With News of the World by Paulette Jiles firmly on my TBR and a film of the book starring Tom Hanks recently released globally (the trailer for which you can view here), what better way to celebrate by giving one lucky UK reader a chance to win a paperback copy of News of the World? Thanks to Serena Stent at Harper 360, I am able to do just that. You’ll find details of how to enter below.

News of the World is published by Harper Collins and is available for purchase through these links.

News of the World

In this National Book Award finalist set in the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust

It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.

In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.

Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.” Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forging a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.

Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember–strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become–in the eyes of the law–a kidnapper himself. Exquisitely rendered and morally complex, News of the World is a brilliant work of historical fiction that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

Giveaway

For your chance to win a paperback copy of News of the World by Paulette Jiles click here. UK only. Giveaway closes at UK Midnight Wednesday 10th February 2021. The book will be sent directly from the publisher. Your details will not be retained by Linda’s Book Bag.

About Paulette Jiles

Paulette Jiles was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks. A critically acclaimed poet, she is a past winner of the Canadian Governor General Award, Canada’s highest literary honour. She lives with her husband in San Antonio, Texas. She has written several novels of which Enemy Women is the most recent.

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I’m very grateful to publicist Grace Pilkington for putting me in touch with A.C.B Wilson so that Tony is staying in with me to chat about his brand new book. I have a feeling it’s going to be an unusual read.

Staying in with Tony Wilson

Welcome to Linda’s Book Bag Tony. Thank you for agreeing to stay in with me. Tell me, which of your books have you brought along to share this evening and why have you chosen it? 

I’ve chosen The Wheels of Society: Its Assembly, Performance and Emotion.

Why? It’s an idea which may help us to stop polluting and warming up the earth, and destroying wild-life habitats. Of course these are huge questions. The only way forward I suggest, has to be to go right back to first principles; to how human society actually does work. These principles are the subject of my book.

And I understand today is publication day Tony so congratulations. What can we expect from an evening in with The Wheels of Society: Its Assembly, Performance and Emotion?

It’s full of stuff which we already know about ourselves but which has never been put together in this way. So even if it’s excitingly controversial at times it uses arguments which are already familiar. My assembly and performance thinking is entirely original.

Oh. Tell me more.

Here it is in brief: Assembly and performance thinking starts by making a clear distinction between the way we selfish individuals are able to assemble into a cooperating group, and the systems by which these groups perform. It then focuses on this performance in all animal cooperation; good examples include honey-bees and wolves. This performance conforms to a universal ‘rule of three’. Briefly; ‘plan it as a group, do it as a group, review it as a group, and repeat’. Performance carries out the purpose for which the group was assembled in the first place.

I have a feeling this concept might be more important now than ever Tony.

This way of thinking works for all social creatures, from ants to humans. It even applies to certain cooperating microbes; thus enhancing its scientific credentials. It may be new but actually it is quite simple. It is essentially an extension of Darwin’s natural selection.

The accepted thinking has always been that humans are in a superior category. Hubris is a brain-fogging disease of the corporate mind. Stretching way back into pre-history; our self-importance has been built up into a colossal mound of fairy-stories and intellectual detritus. The argument here is that hubris is what has prevented us from recognising the relatively simple mechanisms of all animal social behaviour; not just our own; thoughtless, destructive and dangerous as it so often is.

Oh yes! We humans do have that arrogance that rarely considers our real impact on the world. Hopefully that view is changing slightly.

Professional sociologists will notice the claim I am making here; that thinking in terms of assembly and performance provides a truly scientific approach to the workings of society. This is the elusive holy grail they have been searching for ever since 1650 when Isaac Newton used gravity to explain the workings of the solar system. If human society can at last be brought under the scientific microscope we might be able to avoid the frightening consequences of our corporate greed.

I hope you’re right Tony.

So Linda, while this book isn’t sexy or full of laughs it is jam-packed full of writing to enthral the thoughtful reader.

The Wheels of Society: Its Assembly, Performance and Emotion sounds absolutely fascinating.

What else have you brought along and why have you brought it?

Well, it says on the cover of the book that I “paint, write and make beer”. My excellent editor David Elliott wrote those words but it’s true, and I find painting a terrific way to blast away writers‘ block.

So I’ve brought along three fresh watercolours, I did them in the last fortnight. The point here is to keep another activity on the go to ward off the ghastly block.

Those are wonderful Tony. I love the fluidity of style you employ. 

