Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The classic work on how to achieve happiness, which presents the principles that have helped real people transform boring and meaningless lives into ones full of enjoyment.
Sue - Commissioning Editor
Earlier this week, the Random House AuthorsPlace website hosted a virtual chat between Tim Clare, author of We Can’t All be Astronauts and the Epson Library Reading Group. We have pulled out a few of the questions and answers below, but for the full Q&A, visit the AuthorsPlace website.
Epsom Library Reading Group: What was the ‘light bulb’ moment when you decided to leave the fantasy writing world, and write about your adventures in publishing? Was it the comments your mates made?
Tim Clare: I’d very tentatively started to do bits and pieces on stage - stand-up poetry, mostly - mainly because I was able to write something in the day then try it out that night. Writing a novel can be a pretty lonely business - you can work on it for literally years and still have nothing ready to show other people. By contrast, when you write for performance you can get a payoff very quickly.
Obviously fantasy doesn’t translate particularly well to performance poetry! And I found that, because it was me talking on stage, I was ending up making more and more stuff first-person. So I suppose there was a transition that I wasn’t aware of, because I was delivering it all live. Then one day I sat down and started writing it as prose, as if I was just chatting to a crowd of strangers. Suddenly, what had seemed immensely personal and cringeworthy no longer felt that way, because I was used to basically being very open on stage!
ELRG: Your family seem amazing - very supportive - (accept maybe when your Dad wanted to join in your suicide pact!!) your Pa particularly seemed to have an eventful life, - were his three books published? You mention in your book that he said he felt he had to write it - the publishing wasn’t important.
TC: None of his books were published, no. He sent them out to various publishers but I think, like many people in his position, he didn’t really have much of an idea of who to send them to or how to present his work. I think his book of short philosophical essays aimed at sixth formers, Thought Starters, was the one he particularly would have liked to have seen in print. Which seems odd to me… I always expected it would be his memoir about getting over cancer and losing his voice, No Island All My Own, which seems much more personal. But I guess the philosophy was what he felt he wanted to share the most. That love of learning.
I think actually he was a bit more disappointed than he let on that he never got published - I know it would have meant a lot to him.
I’m glad you think my family are amazing. I think so too. They’re lovely people and I’m exceedingly jammy to have them!
ELRG: Did you had a launch party? Did you feel differently about launch parties after you were in print. (thinking about how you dreaded your friends launch parties)
TC: My London launch party [hosted by the Book Club Boutique] was one of the most wonderfully self-indulgent nights of my life. Joe, Ross and Steve Aylett all came and did readings, my parents were there, old school friends I hadn’t seen for years, people who appear in the book… We all chatted and had drinks and I felt like the blushing bride. It was GREAT and I felt super super grateful! (although I was pretty hungover the next morning)
So yes, it did make me feel rather different about launches!
ELRG: If you had to “review”/promote your book in not 200 words, but 140 characters, what would your message be? You may know what I’m aiming at…
TC: Buy ‘We Can’t All Be Astronauts‘ - the book critics are already calling ‘whining’, ‘navel-gazing’ and ’self-indulgent’. Please.
Click here to find out how you can become involved in future author chats.
Poker Face by Judi James
Leading body language expert Judi James shows you how to win at poker and recognise your opponent’s bluffs.
Julia - Editor
It took me a long time to write my memoir – something like 70 years in fact – and I am only just beginning to realise why. Since the appearance of Don’t Forget to Write in the shops three weeks ago I’ve been hearing from readers who, like me, gave little thought over the years to their wartime experiences as schoolchildren sent from their homes to safety in the English countryside. Several tell me they have kept them hidden from memory until now, and that reading my story has brought it all back. One long-time friend called to say that, as he read the book, it was as if the flood gates opened to release his own story into his consciousness. In all the years I’ve known him here in Canada, I had no inkling that he too had been evacuated with his school, or even that he was in England during the war.
