Tess Daly’s memoir of her pregnancy and motherhood is a wonderful celebration of what it’s like to be a mum, with all the joys and challenges that come with it. We are so thrilled to have had it on the Sunday Times bestseller list for the past two weeks in a row.

Today Tess began her publicity campaign after a difficult few weeks, and public support has been overwhelming. Thanks to events at Mamas and Papas, Gurgle and appearances on Steve Wr
ight and The One Show (and that’s just today!) we’re sure that the book will continue to do brilliantly, so watch this space.

Read an interview with Tess on Gurgle.

Watch Tess talk about her top tips for new mums:

And don’t forget you can sample some of the book and keep your very own Baby Diary using our iPhone app!

Miranda - Senior Commissioning Editor

Lynda Bellingham talks about her new book, Lost and Found, adoption, alzheimers and finding herself.

Love Affair is in no way a “victim memoir.” The book is a celebration of the essence of human beings, and a description of the kind of healing that is possible for all of us regardless of who we are or what has happened in our lives. Each one of us, in our own way, experiences trauma and grief - it does not have to be as extreme as I experienced.

From childhood onwards - as a result of our upbringing, education, and year-to-year events that happen to us - each of us holds false beliefs about who we are as well as distorted attitudes about what is possible for us. These things limit us. They interfere with our living life from the core of our being with joy and creativity, love and grace.

The book is not just a personal story although, on one level, it is highly personal to me. Love Affair is also - and more importantly - a map of the process by which human illusions, false ideas, limiting beliefs and attitudes can be gracefully cleared. The key to this kind of deep soul transformation is learning to connect with the essence of who we are at the deepest level of our being. When we do, our entire experience of life expands. We connect with a sense of meaning unique to us and can live more and more from our own truth. No experience is more satisfying or fulfilling. I see this happening to people throughout the globe. Love Affair charts this territory, telling how this can happen for anyone no matter who they are or what kind of life they have lived until now.

Love Affair was not a book I ever intended to write. You can hear about this by watching the video on the home page of the website. I retreated into solitude in a large house behind a walled garden for four years, seeing no-one except my immediate family while writing it.

This process took me to the depths of my soul bringing light into my own darkness. When I began to write, I had no idea where all this would take me. Now I realize that my work for the past 30 years has been about my having to make this journey - a journey to the depths - and then to bring back whatever hidden treasures lay beneath my own traumas and limiting beliefs. It suddenly now makes sense that, following Gail Rebuck’s persistent urging that I write a memoir, I decided to write this book. “It will become the bridge between the work you have done until now,” she told me, “and what you will be doing in the future.”

Now I see Gail was right. All my work for the past 30 years has been about discovering ways and means by which we human beings can connect with that the core of our authentic self and come to live our lives from it. There is nothing more rewarding. For the essence of each of us is magnificent. It is both highly individual to each man and woman in the world, yet at the same time universally divine. What a marvelous enigma.

This is a challenging yet wonderful time in which we are living - a moment in history where the social, economic and ecological order we have known before is breaking down. Everything is in flux. I am excited about what is happening in the midst of such profound upheaval. It feels like a new world is in the process of gestation. I suspect that, for the first time, the gift of becoming who, in truth, we already are but don’t yet know it, is being offered not just to a few enlightened beings. It is available to all of us right here, right now.

Now I see something that I had no idea of when I wrote the book: In some ways Love Affair is a blueprint for how this takes place. It creates a whole new mythology about light and dark that can be transformative to the lives of those of us who are ripe to leave behind the “them and us” mentality and move into an experience of expanded awareness, creativity and personal power. May it bring blessings to all who read it.

Leslie Kenton, author of Love Affair

Find out more about the book on Leslie’s website www.loveaffair-thebook.com

‘Don’t you want an iPhone?’ This is the question my sister asks me every time I produce my phone (a Nokia that, owing to the speed of modern technology, now looks like Noah might’ve used it on the Ark). ‘NO!’ I reply. I have an iPod, which I never use. I’ve just taken possession of a new, flat-screen TV (to replace the portable TV I’ve had for 20 years). Except the TV isn’t new, I got it because someone else had upgraded to a bigger, better one. Having a second-hand TV appealed to me in an eco-friendly way. Gandhi’s maxim that ‘There is more to life than increasing its speed’, would seem to be mine too.

