone. I owe you at least one." He holds up a shiny black credit card. "Besides, this is my boss's card." He hits me with another winning smile.

"Oh, well, in that case, I'll have a Negroni." I sit back, relaxing into the chair. "How come your boss lets you run amok with his credit card?"

He taps the short edge of the plastic on the wooden bar. "Because I'm the only one who knows how to get his coffee order right, and knowledge is power."

"The keys to the caffeinated castle," I add with a nod.

He points at me with the shiny card. "Exactly."

"If only you could deliver them in one piece," I add, brow arched.

"Well, then I'd be running the whole company, and nobody wants that."

Michael Rosen, "Many Different Kinds of Love"

 

Michael Rosen, photograph by David Levene

Michael Rosen is renowned for his work as a poet, performer, broadcaster and scriptwriter. He is Professor of Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London and visits schools with his one-man show to enthuse children with his passion for books and poetry. In 2007 he was appointed Children's Laureate, a role which he held until 2009. While Laureate, he set up The Roald Dahl Funny Prize. He currently lives in London with his wife and children. His website is here. 

About Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS

Michael Rosen wasn't feeling well. Soon he was struggling to breathe, and then he was admitted to hospital, suffering from coronavirus as the nation teetered on the edge of a global pandemic. 

What followed was months on the wards: six weeks in an induced coma, and many more weeks of rehab and recovery as the NHS saved Michael's life, and then got him back on his feet. 

Combining stunning new prose poems and the moving coronavirus diaries of his nurses, doctors and wife Emma-Louise Williams, and featuring illustrations by Chris Riddell, this is a beautiful book about love, life and the NHS. Each page celebrates the power of community, the importance of kind gestures in dark times, and the indomitable spirits of the people who keep us well. 

You can read more about Many Different Kinds of Love on the publisher's website here. You can read a short review of the book by Lisa Williams on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read a sample prose poem from the book. 

From Many Different Kinds of Love, by Michael Rosen

The coma keeps secrets.

There is no place for the coma in 

the geography of my memory. 

I can't visit the coma. 

I can't call for it. 

If I try to find it,

if I plead for it to come, 

it doesn't hear. 

Or if it hears, 

it refuses to come out of its cave

and tell me what happened. 

It hangs back in the shadows

forbidding me from 

having a conversation

There isn't even a sign saying:

'This is not a memory.'

Maggie Brookes, "Acts of Love and War"

Maggie Brookes is an ex-journalist and BBC historical documentary producer turned novelist and poet. She relishes uncovering stories about the strength of women and the power of friendship and love in the most terrible of circumstances. Acts of Love and War, published in 2022, is a heartrending tale of love, courage and sacrifice, following three young British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The Prisoner's Wife – based on an extraordinary true story of WW2 – was published around the world in 2020. Maggie taught Creative Writing at Middlesex University for thirty years and has had six poetry collections published under the name Maggie Butt. Her website is here. She is on Twitter @maggie__brookes

About Acts of Love and War, by Maggie Brookes

Maggie's second novel Acts of Love and War tells the story of Lucy who braves the horrors of the Spanish civil war to bring back two brothers - and ends up saving the lives of thousands of children. The two brothers are rivals for her affection and she loves them equally, or thinks she does. 

Author Nikki Marmery calls the novel,  "A love story with a twist; a war story with a difference." It draws on the memoirs of extraordinary women who worked to deliver humanitarian aid to refugee children. 

As the war intensifies, Lucy realises the challenge is not so much which brother she will end up with but whether any of them will survive. 

You can see more about Acts of Love and War on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an extract from the novel. 

From Acts of Love and War

Hertfordshire, England, 1921

Lucy was sitting in her favourite place, halfway up the mahogany staircase, with a doll laid across her lap. From here she could see all the comings and goings of the house. She watched as her father opened the front door and light flooded into the panelled hall, fixing that morning in her memory forever, as if that was the day someone wound the clockwork and her life began. 

Her father ushered Mrs Murray inside and took her to the drawing room. Behind her came two boys, silhouetted in the doorway against the bright day beyond: a bigger boy holding tight to the hand of his little brother. Jamie and Tom stood still for a moment, on the threshold of Lucy’s life, and then moved cautiously forward into the unknown hall. As they walked towards her their dark outlines blushed into colour and rounded into flesh. 

