Conville & Walsh

Nick Harkaway’s new novel is out.

All Joe Spork wants to do is live quietly. He repairs clockwork and lives above his shop in a wet, unknown bit of London. The bills don’t always get paid and he’s single and in his mid thirties and he has no prospects of improving his lot, but at least he’s not trying to compete with the reputation of Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, his infamous criminal dad.

Edie Banister lives quietly and wishes she didn’t. She’s nearly ninety and remembers when she wasn’t. She used to be a spy, and now she’s… well… old. Worse yet, the things she fought to save don’t seem to exist anymore, and she’s beginning to wonder if they ever did.

When Joe repairs one particularly unusual clockwork mechanism, his quiet life is blown apart. Suddenly he’s getting visits from sinister cultists and even more sinister lawyers. One of his friends is murdered and it looks as if he may be in the frame. Oh, and in case that wasn’t enough, he seems to have switched on a 1950s doomsday machine - or is it something even more alarming?

Edie’s story and Joe’s have collided. From here on in, nothing will be the same - Joe’s world is now full of mad monks, psychopaths, villainous potentates, scientific geniuses, giant submarines, determined and extremely dangerous receptionists, and threats to the future of conscious …  (continue reading)

We are delighted to announce that three of our authors are on this year’s longlist for the Branford Boase Award:

We’re writing with the exciting news that Before I Go to Sleep is this week’s Sunday Times #1 Bestseller. The debut novel by S J Watson has already become an international bestseller in many of the forty languages in which it is published, and has this week sold over 18,000 copies in paperback.

The novel follows Christine, a forty-seven-year-old writer who, following a catastrophic accident in her mid-twenties, is incapable of forming and maintaining new memories for more than a day. Trapped in an existence in which she wakes every day believing herself to be single and with a whole lifetime of choice ahead of her she discovers instead that she lives with her husband, Ben, with most decisions already made.

When Chrissie learns that she has been meeting with a doctor who is helping her to recover her memory - and that following his suggestion she has been keeping a journal in order to record her fragmentary recollections and piece together her past - she is hopeful that she may be cured. But the story that emerges is to set in motion a terrifying voyage of discovery that will ultimately have startling consequences for her and all who love her, leading her to question whether the truth is sometimes better left forgotten.

As reported in the Bookseller, the book has ‘stormed to the summit of the Official UK Top 50, becoming only the third …  (continue reading)