Jurassic London

Latest newsletter harps on about crockery.

A review of A People's Future of the United States, over at Tor.com.

And the publicity tour for The Outcast Hours has a new, virtual, stop, as Mahvesh and I will be doing a late night AMA on reddit, 22nd February.

Recent newsletters: on loneliness and other wicked problems and The Outcast Hours and universal/personal relevance.

Not much else, although worth noting that the rather delicious The Djinn Falls in Love is still lurking about at 99¢.

Ah, and the companion website for The Best of British Fantasy is up and running. Very skeletal, but it'll get there.

The Outcast Hours

Two of 'em:

Thursday, 21st February at the Phoenix Artist Club:

With Marina Warner, M. Suddain, Lavie Tidhar, Louis Greenberg and Will Hill. £10 ticket, which includes a nicely discounted copy of the book!

Details here

Thursday, 28th February at Brick Lane Books:

Featuring Frances Hardinge, Will Hill, Karen Onojaife and Maha Khan Phillips. £5 tickets, redeemable against the price of the books.

Details here

I'll be playing host at both - come by for a chat, a drink, and some signed copies!

Ending 2018/starting 2019 on a productive note, with a rant about resolutions and a long list of good books.

(The latter was inspired by an even better list of reading recommendations from Kirsty Logan.) 

But, here we go...

Crime and Thriller

• *Give Me Your Hand (Megan Abbott)
• Red Harvest and The Glass Key (Dashiell Hammett)
• East of Hounslow (Khurrum Rahman)
• *Something in the Water (Catherine Steadman)
• All Her Father's Guns (James Warner)

SF and Fantasy

• Age of Assassins (RJ Barker)
• The Drowning City (Amanda Downum)
• The Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart)
• *Paris Adrift (EJ Swift)
• *The Stars Now Unclaimed (Drew Williams)

Romance

• Miss Wonderful (Loretta Chase)
• *A Princess in Theory (Alyssa Cole)
• A Lady's Code of Misconduct (Meredith Duran)
• The Masqueraders and The Reluctant Widow and all the other Heyers (Georgette Heyer)
• Once Upon a Marquess (Courtney Milan)

Young Adult

• Overheard in a Tower Block (Joseph Coelho)
• *Slay (Kim Curran) (BOY BAND VS DEMONS)
• The Way You Make Me Feel (Maurene Goo)
• Ghost (Jason Reynolds)
• This Lullaby (Sarah Dessen)

Gold Medal (that's a publisher, not a genre, but they're my comfort reading and deserve the recognition - plus, my rules!)

• The Turrett Room (Charlotte Armstrong)
• The Expendables (Richard Avery)
• Castle Ugly (Mary Ellin Barrett)
• Meet Morocco Jones (Jack Baynes)
• The Magnolia Murder (Wyatt Bell)
• The Hideaway (Nikki Content)
• Smoky Valley (Donald Hamilton)
• Guns Along the Brazos (Day Keene)
• Sinner Take All (Wade Miller)
• Steal Big (Lionel White)

Genre categories are self-defeating and diminishing and, more importantly, I don't know how to categorise these

• "Dr Frankenstein" (Selma Dimitrijevic)
• *There's a Witch in the Word Machine (Jenni Fagan)
• The Talisman Ring (Georgette Heyer)
• *And the Ocean Was Our Sky (Patrick Ness / Rovina Cai)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) 

• Made in Bradford (M.Y. Alam)
• Hold Everything Dear (John Berger)
• Community (Peter Bloch)
• The Nasty Bits (Anthony Bourdain)
• The Age of Jihad (Patrick Cockburn)
• Poverty Safari (Darren McGarvey)
• State of Insecurity (Isabell Lorey)
• The Mosaic of Islam (Suleiman Mourad)
• Bloody Nasty People (Daniel Trilling)

*: published in 2018

For more recommendations (and rants), subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter.

And for some recommendations for 2019, check out this massive list at Tor.com. I chimed in with a few.

A couple of pieces (somehow) -

Review of AfroSFv3, edited by Ivor Hartmann:

“Discovery” implies an element of challenge; a hint that these stories might be a bit too far out on the edge, or potentially unpalatable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A bit on Stormzy, publishing and the importance of evaluation metrics:

Hype alone isn't going to convince an entrenched industry that they need to change everything about their audience/marketing/recruitment/sales/retail approach. There will be a lot of people ready and willing to talk about how Merky 'fails', based on the traditional metrics. "I didn't see a single copy at Hay!"

And, for the hell of it - a new website for www.bestbritishfantasy.co.uk