Lucy thought one of them looked a little older than her and one a bit younger, perhaps seven and four. The bigger boy, Jamie, wore a school uniform with blazer, tie and short trousers. The small boy who gripped his hand was dressed in a sailor suit. As light fell on to their faces from the landing window behind her, Lucy saw Jamie’s lips were clenched hard between his teeth in the effort not to show his feelings, while Tom gazed all about in a mixture of fear and curiosity. They were as unalike as two brothers ever could be. Jamie had his mother’s blue eyes, sandy hair and freckled skin, while Tom’s eyes were brown as his hair; Jamie was skinny, as if he’d grown too fast, while Tom was square and solid; Jamie was pale as a china doll, whereas Tom was all aglow.

Lucy knew these were the boys who were coming to live in the little cottage next door. The boys with the dead father. She turned over the thought in her mind like a shiny new penny and imprinted on its reverse side she found the fact of her own dead mother. 

She watched as the boys became accustomed to the relative darkness of the wide hallway and caught sight of her on the stairs above them. When their gaze met hers, something seemed to catch in her throat and an unfamiliar shiver ran through her. She set aside her doll and stood up.

Later they told her that rays of sun from the landing window illuminated the blonde curls which encircled her head. But all she would remember was the way they stopped and stared as though she was a vision, as though she could become the fixed point in the turmoil of their lives. As though she would save them. 

James Scudamore, "English Monsters"

James Scudamore is the author of four novels: The Amnesia Clinic, Heliopolis, Wreaking and English Monsters. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and been nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Man Booker Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Zembla, Prospect, The Sunday Times Magazine, Time Out and Tin House. He has taught Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and the City University of Hong Kong and is currently on the faculty of the International MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Find out more here.

About English Monsters

English Monsters opens in 1986 when ten-year-old Max, whose parents live abroad, is enjoying the latest of many summer holidays at his grandparents’ farm in the Midlands. His idyllic childhood comes to an abrupt end when he is sent to a nearby boarding school which is characterised by arcane rules and violent punishment. The only consolation Max finds in this harsh new world is the companionship of a close-knit group of classmates. Years later, when Max reconnects with his old friends, he discovers that physical abuse was only part of the story of their time at the school. Riddled with confusion and survivor’s guilt, Max becomes determined to find out the truth: who knew what, and when? And who is now willing to see justice done, regardless of the cost to themselves?

From English Monsters, by James Scudamore

The watery-green dining room on a winter morning. Tea urns steaming furiously. Steam so thick it seems granular, shot through with sunlight from outside. Panes running with condensation, gathered grime silting in the curly stone frames. It might be an agreeable scene if we were permitted to talk above a whisper, but since Weapons Davis is of the opinion that conversation steams the windows up more, a clenched silence characterises the meal.

Sitting beside me, the man himself, who often prefers not to use the masters’ table but to place himself instead in the pit of the children, the better to curb all babble. He broods over his Telegraph, a plate of fried bread and egg in progress. Periodically he snorts when something amuses him, then lays down his paper to prepare another mouthful, mashing yolk and white into a glistening square of bread before placing it inside his mouth and reopening the paper. You’d think he was in the breakfast room of a hotel.

On the next table a dispute has arisen over command of the Marmite. Someone wants it down one end. Someone else is refusing to pass it. But since it’s Weapons Davis on duty, the whole thing has to play out in silence. As I watch, Ali Price, at one end of the table, holds up the jar, eyebrows raised. At the other end a boy called Guy Robertson raises a casual arm to receive it. It’s madness. There are ten pupils on each side, and a minefield of plates and cups in between should the throw go awry.

But the dare has been set. Glancing to make sure Weapons Davis is distracted, Ali brings back his hand and releases the big black jar, which flies in a perfect trajectory, finding Guy’s at the other end, although the throw is so powerful that Robertson has to sit up in his chair to reach for the catch, nearly falling backwards. There’s a submerged gasp of triumph, one hundred boys and twenty girls in one glorious, secret moment.

‘Ha!’ says Weapons Davis.

Cardiac plummet. He reaches to his belt and unsheathes his Bowie knife. He brings it up and cuts into the newspaper, filleting it of the article which has tickled him. He removes the jagged square, sets it down, then stabs it into place on the table. Behind him, Robertson throws the jar skywards in triumph and catches it again, and Ali Price’s face is lit with joy.

Weapons Davis shoots me a tetchy glance, sweeps the room and returns to his paper. ‘Denyer,’ he says, ‘if you want anyone to take you seriously in life, you’re going to have to learn not to gape in fear at the slightest surprising thing. People will think you’re touched.’

