I can see you judging those romance covers; “look at the chiselled abs” you say, “what kind of a name is On A Wicked Dawn you mock. Three weeks ago I would’ve been right there with you, probably daring you to flick through the pages and find a reference to someone’s member. My reading tastes err more towards science fiction, fantasy and horror – the grislier the better. So when started reading my first romance novel I admit my hopes were not high. I expected nothing more than some swooning, a few unrealistic protagonists and predictable plot lines. Oh how very wrong I was.

I took a leap and bought  What Price Love by Stephanie Laurens.  From the first page I realised why Laurens is a best seller. Adventure, spies, murder, passion, action, conspiracy, deception and of course mushy, mushy love are just some of the reasons why you find yourself awake at 3am, not caring that you’ve got to get up in five hours, only that you find out what happens in the end.

The very next day I came into work I ordered the rest of the author’s books. The first one was so amazing that it didn’t even occur to me until later how risky it was ordering and buying in all her other books the next day, just from the impression one of Laurens’ book made. It wasn’t even the first in the series, which amazed me even more. Lauren’s writes her novels in such a way that it’s not imperative to read in chronological order – each book makes a great stand-alone novel.

These are not your typical “Oh I love him, even though he treats me horribly *swoon* I’ll just go over here and pout and wait for him to rescue me”.  No, no and no. These heroines have backbone to spare! Even when contrasted with domineering male protagonists – perhaps even because of that – these characters show an amazing amount of depth and substance. Combine that with murder plots, jealous conniving women and of course romance and you have a winning combination.

My foray into the world of romance novels has definitely been a rewarding one – I thoroughly encourage anyone brave enough to accept the challenge and be seen with a romance novel in their hands. Laurens’ will make it well worth your while.

Neek for TLC Books

The Language of Flowers is Victoria Jones’ story. Orphaned as a small child she has spent the majority of her life being shuffled between institutions and foster homes. This upbringing has born in Victoria many fears, the main being a mistrust of anyone and anything. Unable to get close to anyone she communicates in the language of flowers. Honeysuckle for devotion, azaleas for passion and red roses for love. Using this strange and ancient language she conveys her feelings to those around her never knowing if she is understood or not.

Now eighteen years old Victoria has been kicked out of the system and is finally facing the world on her own. Alone, afraid and with nowhere to go, Victoria takes up residence in a public park. She plants a small garden of her own within the park and begins to attempt to make her way in the world. Looking for work she comes across a local florist and asks for any work the florist may have for her. So begins the next chapter in Victoria’s life.

She thrives on the thrill of matching customers with the perfect flower to match their needs and it is this new beginning that will bring her to meet the person that could change everything. A mysterious flower vendor working at the market place, a man who will make her face the demons of her past and finally get her to ask herself the questions she has run from for so long.

The story switches from stories of Victoria’s past to the present. Back and forth as the mystery of her life unravels and the two parts of the story become one. Take the journey with Victoria, and sit alongside her as she discovers insights about herself and her life she had never considered.

Richly woven, dark, menacing and oftentimes heartbreaking this is a novel of redemption, love, loss and the beautiful language of flowers. A truly beautiful literary novel, this is a book to get lost in. I did not want this book to end and I cannot recommend it enough.  Make sure you add this to your “to be read” pile.

- Courtney for TLC Books

On August 20, booksellers around the country will act like little kids who have had too much red cordial, happily buzzing around with a sense of pride and elation that their stores are being recognised for being an important part of our culture and our communities.

As the owner of a bookstore, I can tell you we don’t do this for the money! All of the booksellers and owners I have come across are passionate about reading, learning, literacy and the communities they dwell in. They also tend to be a little quirky with a tendency towards OCD, but that’s another post altogether.

Jon Page of Pages & Pages Booksellers put it well when he said:

“While reading is generally a solitary activity it is also a social one. Readers love to share their thoughts on books and the books themselves with friends and family. So while we often read by ourselves we want to share our reading experience with others. The bookshop is essential to this sharing process.”