And there’s something more here which I can’t quote put my finger on, and don’t actually want to. It’s about the very tip of the brush on canvas, the very point of the nib on paper, and the Keyboard finger-tip touch. It’s what happens the moment of the act. There are poetic treasures inside us all but often they can only be released at the tip and moment of the act. When stuck I often say to myself; “Just get on with it Anthony; you never know what’s in there till you let it out.”

What a brilliant philosophy.

I’ve also brought along today’s photo of my brewing cupboard because though I only brew twice a year I just happen to be halfway through this brew; this very day.

Next time you’ll have to bring some of the product with you too! Thanks so much for staying in with me today, Tony, to tell me about The Wheels of Society: Its Assembly, Performance and Emotion. I’ve really enjoyed hearing about it.

The Wheels of Society: Its Assembly, Performance and Emotion

Written with verve and a mordant wit, The Wheels of Society is a vivid, cogent, ground-breaking proposal for us to re-think ourselves in order to steer civilisation back to safety.

As a species we seem to cling on to the power and influence of ‘the old normal’. Forests and valleys are decimated so that businessmen can be in Manchester 30 minutes faster; thousands of airline seats are sold for the price of a free-range chicken so that hundreds of short-haul planes can devastate the atmosphere and enable drunken escapades in Barcelona rather than Soho; the rich get even richer and the poor get Covid 19. Bankers conspire in the fraudulent abuse of people’s savings, yet can keep their loot, saved by governments supposed to protect their citizens but who fail to hold a single perpetrator to account.

Is this how we are supposed to be?

The biology of society becomes visible when hubris is side-stepped. First, natural selfishness must be overcome before individuals can assemble altruistically into a working group – a rather wonderful achievement. Our cooperating groups, which make up the hierarchy of society, are living things in their own right. Then, once assembled, the group must perform trial-and-error cycles to do life’s vital functions. Wilson’s ‘assembly-and-performance thinking’ combines these two mechanisms into a simple scientific theory of society which applies, with variations, to all cooperating creatures – not just to humans.

The Wheels of Society: Its Assembly, Performance and Emotion is published today, 4th February 2021, by Quartet Books and is available for purchase here. and directly from the publisher here.

About Tony Wilson

Tony Wilson was born in Dublin in 1931 and studied economics at Trinity College before qualifying as a chartered accountant. After six years in Paris with Price Waterhouse he went to England working as financial controller in the Avon Rubber Company, GKN, and British Oxygen.

Tony lives near Bath where he paints, writes and makes beer. He has had five one-man exhibitions and has shown in the RA Summer Exhibition.

My grateful thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me to participate in this blog tour for Gold Light Shining by Bebe Ashley. I’m delighted to share my review today.

Gold Light Shining is published by Banshee and is available for purchase here.

Gold Light Shining

Within five minutes, I knew
I loved the stranger in my head.

In her debut collection of poetry, Bebe Ashley spins gold from the detritus of the internet. A landscape often depicted as a wasteland is illuminated in poems that explore celebrity, obsession, sexuality, coming of age, and that charismatic enigma, Harry Styles.

Inspired by sources as diverse as Styles’s track listings, Scandi webseries Skam, and One Direction newsletters, Ashley spins us across continents on a tour of the surreal highs and absurd lows of celebrity culture. These are poems of youth and yearning, yet they’re suffused with the hard-won wisdom that the communities we build can be as meaningful as the families we’re born into.

Perceptive, witty, and exuberant, Gold Light Shining introduces an essential new voice; one that captures how pop culture’s Technicolor joy disrupts our greyscale world.

My Review of Gold Light Shining

A collection of poems exploring modern life and culture.

I have to be completely honest and say that, had I read the blurb before reading Gold Light Shining, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to investigate this collection. I have no interest in celebrity culture and am barely aware of Harry Styles’ existence so that I’d actively have turned away from reading these poems. And that would have been a mistake. In Gold Light Shining Bebe Ashley has illuminated a world I knew little about and, vicariously, has introduced me to writing I found fascinating and to music I hadn’t previously heard but now enjoy!

There’s considerable complexity in this collection. Bebe Ashley takes her reader on a journey through time and place so that I actually found much that resonated with me. References to popular culture and fashion from my past evoked long forgotten memories so that reading these poems reignited my own past for me. There’s both a visual and auditory quality to the writing and I really enjoyed the variety of physical structure on the page, the use of white space for emphasis, the compound words of swirling colour and the references to more prosaic aspects like food, that somehow made the poems simultaneously mysterious and completely knowable. At times it felt as if I were reading through a kind of prism so that I could bring my own meanings to the writing as much as those meanings Bebe Ashley may have intended. I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of my reading.