But now? Now I might be persuaded on an iPhone/iTouch/iPad/iWonder. Because I’ve just spent the last month creating Ebury’s first app and Pandora’s iBox has been opened.

We decided to do the app – for Tess Daly’s The Baby Diaries – just before Christmas. Which meant that we had about a month to get it designed, built and launched, to be in line with the book’s publication date! EEEK. This was not good news for a neo-Luddite. I needed an iSaviour. Luckily, I was recommended a few companies who specialised in apps, and after a lightning round of proposals, emails and phone calls, I had my man. He is called Dave, and with his trusty tech-hound, Henry, he set to work.

A month’s worth of emails, calls, re-formatting copy, designing, building, testing, and even filming a demo video, and we were ready to go. We got a big promo on the apps homepage, and within three days, we had 6,500 downloads! I’ve become mildly obsessed with the daily stats, and our position in the Health and Fitness app chart. Plus there’s a whole new world of app reviewers to target.

So, check it out (it’s free to download), forward it on to any friends who might be contemplating a baby, and please leave your e-shillings, groats, sovereigns and the like in the comments pot underneath so that I can save up for whatever shiny gizmo Steve Jobs is going to change my life with next. Because yes, now I’ve had a play with one, I definitely want an iThing. After a decade, I’m finally ready to join the 21st century…

Alex - Marketing Manager

I have just seen a preview of the first two episodes of THE PACIFIC, the BAND OF BROTHERS follow up from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. My God, this is an incredible piece of television — incidentally the most expensive television series ever made.

THE PACIFIC is based on two books, WITH THE OLD BREED by E. B. Sledge and HELMET FOR MY PILLOW by Robert Leckie. The authors of both books are lead characters in the series. And when you watch THE PACIFIC you find yourself thinking one thing — how on earth did they cope? How did they get through this hell? (And it really is HELL we are talking about here).

The answers, of course, lie within these two books. Here are the thoughts of the men themselves, written down in personal, often horrific detail, so that future generations may begin to understand what they went through. THE PACIFIC is an incredible piece of television, but if you want a deeper understanding of what it was like in the Pacific, you need to read WITH THE OLD BREED and HELMET FOR MY PILLOW.

Jake Lingwood, Publisher, Ebury Press

Watch the trailer:

The Manifesto is not so much a vision of the future as a slightly disturbed stare of inappropriate length into the navels of Mark Thomas’s audience. It is the result of touring the country for the best part of a year, collecting people’s ideas to make the world a better place, then discussing them and voting to select a policy from each show. Every policy published in The People’s Manifesto is there by dint of having undergone this process.

In a perfect world these policies would appear in a mainstream party political manifesto but there is little likelihood of that as traditionally radical common sense has been the kiss of death to any politicians career.

Now, however, Mark Thomas and Ebury Press are offering the chance for one reader to take up the gauntlet laid down by the book, offering one reader the chance to stand for Parliament in the next general election and run a campaign based on the ethos and ideals of The People’s Manifesto.

Yes you will have to submit a web form, yes you will have to outline where you want to stand and why. And yes, you will have to outline what policies are your priorities and your campaign plans. But if you are selected you will be given £500 to pay for your deposit and £500 campaign expenses.

Previously independents have stood for election under the premise that they had nothing to lose but their deposit, now at least for one person the deposit is covered. Go on have a go. Visit the website to find out how.

www.thepeoplesmanifesto.co.uk

For the month of January, Booker prize winning author Ben Okri tweeted a poem about time.  The poem went out bit by bit, every day for the month, and it can now be read in full below.

As clouds pass above our heads
So time passes through our lives.
Where does it go,
And when it passes,
What do we have to show?
We can plant deeds in time
As gardners plant roses.
We can plant thoughts, or good words too
Especially if they are noble and true.
Time is an act of consciousness:
One of the greatest forces
Of the material world.
We ought to use time
Like emperors of the mind:
Do magic things that the future,
Surprised, will find.
We could change our life today
And seek out a higher way.
The Buddha sat beneath a tree
And from all illusion became free.
And as we travel on this life that is a sea
We can glimpse eternity.
We can join that growing fight
To stop our world being plunged into night.
We can wake to the power of our voice
Change the world with the power of our choice.
But there is nothing we can do
If we don’t begin to think anew.
We are not much more than what we think;
In our minds we swim or sink.
If there is one secret I’d like to share
It’s that we are what we dream
Or what we fear.
So dream a good dream today
And keep it going in every way.
Let each moment of our life
Somehow help the good fight
Or help spread some light.
The wise say life is a dream;
And soon the dream is done.
But what you did in the dream
Is all that counts beneath the sun.
The dream is real, and the real is a dream
Each one of us is a powerful being.
Wake up to what you are,
You are a sun, you are a star.
Wake up to what you can be.
Search, search for a new destiny