I love the conversations that I get into with customers about all sorts of different genres and writing styles. On any given day I have numerous conversations with passionate readers about what they have just read, what they will read next and what they are looking forward to.  This morning alone I have:

• Helped one customer to find two books on explaining IVF to children, and where they came from.
• Chose two books as presents for a grandma visiting her grandchildren in Scotland, both Australian stories by Australian authors.
• Talked to an avid crime reader about branching out from Scandinavian Crime and trying Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson
• Sourced a book on a tricky relationship situation for a customer
• Talked to two authors about upcoming books
• Found the perfect distraction for a pirate obsessed child at home with the flu
• Discussed and sourced books for a customer doing a paper on ‘People and Place’ at university.

All of these discussions and books found for people represent the service that booksellers do all the time, because they love books. That is also why we organise book groups and events and story time for children, because reading is as essential to us as food, water and oxygen.

Booksellers also form a conduit between the author and the reader.  We are very privileged to be able to meet authors and get a glimpse into why and how they write, which we then share with our customers.  Occasionally we even get to have those authors in the store to meet their readers, which is always a thrill.

This is why National Bookshop Day is so exciting for us, everyone will be reminded of the place around the corner that isn’t just a store selling books, it is in fact a doorway to new worlds, new learning, an escape from the everyday or a journey, where you can meet like minded people who share the same passion for reading and get encouragement and advice to read new books.

As author of Loathing Lola, William Kostakis so eloquently put it:

“There’s more to a bookstore than simply selling books. Thanks to the RedGroup collapse, all anybody wants to talk about is the fact that bookstores are dying. Well, maybe places where they just sell books are dying, but bookstores that are active parts of the community; connecting readers with books, authors and each other… they’re thriving. There are 1000 things that bookshops like TLC can do for you that Amazon can’t, you simply have to step inside and ask.”

I look forward to wishing everyone a happy National Bookshop Day!

TLC Books is having it’s own special celebrations on National bookshop Day – see our website www.tlcbooks.com.au or http://www.fb.com/event.php?eid=128524687240633 for details.

Like us on facebook for all the news and reviews www.fb.com/tlcbooks

Tanya Caunce for TLC Books

Each month I literally go through hundreds of books from many publishers and decide what to order for the upcoming months. Did you catch that? Hundreds of books. And on big months, I would say thousands when you look at October lists (pre-Christmas) and dealing with over 20 publishers. Can you imagine, as a bibliophile, how you have to rein in the urge to buy it all? I seriously feel like cackling “mine, mine, mine, they will all be mine!” but I refrain and act professionally when all I want to be is a kid in a candy store.

So the secrets? There are none. There is not even a specific equation for choosing the books we sell but there are some important factors. Let me elucidate:

Is it a good book?

Yes, I know this seems really basic, but you’d be surprised. Every book I stock doesn’t have to rock my world or change my view of society, but I have a preference for well written and well crafted novels containing characters you can relate to. Believe me, there are many books out there that don’t have these qualities but yet they crowd publisher lists

We, my staff and I, read a lot of what we stock about 3-4 months prior to release, the publishers issue reading copies and it really helps us sort the wheat from the chaff so to speak. I love both non-fiction and the more literary style novels, Courtney loves crime, fantasy and fiction, Laura loves children’s books, historical fiction and general fiction and Neek is the fantasy and young adult queen.

If we don’t read the whole book, we often get a sample chapter to see the writing style and get a grasp of the content. This makes a lot of our ordering decisions for us. If the author is really well established we generally rely on their reputation. Having said that – there are a few established authors I don’t order in, as their writing has turned woeful and I can’t honestly recommend them. Patricia Cornwell, I’m looking at you.

Quite often I or a member of staff will champion a book, basically, read it and fall in love with it and recommend it to everyone we know – because we just want to share its sheer awesomeness. I love this, because it means we’ve found a great book and we get to have other people discover it too. It’s a bookseller’s biggest thrill and I order bucket loads of those books when we find them.

Who is it for?

One of the advantages of being an independent bookstore is that we have our own community of readers. Quite often I will order in a book because I am specifically thinking of particular customers when I order in a title; often along the lines of “Oh, she’s doing a degree in anthropology, she will love this” or “wow, he has been looking for something on this, it’s all about wolves in their natural habitat”. You get the gist.

To be perfectly honest, it’s like I am picking out birthday presents for customers every month, making sure that everyone will find something they love on the shelf. Which is really fun.

Seriously, really fun.

The cover.

Yep, I’m going to say it. A book can be amazing and wonderful or shoot rainbows from its pages but if the cover is really bad (I’ve seen some shockers) then I won’t order in as many. So really, this is a quantity decision rather than a “will I get it” decision.