For me, the dam burst some 20 years ago when a small advertisement in a Toronto newspaper invited World War II evacuees to send their stories for possible inclusion in a book being compiled by a former Londoner now living in this city. Later he told me he had advertised worldwide, expecting only a small response from Canada. Instead, replies by the sack-load arrived at his office from various parts of the country. My own submission ran to 20 pages, after I dropped what I was doing to pound my typewriter like a mad woman, long-forgotten memories shooting onto the paper.
It wasn’t that I forgot the war entirely. For several years I kept in touch with two of my foster parents, but always wrote of the present and future rather than the past. When I settled in a new country, married and started a family, I gave little if any thought to that part of my past. Later, I was able to meet with some of my sisters regularly and we talked of the war but our conversations were always kept light. We laughed a lot, about Mum and her Spam dinners – things like Vi’s fake wedding cake, and undies made from parachute silk, and the cockerel who sealed his fate by pecking the hand that fed him. When talk turned to our evacuation, Iris always made it into a joke. Neither of us brought up the deep humiliation we felt when being among the last to be chosen by prospective parents. Or the scandal that had us so hastily removed from our first billet. And nobody learned of the heartaches I endured when I was sent further north. Often my sisters told me I should put it all into a book, and I began taking notes. Then I would pack my bag and leave for a travel assignment to some far off land where I filled my head with exotic new thoughts.
Finally, I could put it off no more. The resultant book proved both painful and exhilarating to write. I laughed, I cried, I remembered happenings lost to me for half a century, and all the time I felt my sisters urging me on. My one remaining sister loves it. Nieces and nephews are buying copies for their children as permanent reminders of their heritage. One ten year old is taking it to school come September, as part of her project on the war. Another will be introducing it to her friends and fellow pupils at Westcliff High School. Still, the unexpected bonus for me are letters from readers who say they are grateful that my story has brought their own wartime memories under the light. As time goes by I hope there will be more such letters, because it is a very healing experience.
Pam Hobbs, author of Don’t Forget to Write
Hands-On Healing For Pets: The Animal Lover’s Essential Guide To Using Healing Energy by Margrit Coates
The essential guide for animal lovers who want to bond with their pet at a deep level, written by one of our leading animal communicators - a must for any open-minded pet owner!
Sue - Commissioning Editor
Aside from all the lettuce, rocket and chard that we have been cutting to eat in our salads over the past few months, BBC Books editor Caroline went out to the garden this morning and did a bit of a harvest, with chilies, baby courgettes, runner beans and a few ripe tomatoes!
I have taken some beans and a chili for my dinner tonight, and there was some mention of people stuffing the courgette flowers with cheese and deep frying them. YUM! I guess when you publish some of the best gardening and cookery books on the market, some of it is bound to rub off…
Katie - Digital Marketing Executive
A refreshing new approach to dating, for women who want a new way of finding a soul mate. I just love this book: it’s something fresh and different, but also extremely practical and full of common sense – not at all patronising like so many other dating books.
Julia - Vermilion editor
I wonder what Jackie Collins does on the morning that her books are published? Maybe a swim in her Olympic sized swimming pool? Maybe she has a wander around her mansion – that I’m imagining looks like Caesar’s Palace, all gold leaf and marble pillars - in some Palazzo pants and some Gucci shades. She probably sips on some orange juice that one of her many serfs have squeezed for her congratulating herself on another year another book. I can guarantee one thing; she isn’t sitting on her settee at five in the morning having spent the night barfing up because she has a cross between food poisoning and morning sickness. (Have I invented a curious new illness? I shall hereby call it Food Sickness. Or no…wait, Morning Poisoning.) Which is what I’m doing.
Today, August 6th, is the launch of my new book Star Struck and very excited I’ll be too when I finally get dressed and return to a better shade of grey. I’ve already seen it in a book shop, while coming through Dublin Airport with my sister on Sunday it was there in the New Titles section, bold as brass. My sister got very excited and demanded that I have a picture taken next to it - probably the sort of business that Joan and Jackie get up to all the time – and so I duly stood next to my book pointing at it like a half wit. Then my sister went and bought a copy while enthusing to a less than impressed sales girl. Sales girl: Can I have your boarding card please. Sister: Yes. (excited) My sister wrote this. The sales girl takes a look at me noting that I am neither Jackie Collins or Marian Keyes and smiles without her eyes getting involved. Sales girl: six ninety nine please. My sister takes the book and mutters something about the girl being ignorant and I mop my brow thinking phew, good job she didn’t announce it to the shop, I might have experienced a JK Rowling type book signing stampede if everyone else had matched the woman behind the counter’s enthusiasm.