In a strange way publication has felt like getting married all over again, except in reverse order. First came the reception – at which the bride (ie me) went against convention by wearing black with red shoes – with that dreamlike experience of bringing together people from very different parts of your life and seeing that they do, amazingly, all get on. Then, next day, the big event. I got ready and made my way to Waterstones and Hatchards in Piccadilly, feeling just as breathless as I did on my way to my wedding. And lo and behold, the book was there, waiting for me! A week on, my head is still spinning – but in a good way, not like in the Exorcist.

Finding Monsieur Right – a book about the very, very good things that can happen to you when you move to a strange country – shuttles between Paris and London and tells the story of two heroines, English Daisy and French Isabelle. I remember very clearly how it all started, one day that I found myself in a fairly advanced state of pregnancy and incapable of doing any real work. I was daydreaming and for some reason an image lodged itself in my head. There was a girl in a designer ball-gown stuck on the roof of the Paris Opera House – she had been locked out. That was all I knew. So I sat down to write in order to try and work out how events had conspired to put her on to that very cold roof.

At this stage, the whole thing felt like a problem-solving exercise. I was sketching out lines of flight – who? where? why? what? It was a fairly detached pursuit – something to stop my brain from grinding down completely. And then, after a few weeks’ writing, I suddenly found myself crying actual tears at my desk – because a French boy I had made up was being mean to one of my heroines. I knew then that a line had been crossed. Yes – I know I was pregnant, and those friends who have known me longest might say ‘But she cries at anything’ and they would be right, but this was something else. I’d become sucked in by the story I had invented – a strange feeling.

As to what happened afterwards, it was really down to my husband the critic first of all, because he read the thing and thought it was OK, and convinced me to look for an agent, which I did. Enter the fantastic Teresa Chris, who, without even pausing to put down her amazing statement handbag, seized the manuscript with one hand, picked me up by the scruff of the neck with the other and propelled us expertly into the world of publishing. Then the doors of Ebury Press opened before me with a great blast of trumpets – I suddenly had an editor of my own, Gillian Green, who was more than happy to engage in lengthy discussions about the dos and don’ts of delivering a love letter or just how fast a girl could move from a first kiss to having clandestine sex in a cupboard. I’d found my people. And there is no sweeter feeling than that.

I’ve also been incredibly lucky with my improvised and fairly dishevelled focus group – the friends who took the time to read the book before it was published, and for some of them in manuscript form and before the jelly had quite set, so to speak. The funny thing is that I really believed, when I decided to write fiction, that I was taking myself out of the equation. As it turns out, it doesn’t really work like that, because thanks to my readers’ feedback about the book I also learned a couple of things about myself.

The first wave of reactions went something like: ‘Hey Muriel, there’s a lot about fashion in this! I was really surprised! I had no idea you knew about this stuff!’ To which my response was a relaxed: ‘What? Excuse me? What do you think all this is, huh? That’s from Marni, for a start!’ Then, while I was digesting this and managing to rise above it brilliantly (still only just a little bit twitchy) came the second wave of feedback – from those brave souls who spoke in praise of my carefully honed and never ever gratuitous sex scenes. There was the odd bout of embarrassment, as when a very outspoken girlfriend told me in no uncertain terms about the electrifying effect of the aforesaid sex scenes upon her married life. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say apart from a prolonged ‘Um’ sound, but really, it was so sweet of her to share this with me.

And then it occurred to me that nobody had said: ‘Hey Muriel, there’s a lot of pretty saucy sex in this! I was really surprised!’ So that was it – the great lesson in self-knowledge. The author of Finding Monsieur Right is perceived on the one hand as tragically unfashionable, but also, on the plus side (I guess…) as a blatantly obvious mouth-breathing pervert. I can cope with that for the sake of literature.