As much as people protest that it is shallow to contemplate a cover in a book buying decision, it really isn’t. Many people won’t give a book as much of a chance if the cover doesn’t reflect what is described through the blurb on the back. The cover will attract the wrong people who will read the blurb and feel a disconnection with the book already. Game over.

Does it fit in with the shop?

I have seen some great business books, fabulous sport books and a variety of amazing design books. But we do not have a place for them. I will order on customer request, and will mention those books to particular people but we have a limited space and we simply don’t have enough demand for some books.

Outlay – do I have enough money to put it on the shelf?

I would love to order some more of the quirkier and beautiful design books as well, but at $200+ a pop that is a lot of money to be tied up sitting on a shelf for the off chance. So we keep it to a restrained amount.

Same as I would love to have a range of deluxe edition leather bound volumes. But then I would have to cut back elsewhere, so for now, those will wait.

Being in a business, I have to watch where my budget is spent and as I don’t have a wealthy benefactor or rich silent partner (I am currently seeking candidates for these positions, applications are open) I have to stick to that damn budget or go broke spectacularly.

Things that do not factor in:

Publisher promotions.

The publisher offers a free bag/hat/steak knives with the book. If the book isn’t worth reading, then no amount of free stuff is going to help.

Publisher Promises.

“Love this book or your money back!”

“We guarantee this book!”

“This book will do the dishes for you!”

All well and good, and to be fair, the promise is usually right – it is quite often a good book, but if it isn’t, it won’t be on my shelf. There would be nothing worse for someone to read a bad book and then have to go online to ask for their money back. That’s why booksellers are here – so we can help people make the right choice on what to read in the first place.

Only having what I want to read

Let me assure you – this is NOT the case. I will happily go on for the rest of my life without reading about composting, knitting or what really went on in the Korean War. Other people DO want to read about these things (I know, hey?) so I supply a selection that I know to be well researched and well written.

So that’s about it.

I hope you have enjoyed that little foray into what I do on a constant basis for my little bookstore. It’s a never ending task which I am happy to say, I love to bits, even if it can get overwhelming at times. I mostly get it right but can still get it wrong… apparently I’m not perfect. Who knew?

Tanya - TLC Books

www.tlcbooks.com.au

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Karou has been the apprentice to the wishmonger her whole life and working for this chimera can mean dealing with some interesting individuals – both human and otherwise. Hidden from the human world are her adoptive family of chimera who deal in wishes and for reasons unknown require copious amounts of ill-gotten teeth. When she’s not trading wishes for molars, Karou is just like any other seventeen-year-old art student in Prague…with blue hair that grows that way naturally.

There is more to this story than sketchbooks filled with monsters and underground markets of teeth. Someone is tracking Karou. Something is hunting the chimera. Somewhere Karou’s home is burning and the answers to the mysteries of her life seem to exist in a place she can’t get to.

Past, present and future collide into a collage of devastation as all begin to realise that some secrets should remain hidden. Lives will be lost and others found. Friend will resemble foe and sanity becomes insane in a war where there can be no victor. Love may just find that it has no place in a world that is burning.
An epic adventure, tear wrenching heart-breaker, laughter-fit inducer and so very, very much more, this book has it all. Taylor has certainly set the bar high for this trilogy and I have every confidence that she will exceed the standard in the books to follow.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is, dare I say, perfect. I’ve not encountered a fantasy work like this in such a long time I’d almost forgotten that originality still exists. This book is the Luke Skywalker of fantasy – our saviour from a literary world full of clipped angels and vampires with glitter problems.

-Neek for TLC Books

Want some more info about the author? Check out her website: http://lainitaylor.blogspot.com/

Plus, I haven’t started it yet, so this will be the official start… again. Yes, it has been that kind of week. 

Thanks to the 30 Day Book challenge facebook page, we have some fun for you!