It is such a strange feeling seeing your book out in the world for the first time. Star Struck is my third novel but my first to be published in the UK (the others were published in Ireland) and I know that I will be very excited seeing it in a bookshop here in Manchester. I will no doubt hover around watching to see if anyone buys it, I might even take it from the shelves and laugh heartily saying “Well this book that’s about a girl from Manchester and her varied successes in an X Factor type competition and her dysfunctional family is a great read. I can’t recommend it enough!” Until I get thrown out of Smiths.
So with that in mind I really must get myself changed into something that will cheer me up and head into town at the first available opportunity. I might even take a leaf out of Jackie’s book and dress as if any moment I might be whisked off on a yacht. Not literally take a leaf out of her book obviously; getting thrown out of Smiths once on the day your book comes out is quite enough for anyone. So if you see some dodgy pregnant bird in Palazzo pants and big shades looking pallid and laughing heartily at a book with a glitzy blue cover in a book shop in Manchester today it’s probably me.
Anne-Marie O’Connor, author of Star Struck
Visit Anne-Marie’s website
Is there anything better than a really chunky book full of bitches, bonking and backstabbing? Crammed with beauties, baubles and billionaires? No, there is not. And anyone who makes a case for well-behaved literary classics in the height of summer is not the kind of person I want to hang out with poolside on my holidays. For make no mistake, the blockbuster is best consumed whilst high on a cocktail of cocktails, a bucket of sunscreen and the kind of intense sunshine that requires not only Victoria Beckham-sized shades, but also a gigantic hat that enables you to channel 70s-era Joan Collins. Preferably your drinks will be brought to you by a buffed and well-oiled local youth with a glint in his eye so that you can pretend that you’re one of the book’s fabulous heroines, but generally, as long as the drink has some classy umbrellas in it and plenty of ice, that’s enough for me.Silk delivers on all fronts – at 480 pages, it’s the blockiest of blockbusters. With three fantastic leading ladies (an up-and-coming fashion designer; her ball-busting barrister mother, who specialises in celebrity divorces, and the mistress of a European mogul) there is high drama and there are low morals; there is manipulation and blackmail, triumph and tragedy; unrequited love and very-much-requited lust. Rupert James has created a world that you can immerse yourself in totally, with bags of insider gossip (fun times are to be had working out who the various fashionistas might be based on…), a ludicrously gripping plot and more highs and lows than the rollercoasters at Alton Towers.
When the first third of the book came in, most of Ebury devoured it instantly and then beat down the editor’s door demanding more. ‘Rupert hasn’t written it yet!’ she protested, barricading herself against the onslaught with a wall of inferior manuscripts. ‘Tell him to type faster!’ we screeched. Luckily Rupert obliged and his editor was left alone as we greedily devoured the rest of the book. If you want to forget the recession, ignore the torrential rain of yet another British summer on your ‘staycation’ and indulge in diamond-encrusted fabulousness, then grab yourself a copy of Silk and tell your friends not to expect a word out of you for the next couple of days. More flamboyant than Vivienne Westwood’s hair; sexier than a roomful of Cavalli-clad models and more guiltily moreish than a shopful of Krispy Kremes, Silk is the one accessory you really must have this summer.
‘Taking on the gossipy tone of the very best Jilly Cooper novels and giving it a modern twist, this is a 21st century bonkbuster with attitude… If you secretly wish Dynasty had never ended and enjoy reading Lace whenever you take a sick day, this is the book for you. Pass the cocktail shaker…’ Elle
Alex - Marketing Manager
India’s Unending Journey by Mark Tully
One of the world’s leading writers and broadcasters on India takes us on a thought-provoking journey through this spectacular country, while considering his own evolving relationship to it.
Sue -Commissioning Editor
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