The themes Bebe Ashley explores in Gold Light Shining give much for the reader to ponder. From art to drugs culture, sexuality to love, there are many layers to uncover in this slim volume. With both first and third person voices singing across the pages I think there is something for any reader to identify with too. I especially enjoyed ‘the boy who’ poems in the Fanfic section because there’s an underlying wistfulness that I found quite emotional.

From wondering what I’d let myself in for in reading Bebe Ashley’s Gold Light Shining and thinking I may have chosen a text that wouldn’t suit me at all, I discovered an eclectic mix of styles (and Harry Styles), images, themes and references that I found extremely interesting and very much enjoyed reading.

About Bebe Ashley

Bebe Ashley lives in Belfast. She is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Her work can be found in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Jukebox and The Tangerine.

When procrastinating from her PhD, she takes British Sign Language and Braille classes and writes pop culture articles for United by Pop, specialising in Harry Styles.

There’s more information on Bebe’s website and you can follow her on Twitter @bebeashley95.

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Lovely Carol Wyer is becoming a regular feature here on Linda’s Book Bag! Today I am delighted to be part of the launch celebrations for her latest book An Eye For An Eye and I would like to thank Emma at Damppebbles Blog Tours for inviting me to participate

More recently I shared my review of Carol’s Somebody’s Daughter here.  I reviewed her What Happens in France here, and previously we celebrated the publication of Carol’s The Missing Girls in a post you can read here. I also interviewed Carol about her writing here to mark the publication of Little Girl Lost.

Published by Thomas and Mercer, yesterday, 1st February 2021, An Eye For An Eye is available for purchase here.

An Eye For An Eye

A killer running rings around the police. A detective spiralling out of control.

DI Kate Young is on leave. She’s the force’s best detective, but her bosses know she’s under pressure, on medication and overcoming trauma. So after her bad judgement call leads to a narrowly averted public disaster, they’re sure all she needs is a rest.

But when Staffordshire Police summon her back to work on a murder case, it’s a harder, more suspicious Kate Young who returns. With a new ruthlessness, she sets about tracking down a clinical, calculating serial killer who is torturing victims and leaving clues to taunt the police. Spurred on by her reporter husband, Young begins to suspect that the murderer might be closer than she ever imagined.

As she works to uncover the truth, Young unravels a network of secrets and lies, with even those closest to her having something to hide. But with her own competence—and her grip on reality—called into question, can she unmask the killer before they strike again?

My Review of An Eye For An Eye

Kate’s on enforced leave but there’s a new case that needs her.

Opening in dramatic fashion, An Eye For An Eye held my attention from the first page to the last. Although this is a new series and the author needs to provide background information about her new lead character DI Kate Young, I thought Carol Wyer achieved a perfect balance between exposition and narrative pace. I loved the psychological aspects of Kate’s character set against the police procedures in catching the killer because it gave me an insight into humanity as well as entertained me. Curiously, having read and enjoyed other Carol Wyer books, I felt there was an added polish to the writing here, especially through her carefully crafted descriptions that provided an even more arresting read. It somehow felt as if the author has honed her craft to bring an added dimension to her settings that I really enjoyed.

The plot is a corker and the more I read the more engrossed I became, thoroughly enjoying trying to unravel the case alongside Kate. As An Eye For An Eye reached its denouement I found my pulse racing. Whilst there is sufficient and compelling detail, there isn’t the gratuitous violence of some crime fiction so that I found the events all the more believable and engrossing. I loved the way the ending sets up future books featuring DI Kate Young whilst bringing this story to a satisfying conclusion.

Having really enjoyed the story, I was left thinking continuously about Kate. She’s a brilliantly depicted, well-rounded character. Her mental and physical health, her personal future, her career and her potential developments have me intrigued so that I feel I have begun to know her but want to find out more. Reading about Kate in An Eye For An Eye felt like meeting a new person who could become a friend and left me definitely wanting to meet her again. I did have one concern about the characterisation. Once the killer had been revealed, I found myself empathising with them so that Carol Wyer managed to make me think about myself as a person as well as the people in her story in a way I found rather unnerving. I think it takes real skill to make a reader contemplate themselves in the way Carol Wyer does here.

Indeed, several aspects of An Eye For An Eye are rather unsettling and this is what makes it such a compelling police procedural. Several forms of manipulation, identity, loyalty, grief and professionalism are just some of the themes that add depth to the read. Certainly the book can be read for sheer entertainment which it provides excellently, but it’s the undercurrents that I particularly enjoyed too.

I thought An Eye For An Eye was a super start to a new series and I really recommend it.

About Carol Wyer

USA Today bestselling author and winner of The People’s Book Prize Award, Carol Wyer writes feel-good comedies and gripping crime fiction.