Similar to the 30 Day Song Challenge, the 30 Day Book Challenge is a challenge that lasts thirty days, where users post links to their wall, one per day for the appropriate category. Here’s the guide:

Day 1 – Your Favourite Book

Day 2 – Your Least Favourite Book

Day 3 – A Book You Read to Feel Good

Day 4 – A Book You Read to Feel Down

Day 5 – A Book That Reminds You of Someone

Day 6 – A Book That Reminds You of Somewhere

Day 7 – A Book That Reminds You of Your Past

Day 8 – The Book You Can Quote Best

Day 9 – A Book With Your Favourite Character (Male)

Day 10 – A Book With Your Favourite Character (Female)

Day 11 – A Book By Your Favourite Writer

Day 12 – A Book By Your Least Favourite Writer

Day 13 – A Guilty Pleasure

Day 14 – The Book That No One Expected You To Like

Day 15 – The Book That Depicts Your Life

Day 16 – A Book You Used to Love, But Now Hate

Day 17 – Your Favourite Drama Book

Day 18 – Your Favourite Comedy Book

Day 19 – Your Favourite Action Book

Day 20 – Your Favourite Romantic Book

Day 21 – Your Favourite Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book

Day 22 – Your Favourite Horror Book

Day 23 – Your Favourite Thriller/Mystery Book

Day 24 – Your Favourite Animated or Children’s Book

Day 25 – Your Favourite Non Fiction Book

Day 26 – Your Favourite Series of Books

Day 27 – Your Favourite Stand Alone Book

Day 28 – The Most Obscure Book You’ve Ever Read

Day 29 – Your Favourite Book As a Kid

Day 30 – Your Favourite Book This Time Last Year

Good luck with narrowing down all those choices, I am having palpatations just “thinking” about it! 

Cheers, Tanya 

for TLC Books

As Neek, a TLC staff member (or Isobelle’s biggest fan – cue nervous laughter and manic devotion), put it:

Isobelle Carmody’s writing it is like a smorgasbord of greatness with a side of fantastic, drizzled with some awesome sauce.

After calming the staff down and managing to get all of them breathing normally again, I was barraged with many suggestions of questions to ask her, MANY questions. First and foremost was “Tell us what happens in the next Obernewtyn book! Well, I am happy to say, we do get a tantalising glimpse… but more so we get an understanding into why Isobelle loves to write, her relationship with her characters and what a passionate author she is.

Thank you very much Isobelle for being interviewed, and sharing your passion with us.

You’re one of Australia’s favourite fantasy authors – what is it about this genre that you love?

I think I see in it what most people do, as a reader and writer. It allows me to step outside the constraints of everyday life where we have to hang the washing and do our wretched tax and argue with some official over something and shop for dinner and buy band aids and Drano and washing powder. Not in order to escape vacuously, as is often the perception, but in order to think about things that matter to me. Like what it means to have free will and yet to co exist with others who also have free will that might infringe upon mine; about why some people are cruel and why some are courageous; about how it is that someone grows up to be Mother Teresa while someone else become Hitler; it is about what makes a person able to sacrifice themselves for others; about what is required of me if I want to be a friend to someone; about what the difference is between a human who is cruel and the cruelty of a cat to a mouse it has caught; about how important powerful people can make decision that a child can see will cause great harm, as if they and their children were going to be exempt from the consequences. In a way, it I like dreaming – a way and a space to deal with all of the thoughts and puzzles and conundrum that arise from that everyday life, only unlike dreaming, you are fully conscious. I guess that is the best way to put it. Writing fantasy is like conscious dreaming.

Isobelle, we literally have hundreds of fans of your writing eagerly awaiting your next book, just from our little shop. Does that translate into a lot of pressure for you when you’re writing?

Absolutely. It is the publishers who put the pressure on, of course, though probably more for their own economic reasons than anything else. But I certainly feel it whenever I am anywhere in public. For instance I was recently signing books at Supanova in Melbourne and there were literally hundreds of people asking when the next Obernewtyn book was coming and if I was ever going to write Darkbane or the last Billy Thunder book. But I never feel bad about that pressure because I truly work as hard as I can so the delays are not because I am slacking off, and in a way it is satisfying to be able to tell people to their faces what I am doing and why.

What’s the most difficult part of being a writer?

Odd as it sounds, sometimes the sitting and typing for hours. I get really sore elbows and back. I get physically bored. You are supposed to get up and move around every twenty minutes or something but I am so engrossed that I never do. Then I pay for it. There is no real downside other than that. I love what I do and I even love it when the going get tough. I love being demanded of by the story and I love conquering the problems. Sometimes when the next round of editing comes, my heart sinks a little, but it never seems to be that hard to re engage a story – even a huge one. I think that is because I write what I want and so it is never just pounding out words to meet a deadline or a word limit. I am always inside what I write. It always matters to me.

