ROAST BOOKS

ITS TIME!

For the release of our next summer publication.

Neo chick lit with a darker side, a vodka twist, recipe’s galore and a generous slice of post-Soviet living

_

“Made me laugh A LOT. It is terrific fun, the Companion guide a bonus and the illustrations are a delight. Amy Spurling writes beautifully and wittily: a rare gift. Many laugh-out-louds and aphoristic truths.”
-Valerie Grove, Times columnist and biographer

_

An Interview with Amy Spurling by Nik Perring, author of Not So Perfect

-

Kate Harrison Talks to Amy Spurling

-

Check out the interview on Vulpes Libres, which profiles Roastbooks HERE

Writer’s News take an interest in John Karter and his novella, ‘The Profit’ READ HERE

DJ Kirby’s take on Great Little Reads

BUY ROAST BOOKS ON THE BRILLIANT INDIEBOOKS SITE

Its fab news that Legend Press have responded to the need for a site like this! Check it out, its gorgeous and there’s a really interesting selection that changes monthly.

http://bookchase.blogspot.com/2009/09/selling-light.html

Peter Cooper is one of those rich young men who wake up every morning wondering what the world can do for him today. Self-centered to the degree that he truly believes he has been placed upon the Earth simply to enjoy himself, Cooper surrounds himself with people who acquiesce to his supposed superiority. That he will one day cross paths with George, the lighthouse keeper, and young research student, Briege, is unfortunate but not so surprising.

After all, when George decides to use the internet to sell his life, who is more likely to purchase it than someone like Peter Cooper? George, filled with personal despair, is ready to sell, and Peter, who will buy anything he thinks might amuse him, has the money to buy George’s life on a whim. And that is exactly what happens.

Meanwhile, Briege goes merrily along studying crabs and other assorted creatures offered up by the little seaside village. Briege, though, is no ordinary researcher. Rather, she comes to know the crabs she studies as individuals, even to drawing their personal portraits in her notebook, naming them, and recognizing them as individuals with personalities when she spots them again days later. Briege’s problem is that she relates better to the crabs than she does to people.

Effie Gray’s Selling Light offers a glimpse into the lives of people who are totally unprepared for what they find and feel when they stumble into each other. Gray often uses humor to make her point about the nature of modern relationships in a world in which so many find it impossible to form long term connections, but her message is both serious and sad.

Selling Light is another in the Roast Books series of Great Little Reads, books designed to be read in one or two sittings spread over a couple of hours. As usual, the back cover of the book contains its “List of Ingredients.” This time around those ingredients are: “Dilapidated Lighthouse, Obsessional Research Student, Identity Crisis.” Effie Gray brews up a complicated and entertaining little story from those ingredients.

It’s always a bit nerve racking waiting to hear the ‘bloggers verdict’ on a new title, so we must thank Evagation for being one of the first to comment on its imminent release…

Talking of blogs, Lizard has been reviewed on Nik’s blog Here, with an interview of author, Leonore Schick

Charles Lambert, author of Little Monsters: Bristling with intelligence and invention, often drily hilarious and occasionally chilling, this collection of interconnected stories is both a joy to read and the most appealing and effective primer of political thought I’ve come across for some time. AC Tillyer’s 26 possible worlds, arranged alphabetically from Archipelago to Zero Gravity Zone, insistently probe the meaning of power and its misuse, the rise of prejudice and authoritarianism, the role of capital, the lies we tell ourselves and each other in order to survive as societies – and they do so in an authoritative, highly readable fashion, with more insight and wit than many books ten times the size of this collection. Each small tale is both a parable and a perfectly realized world; taken together they turn into reflecting facets of a single world, that of Tillyer’s remarkable imagination, irreducible to mere allegory, a world that contains bog-people and multi-storey car parks without embarrassment. Echoes of writers as diverse as Swift and Tolkien, Borges and Magnus Mills, only reinforce the originality of Tillyer’s take on how we live – and fail to live – together. An impressive and thought-provoking collection by someone who deserves to be widely-read.

Many readers will be familiar with Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which is almost essential reading in order to understand this brilliant parody and satire on the financial worlds. Piers Black is the ultimate charismatic tycoon ‘revered by men and universally desired by women, a legend in his own Armani suit’, and has his own ruthless and calculating message to deliver to a packed audience of shareholders. He speaks in turn on a variety of topics, suggested by members of the audience such as profit, greed, mobile phones, work, adversity and even accountants, takeovers, clothes (you are what you wear), cars, sex and money. When it comes to love, the text is the greatest travesty of and contrast with Gibran: ‘Love brings powerless confusion to those whose purpose and direction was as unshakable as a mountain.’ Piers sees love as a monstrous web and maintains that the greatest love of all is self-love. Just as he reaches a peak of eloquent rhetoric, the voice of his father rings across the hall, asking him what has become of ‘the time to be kind and long-suffering and loving and generous’. This incident creates a crisis from which he makes a nearly full recover, reverting to his self-assured arrogance. This is a great book to take on holiday and will surely make you laugh out loud as someone asks enquiringly ‘speak to us of cars’ and Piers launches forth with soaring metaphors and high-flown but utterly cynical prose.

Full Review

London’s Roastbooks Ltd. was kind enough to send me three of their books last month for review consideration. At the time, I knew nothing about the company or its books but I was intrigued by the concept of a novella collection called “Great Little Reads.” According to the company’s Faye Dayan, “These are little books for the modern lifestyle, designed to be read in one or two sittings.”
That is exactly what I needed this weekend, something relatively short but so well-written that I could lose myself in it for an hour or two at a time, and I was lucky enough to throw The Cloverleaf Development into my luggage at the last second Friday afternoon before I left for a quick out-of-town trip.

The Cloverleaf Development, written by Keith Scales, is a tongue-in-cheek novella of 130 pages that kept me thoroughly entertained and intrigued for the two or so hours of reading time it requires. Mr. Scales has created a surrealistic little world in which an isolated rural area is about to have its world rocked by a new housing development, complete with major changes to the roads in the area, being built just a short distance away.

The residents of Overlook City are proud of their little community and very much against anything that might change the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. There are few secrets in Overlook (at least that’s what the locals like to believe) and everyone seems to know most everything about everyone else. But when the long abandoned Malarky Mansion is demolished to make room for the new development and human bone fragments, including most of a skull, are found, those same locals are in for a shock. Everything they thought they knew about the old mansion and its former residents just might turn out to be wrong.

Following the supremely self-important Sheriff Wilmot around as he constantly revises his theory on what happened in Malarky Mansion some two decades earlier is half the fun. Wilmot is the kind of sheriff who decides what must have happened and then works furiously to find only the facts he needs to prove his case. That no one in town agrees with any of his theories hardly slows him down as he stumbles from one colorful town character to another in his quest to prove himself correct.

The rest of the fun comes from being fooled along with everyone else in town as to what really happened in the mansion and how the bones got there. Good novellas and short stories, in my estimation, are probably more difficult to write than novels since the author has so few pages to create multiple characters and to flesh out a plot. This is one of the good ones. Keith Scales has packed more into his 130 pages than many a novelist manages with a 300-page canvas. It is filled with quirky characters, humor and observations about small town life, and it is definitely a “great little read.”

Readers will note, also, that the back cover of each of the Roast Books novellas includes a list of the book’s “ingredients.” In the case ofThe Cloverleaf Development, those indgredients are: Circumstantial Evidence, Cattledrive Eatery and Saloon Banter, Discovery of Body Parts, Out of Town Developers.” Just how perfect that little recipe is will become obvious to anyone who reads The Cloverleaf Development.