A move from humour to the ‘dark side’ in 2017, saw the introduction of popular DI Robyn Carter in Little Girl Lost and demonstrated that stand-up comedian Carol had found her true niche.

To date, her crime novels have sold over 750,000 copies and been translated for various overseas markets.

Carol has been interviewed on numerous radio shows discussing ”Irritable Male Syndrome’ and ‘Ageing Disgracefully’ and on BBC Breakfast television. She has had articles published in national magazines ‘Woman’s Weekly’, featured in ‘Take A Break’, ‘Choice’, ‘Yours’ and ‘Woman’s Own’ magazines and the Huffington Post.

She currently lives on a windy hill in rural Staffordshire with her husband Mr Grumpy… who is very, very grumpy.

When she is not plotting devious murders, she can be found performing her comedy routine, Smile While You Still Have Teeth.

All of Carol’s books are here. You can follow Carol on Twitter @carolewyer, visit her website and find her on Facebook and Instagram.

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My enormous thanks to Kelly Florentia for sending me a copy of her latest psychological thriller, Mine, in return for an honest review. I’m delighted to share my review today.

Published by Bloodhound today, 1st February 2021, Mine is available for purchase here.

Mine

When you’ve been destroyed, who can you trust?

When loner Lucy Harper, accepts a Facebook friend’s request from Jasmine, an old school friend, the last thing she expects is for Jasmine to run off with her husband, Andrew.

Now, newly divorced, Lucy lives in the flat she still part-owns with Andrew. After a drunken night out, she wakes up with Teddy Fallon. But this is the least of her worries.

The night before a text came through claiming someone knows her secret.

But what is Lucy hiding?

Before Lucy has time to process everything, her ex drops a bombshell – fiancé Jasmine is pregnant, and he wants his share of the money from the flat.

Then the blackmail begins.

Who is after Lucy and why?

Love isn’t always innocent, and Lucy is about to learn a lesson the hard way.

My Review of Mine

Lucy’s life is about to take a turn for the worse!

With a dramatic and threatening opening, and a hugely surprising epilogue, Mine is a compelling thriller that kept me hooked throughout. Part of the appeal comes through the fact that the plot often hinges on fairly ordinary actions, such as too much to drink or a phone call or text, which means the narrative is all the more believable, and all the more tense, for the realisation it could possibly happen to any of us. The title, Mine, is so apt because it relates to many different aspects of the story, from physical items to over possessive relationships, with characters claiming or rejecting people and things as the narrative progresses, making for real interest.

Settings are reduced, with much of the action happening in Lucy’s flat so that there’s a tense atmosphere of claustrophobia underpinning the story and making it even more gripping. With themes of identity, trust, friendship, revenge, family and betrayal there’s a menace behind the plot that I thought gave added layers of interest too so that I was intrigued throughout. Although I had my suspicions, I had no idea how Mine would end and whilst I guessed some aspects, I was treated to some surprises too so that Mine kept my attention completely.

Lucy’s first person narrative is clear and strong and I have to admit that I didn’t much like her. She’s unreliable as a friend, not entirely trustworthy, rash in her behaviour, frequently far too gullible and often drunk. Consequently, I found it fascinating that Kelly Florentia made me care about what happened to Lucy and I was totally invested in her success. Whether she achieves it, I can’t say for fear of spoiling the story. I didn’t feel I got to know the other characters as deeply as Lucy and this is by no means a criticism. One of the key drivers of Mine is the fact that we don’t ever really know others completely and we don’t always know their ulterior motives. It’s an intriguing aspect of the story. I loved trying to work out who could be trusted and who was a danger.

I found Mine thoroughly enjoyable and very entertaining. It’s left me wanting to read more of Kelly Florentia’s work and wondering I haven’t done so sooner.

About Kelly Florentia

Kelly Florentia was born and bred in north London, where she continues to live with her husband Joe, and where her novels The Magic Touch, No Way Back, Her Secret and her latest, a psychological thriller, Mine, which publishes in February 2021 by Bloodhound Books, are set.

Kelly has always loved writing and was a bit of a poet when she was younger. Before penning her debut, she wrote short stories for women’s magazines – To Tell a Tale or Two is a collection of her short tales. In January 2017, her keen interest in health and fitness led to the release of Smooth Operator – a collection of twenty of her favourite smoothie recipes.

As well as writing, Kelly enjoys reading, running, drinking coffee, gyming, watching TV dramas, and spending way too much time on social media.

For more information, follow Kelly on Twitter @kellyflorentia, visit her website or find her on Facebook and Instagram.