You write short stories, picture books, series for younger readers (I love Little Fur!), young adult and fantasy. Which do you enjoy the most? Do you have a pet favourite?

I think my best writing overall is in short stories, other than in Greylands, which I wrote like a short story. In a way they are the hardest thing to write because there is a very intense focus on them and you can never forget the form. Picture books are never quite easy for me, either, though having said that my favourite picture book is Journey from the Center to the Earth and I love that story. I love reading it aloud to kids and Marc Mc Bride’s pictures are fabulous. What I really enjoy most these days is being able to draw as well as to write. That started with the Little Fur book, and they are very special to me. And of course now The Red Wind and the next two books in that series are waiting for me. Both sets of characters in those books come very much from stories I made up for my daughter and so they are full of us and our lives, which again make them special. Strange as it sounds, going back to what I said right at the start, they come from things that are happening in the world around me. About my relationship to the world. Writing lets me think about it. For me, to write is to think.

In regards to Obernewtyn: These characters have been around for quite some time now, and I know many of our readers feel like they are visiting old friends when they read and reread the series. When you write do you get the same feeling? 

Absolutely! My dear editor said recently that she was not sure she liked Dameon and I defended him as ferociously as if he were my best friend. I mean how could anyone not like Dameon?! Re entering that world is like slipping on a favorite coat. I love the feel and familiarity of it, and the questions it was asking when I was 14 are still really important to me- in a larger sense, is it possible for human beings as a race to grow morally and ethically; in a more personal sense- what do we gain and lose as individuals when we chose to become part of a group or give ourselves to the ideals of a cause?

So come on, dish, who’s your favourite character? Or if you can’t choose, who is the easiest to write?

Favourite character? Hm. Well I love writing Elspeth when she is sharp and terse because I’m not often like that. I love the rudeness of the Crow and the sorrow of Sorrow. I guess I really liked all of the Little Fur character because of their voices- I loved doing the audio CD of them for Bolinda SO much. I have just finished recording The Red Wind, too, and in that loved the voice of the monster. One of the easiest characters to write was Alyzon Whitestarr. I’d love to go back into her again. But no, I can’t pick one favourite. It’s like the one I am in at the moment is the most interesting and engrossing, and that is Elspeth, of course.

It seems like you put a lot of thought into naming your characters and landscapes, what’s your inspiration for all these names?

The names have to have the right feel. They had to resonate to the characters character. They have to have meaningful poetry.

Which question are you most sick of answering in interviews?

Anything about my childhood unless it is a very specific question, then I like it because sometimes it lets me remember something I had not thought about. Someone recently asked for my first memory and that provoked some fascinating thoughts

What book(s) are you reading now?

Peter Handke’s The Weight of the World, Sebastian Faulks One Day in December and Haruki Murakami’s interviews with victims of the Sarin Gas attack on the Tokyo underground. Utterly riveting mostly for the difference in how the Japanese react to disaster in their midst as compared with how we or American would act. And of course it is reiterated by how they are reacting to the current disaster. For me it is especially interesting because in the final Obernewtyn book, Elspeth deals with a people who are ancestors/survivors of Asians, and the book is very much drawing on my reflections.

Please, please, please taunt us with a titbit of information from your new book The Sending, the 6^th book in the Obernewtyn series, due out September 2011.

Hmm didn’t I just do that in the last answer? Ok, we will meet Straaka’s brother in The Sending and he has a really interesting character arc. That’s it. Hope you enjoy the next book and that you feel it has been worth waiting for!

Want to no more about the Obernewtyn series? Go here obernewtyn.net

More about Isobelle? Go here www.isobellecarmody.net

Tanya Caunce for TLC Books

Every time I read a John Connolly book I am transported and entranced. If you try to talk to me I will say whatever I need to, to get you to go away as quickly as possible so I can keep reading. I will not have heard or registered a thing, I once agreed to watch a Spice Girls DVD and the blame sits squarely on John Connolly’s shoulders. I was engrossed in Every Dead Thing at the time.