Muriel Zagha, Author of Finding Monsieur Right

Visit Muriel’s blog
Read a sample

Every February the spectacularly clever, scrupulously discerning and altogether saintly readers of Mojo magazine vote for their favourite “things” of the past year. This year they have decided that the best band of 2009 was Animal Collective, that the best reissue was The Beatles’ masters and that the best book was Mozipedia - The Encyclopedia of Morrissey and The Smiths. As the author of the latter I am so crippled with surprise that, three days after being told the news, I feel I’ve no gob left to smack.

It is great comfort to somebody who originally feared the idea of an encyclopedia on Morrissey was one step too far through the gate of the asylum. When I approached Ebury with the idea some years ago I was fully prepared to be manhandled off the premises in moral disgust, possibly via the laundry chute bound, chloroformed and gagged in a Hessian sack. That they eagerly agreed to publish it told me either my lunacy was contagious or that Mozipedia was, truly, a tome worth tackling.

Some pop singers are stars. Morrissey is a whole cosmos. A universe of songs crackling with the saddest, funniest, most romantic, most perceptive lyrics on the state of humankind ever to be sung. A galaxy of influences, from pop music, film, literature and occasionally the football pitch. And a solar system of world-weary insight: “I’d cry if I had to eat a curry.”; “I’d have a jam jar, not a gravestone.”; “I can’t even be natural when I’m lying in the bath.” Mozipedia was my humble attempt to plot the vast heavens of Morrissey and The Smiths as far as my eyes could stretch, allowing readers to flick through and form their own constellation. If we align Eric Cantona (an obsession in 1995), ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ (his 2004 battering-ram back into the UK Top Ten) and Black Box’s ‘Ride On Time’ (a guiltless pleasure in 1989) maybe we’ll have found his equivalent Orion’s Belt. Or maybe not..

The fact that the handsome and sagely readers of Mojo have voted Mozipedia their book of the year is polite warning to non-believers that there are enough still enthralled by that cosmos. 2009 itself was a nerve-shredding experience for most Morrissey “apostles” (he’s not a fan of the word “fan”: see Mozipedia page 124). Collapsegate in Swindon. Then Bottlegate in Liverpool. Not forgetting “F*** yourself and love me outside”-gate in Hamburg. But his insuperable spirit prevailed. It was there in every breath of his ninth studio album, Years Of Refusal, and in every utterance of his final “appearance” of 2009 as Kirsty Young’s guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “Going to bed is the highlight of everybody’s day,” he told Young. “We all love to go to sleep. It’s the brother of death.”

And so the discombobulating bliss of Morrissey’s universe expands evermore. I hope Mozipedia has helped in some way to navigate around it. To all its readers, Mojo poll voters especially, I wish the sweetest of dreams with the brother of death.

Simon Goddard

Last week our wonderful I Never Knew That… series sold its half millionth copy. Championed by Sarah Kennedy on her BBC Radio 2 show, the series began in April 2005 with the publication of I Never Knew That About England. It has expanded to eight titles with companion books on Scotland, Wales, Ireland and London, as well as the English, Irish and Scottish and, most recently, I Never Knew That About Britain: The Quiz Book.

Researched and compiled by Christopher Winn, each book is beautifully illustrated with line drawings by his wife, Mai Osawa. A professional quiz-setter, the idea for the I Never Knew That… series emerged when Christopher was travelling around the country looking at country house venues to host a play he was working on, Ancestral Voices. Christopher’s first car was a Morris Minor which frequently overheated, and any journey had to be on country roads so that he could stop from time to time to let the car cool down, giving him plenty of opportunity to investigate the fascinating stories of towns and villages along the way. For instance, I bet You Never Knew That…

• British stamps are the only ones in the world not to include the country of origin
• The traffic cone was first produced in Edinburgh
• Llanwrytd Wells, home to the World Bog Snorkelling Championships, is also the smallest town in Britain, with a population of just 700
• Lincoln Cathedral was the first building in the world to be constructed taller than the Great Pyramid

To celebrate this landmark sale, we have 5 copies of I Never Knew That About England and I Never Knew That About Britain: The Quiz Book to give away. Just answer this question, taken from one of Christopher’s books, in the comments:

- Apart from the City of London, what is the smallest city in England?

Caroline - Deputy Publicity Director