Jonathan Coe, "Mr Wilder and Me"

 

Jonathan Coe, photograph by Josefina Melo

Jonathan Coe was born in Lickey, a semi-rural suburb of Birmingham, in 1961. He attended King Edward’s School, Birmingham, Trinity College, Cambridge and Warwick University where he wrote a thesis on intrusive narration in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. His first novel The Accidental Woman was published in 1987 and he is now the author of thirteen novels, including What a Carve Up! (1994), The House of Sleep (1997), The Rotters’ Club (2001), The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010), Number 11 (2015) and Middle England (2018). In addition he has published a fable for children, The Broken Mirror, and a biography of the experimental novelist BS Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant. He is also an amateur musician whose album Unnecessary Music can be heard on bandcamp.com. On twitter his handle is @jonathancoe. Below, he talks about his new novel, Mr Wilder and Me, and you can read an extract from it.

About Mr Wilder and Me

I discovered Billy Wilder’s films in the late 1970s, when I was a teenager. But the first film of his that I saw (on television) was not one of his acknowledged masterpieces – such as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard or Some Like It Hot – but The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, his reimagining of the great detective’s personal life, which had been a commercial and critical flop.

I’ve written elsewhere about how my love for this film developed into a full-blown obsession. And of course it led me to watch all of Wilder’s other films, and to find out as much as I could about his life: his formative years in Vienna and Berlin, his flight from Nazi Germany in 1933, his transition from Hollywood screenwriter to Hollywood director. I became fascinated, in particular, by his meticulous, craftsmanlike approach to screenwriting, the formal solidity of his plots, the elegance of his narrative structures. Before the age of video recorders, I recorded his films off the television onto audio cassette and listened to them in bed at night, absorbing the rhythms of his dialogue. His influence on my development as a writer was much greater than that of any novelist.

So I have always wanted to write a book about Billy Wilder. But there are already several good biographies. And besides, while writing Like a Fiery Elephant, my biography of BS Johnson, the thought had stolen over me, more than once, that it might have been a better idea to write a novel about him instead. I might have got closer to him that way; perhaps even written something more truthful. And so I finally arrived at the idea that my book about Wilder should be a work of fiction, albeit based on real events.

The real event I chose to focus on was the making of Fedora, Wilder’s penultimate film – one of his most rarely-viewed, and one of his most puzzling. I knew that it had not been an altogether happy experience, either for Wilder himself or for his co-writer IAL Diamond (who is also an important figure in my book). So because I didn’t want this to be a bitter novel, a story of failure and disappointment, I decided to narrate it through the eyes of a completely invented character – a young Greek woman called Calista, who is taken on as an interpreter during Fedora’s location shoot, and who is full of optimism and starry-eyed wonder at being admitted into the world of Hollywood filmmaking.

I wanted to write a novel about the nature of creativity, and how it changes as you grow older. About the relationship between America and Europe. About the love between two professional colleagues (Wilder and Diamond) who in many ways are closer to each other than they are to their wives. About the most intense forms of personal grief, how you deal with them and how they find their way into your art. Above all, I hope it will be a novel that will make its readers want to watch Billy Wilder films again.

From Mr Wilder and Me

‘You don’t know the story of Nijinsky?’ he said. ‘He was a great dancer, but he went nuts. He ended up in a mental asylum suffering from terrible delusions. There’s a funny story about that, as well.’

This seemed unlikely, but Mr Diamond was determined to tell it anyway.

‘Billy was in a meeting once, with a producer. And he was telling him that he wanted to make a film about Nijinsky. So he told the producer the whole story of Nijinsky’s life, and this guy was looking at him in horror, and saying, “Are you serious? You want to make a movie about a Ukrainian ballet dancer who ends up going crazy and spending thirty years in a mental hospital, thinking that he’s a horse?” And Billy says, “Ah, but in our version of the story, we give it a happy ending. He ends up winning the Kentucky Derby.”’

And this time I did laugh, partly because I thought the story was funny, and partly because I liked the way Mr Diamond told it, the way his eyes shone as he reached the punchline, the way that for him, briefly, the telling of this joke brought an instant of strange joy and clarity to the world. And I realised that for a man like him, a man who was essentially melancholy, a man for whom the ways of the world could only ever be a source of regret and disappointment, humour was not just a beautiful thing but a necessary thing, that the telling of a good joke could bring a moment, transient but lovely, when life made a rare kind of sense, and would no longer seem random and chaotic and unknowable. It made me glad to think that in the midst of the world’s many intractabilities he still had this one source of consolation.