I cannot tell you the glee, excitement and sheer joy I exuded when he agreed to be interviewed and the agony of wondering what questions to ask… you see, it’s one thing to be fangirl but you don’t want to come off as such. Suffice to say, I took two weeks to work out the questions to ask and whittle them down from 147 to 10. John was absolutely wonderful in answering them comprehensively and with great speed, further deepening the awe devotion respect I hold for the man.

I hope you enjoy the interview and the insight we get into a fantastic author. John has a new book due out in May called Hell’s Bells which is the sequel to The Gates, a young adult series I can thoroughly recommend.

Thanks again John, hope you can come to Australia soon as I would love to buy you a drink!

————————————————————–

John, you write crime, psychological thrillers (sometimes with a dash or two of supernatural) and now you have started a series for young adults with The Gates and the Hell’s Bells. Do you have a preference for one genre over the other?

No, not at all. I suppose I view them all as being part of the same undertaking.  Most writers only have a limited number of subjects that interest them, and to which they return over and over.  Childhood is one of my subjects, so The Book of Lost Things, The Gates/ Hell’s Bells, and many of the Parker books are concerned with children and childhood.  In the Parker books, it’s often how the sins of one generation impact on the next, while the other books are more directly concerned with childhood experience.  I suppose, too, the supernatural connects them all.  It was a genre that I loved as a boy, and I still have a huge fondness for old ghost stories, most English 19th/ early 20th century.  In the end, I think I’m a genre author, in the sense that I’m curious about the possibilities of genre fiction, and I’m not snobbish about it, unlike some of my fellow mystery authors.  It’s curious that there remains a deep distrust of the supernatural among more traditional practitioners of the crime novel.  It harks back to the genre’s rationalist roots, I think, but the reluctance to countenance experimentation with other genres is very depressing.

What was your inspiration for The Gates series?

I had the idea for the book around 2000 or 2001.  Basically, I thought it was a lovely idea: a small boy discovers that his neighbours are trying to open the gates of Hell.  I just couldn’t quite figure out how to do it until I began reading about the Large Hadron Collider, and suddenly I thought, ‘Hey, that’s it!’  It gave me what Hitchcock called the McGuffin, the thing that powers the plot, but it also enabled me to bring in all kinds of odd science, and that in turn gave birth to the footnotes, and the twin narrative in the book: the story being told, and the slightly sarky commentary on it by this author figure who is both me and not me.

What would you graffiti on the Large Hadron Collider?

‘Warning: Not To Be Used Without Adult Supervision.’ 

The Gates and Hell’s Bells are both hilarious and full of quirky logic and physics. Is physics a personal passion or something you looked at purely for the book?

I studied physics in school, but I wasn’t very good at it.  It’s only lately, returning to it as a adult, that I’ve begun to get a handle on it.  In the end, the books are anti-magic, in a sense: the universe is quite extraordinary enough as it is without the need to bring in wizards and dragons.  I think, too, that all authors are magpieish by nature: we look for shiny things that interest us, and we hope that they might interest other people too.  These books are full of little shiny things that I just find fascinating, or odd, or funny.

Religion and aspects of it feature in a lot of your books, does that stem from an Irish upbringing?

Well, I was raised a Catholic, and that’s still my faith, although I don’t go to church very much anymore.  I still drop in occasionally when passing, though.  I suspect I just don’t like being preached at anymore, and it really doesn’t matter what religious form that preaching takes.  I think that a lot of mystery fiction I love – and I’m thinking of James Lee Burke in particular, although what I’m about to say equally applies to a lot of the heroes of darker mystery novels – concerns individuals who are searching for redemption, and for me that word comes freighted with a certain amount of spiritual baggage.  Also, someone once said that all crime writers are secretly moralists and, again, seen from a certain angle morality casts a certain spiritual shadow.

Music features heavily in some of your books, with The Unquiet having an accompanying CD. Do you listen to music while writing? What are your favourite artists to write/listen to?

No, I can’t work in anything but silence.  I can’t even read while listening to music, or certainly not music with lyrics.  But music and books are my twin passions, and compiling the CDs for the books gave me a way to combine both, as well as pointing readers in the direction of artists whom they might not have encountered before, and songs that resonated with me as a writer, either lyrically or thematically.  As for favourite artists, I’d take A Walk Across the Rooftops by The Blue Nile on to my desert island, and most of Neil Young’s work.

Your characters over the years have been quite diverse, do you have a favourite?

There’s a lot of me in Parker, and he’s become a means of examining the world.  On the other hand, David in The Book of Lost Things is very much me as a child, and I have a huge fondness for that little book.  I suspect it may be the best thing I ever write, and I’d be quite content if that judgement was passed on me.

You were a journalist before you started publishing novels, did you always want to be a novelist or was it a progression? Basically, did you always want to be an author?

I saw journalism as a way to be paid to write, but I got frustrated after a few years.  Basically, there were better journalists than I on the paper (The Irish Times) and better feature writers too.  I’d like to think I was good enough for the newspaper, because I still think it’s the best newspaper in Ireland, and it was very supportive of me.   Had I stayed on I’d have been happy to be a journalist, although I think there might always have been that niggling sense of incompleteness.  In the end, I wanted to write fiction.

Who are your favourite authors? And do you derive inspiration from them and their writing?

The greatest novel in the English language, for me, is Bleak House by Charles Dickens.  After reading that, all other fiction felt a bit thin.  Ross Macdonald and James Lee Burke are probably the greatest influences on my mystery novels – Macdonald for his empathy, and Burke for the beauty of his prose, and the depth of his compassion.  But I’m the product of every author I’ve ever read and loved, from Enid Blyton to E.E. Cummings.  It would be hard to pinpoint their inspiration directly, though: I just know that they’ve made me the writer that I am.

I know this is a hard question, but if you could only have 5 of your books forever – which five would they be?

Mine, or those of other writers?  I don’t think mine are going to last forever.  None of us is writing for posterity; we just have to write as if we are.  But other writers?  Hmmm.  Bleak House, certainly.  The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.  The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.  The Collected Poems of E.E. Cummings.  And, because they make the world a brighter, happier place, the Jeeves & Wooster novels of P.G. Wodehouse.  A desert island existence wouldn’t be so bad with those writers for company.

Tanya Caunce for TLC Books

My name is Neek and I am about to rant about my favourite genre. Just thought I should warn you.

What started with swooning girls and vampires with glitter infections has now spawned the rise of a new kind of young adult book, whose authors story-telling credentials go as far as having a crush when they were 14. Cut to 25 years later, these girls have now grown up and much like a rabid dog wants to share its rabies, these ‘authors’ want to share what their hormone-fueled imagination dreamt up in the back row of Mr. Harrington’s math class so many years ago. So sit back, relax and enjoy a complete lobotomy that you can’t claim on Medicare.

The basic storyline of these books goes a little something like this: nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening, angst. Nothing’s happening, meets brooding-loner-guy. Angst about falling in love with brooding-loner-guy, nothing’s happening, finds out their love can never be, nothing’s happening, something about vampires/fallen angels. Angst, people might die or at least be put in a ‘dangerous’ situation, protagonists go through the ‘I love you, but no, I can’t!’ for a while, and somewhere in amongst all that there is a plot. Finally, there’s likely to be a sentence which implies more books to follow, at which point I start looking for the nearest and bluntest object.

Time for the checklist:
1. Whiny protagonists? –check
2. Instantaneous love? – check
3. Characters whose shallowness is so thorough it’s almost like depth? –check

Fantastic. Send it off to the publishers clamouring for anything they can jacket in black and red and you’ve got yourself one nifty little pay cheque. I am tired of shoddy imitation rather than true imagination.

This is my favourite genre dammit! Stop fouling the waters with pale imitations of fantastic books.

To any authors who may be reading this, for whom gen Y is a demographic and not a mindset, here’s a free tip for you: adding modern slang doesn’t endear a book to the young’uns…it comes off very condescending and irritating. Like, nothing’s as annoying as when, you’re like, in the middle of a totally huge moment in the story and so anyway, the main character acts like a complete spaz and you’re like, OMG Becky! Don’t go into the manky alley in the middle of the night, there’s totes a vampire with a complexion problem down there!

Sentences like “I couldn’t stop staring at his perfection” should incur immediate relocation to hell: preferably one of the inner-circles.

Authors and publishers: you are now bludgeoning the corpse of a genre that died an honourable death with ‘Buffy.’ Write something worth publishing or stop writing altogether, lest you sentence us all to bookstores full of red and black covers.

Neek for TLC Books

The Novel In The Viola is Natasha’s second book and we are just as excited about it. A wonderful tale of an Austrian girl displaced during the onset of WWII, a Jewish girl, who takes refuge in England as a domestic worker for a family (of sorts) in a grand old home in Tyneford on the Dorset coast.

The book  gently and beautiful written and you are quickly drawn into Elise’s life and the life of the village in Tyneford. I know we have another bestseller on our hands and we are delighted that Natasha took the time to answer our questions. Even the really personal ones!

Thank you so much Natasha

Can you tell the readers a little bit about yourself as a writer?

As well as writing novels, I also write screenplays with my husband. I think that means while my work is ‘literary fiction’ it is very plot driven. I visualise scenes – Kit meeting Elise on the beach while she’s in her knickers and cursing at the sea, the party scene in Vienna, Elise and Mr Rivers drinking pink gin before the last dance at Tyneford… I use these scenes to then tell the story.

My editor once told me that my books are carefully lit. In a movie that is the job of the director/ director of photography but this is the pleasure of novel writing – I can write, direct, cast, find the perfect location and even light the scene. And the fabled ‘golden hour’ at sunset can last as long as I want it to!

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

I live with my husband, a writer, in rural Dorset. We love tramping across the fields and chatting through the plot of whatever we’re working on or about the books we’ve read or the films we’ve been watching. I’m basically a story-monster so my favourite pastimes involve stories in some form. Or cooking as I’m also a big fan of food. I love slow cooked stews – basically anything that’s hard to burn as I tend to forget what I’m doing half way through. I forgot some rhubarb yesterday and welded it to the bottom of a pan.

Do you have any rituals or processes for writing your novels?

In spring or summer I take my laptop down to the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. There is no phone, no internet – just the squawk of the pheasants and the sound the of the bees. If it’s cold, I work in my study under the eaves and if it’s very cold, I write by the fire.

I have to say, readers at TLC Books fell in love with Mr Rosenblum’s List, have you had very much feedback from readers?

I’ve had so many gorgeous letters and e-mails from readers. It’s been just amazing. A note from a reader who has really connected with my writing, absolutely makes my day.

You have a blog at natashasolomons.com, does that connection with your readers influence your writing at all?

I actually find that while I’m writing, I need to disconnect from the world for a while. I read and read and take long walks, as I need to allow the real world to take second place to the imaginary one that I’m starting to create. I think it would be dangerous to try and write what I believe readers to want. I have to write the stories that excite and challenge me. I need to be a little frightened before I start.

What was the inspiration for The Novel In The Viola?

I’d always wanted to write something set in the ‘ghost village’ of Tyneham, which was requisitioned by the War Office in 1943. The villagers were forced to leave their cottages on Christmas Eve. They left pinning this note to the church door:

‘Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.’

But, they were never allowed back and the village is now a ruin. It is situated on one of the most beautiful stretches of England’s coast – but the land is still owned by the Ministry of Defence and visitors are only allowed occasionally.

While I was pondering Tyneham, I read an article in a magazine about Jewish women who managed to escape Nazi Europe by becoming domestic servants in Britain. Many of these women had led privileged lives with servants of their own and had to come to terms with their new positions. In a ‘eureka moment’ I realised that I needed to tell the story of Tyneham and the last days of an English country house, through the eyes of an outsider and a servant– a young Jewish girl from Vienna.

The novel is also influenced by books like Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’, ‘Remains of the Day’, ‘Atonement’ and of course, the quintessential ‘young girl in a country house’ story, ‘Jane Eyre.’

If you’re willing to share… love and falling in love features heavily in The Novel In The Viola, what age were you when you first fell in love?

I pined for a beautiful boy, who looked rather like Kit. I was very young, probably only eleven, and I used to watch this tanned boy skimming pebbles on the beach. I felt so pale and plump and ordinary beside him.

Both of your books deal with new immigrants to the UK finding their feet and themselves, is it an issue close to your heart or a coincidence?

My grandparents were immigrants from Berlin, arriving in the UK shortly before WW2. I think their stories as well as those of other refugees have inspired me.

Out of all your characters, whom would you want to know in ‘real’ life?

I feel that I do know them. They are as real to me as my own family.

Finally, do you play a musical instrument at all?

I play the flute really badly. In fact, I can’t play at all if I think someone can hear me. I spent 7 years miming in the school orchestra. The oboes who sat at the next desk used to laugh at me.

Tanya Caunce for TLC Books