The Wanderers by Meg Howrey

'Phenomenal. The Wanderers explores the dangers and necessities of venturing away from the familiar and finding home in the unknown. Howrey's expansive vision left me awestruck' - Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

‘The Wanderers is a wonderful exploration of space, trust, and what it means to be a conscious creature, finely-tuned and funny from the first page to the last. I loved getting lost in Meg Howrey's off-kilter world of astronauts and their simulated fantasies.’ - Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive

Station Eleven meets The Martian in this brilliantly inventive novel about three astronauts training for the first-ever mission to Mars, an experience that will push the boundary between real and unreal, test their relationships, and leave each of them—and their families—changed forever.

---

Scribner (Simon & Schuster) / 6 April 2017 / £12.99 / HB / Fiction

As they look to the stars, what are they missing back home?

---

In four years Prime Space will put the first humans on Mars. Helen Kane, Yoshi Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they’re the crew for the job by spending seventeen months in the most realistic simulation every created

Helen is an experienced astronaut with a NASA position and a struggling grown-up daughter who needs her but when, at the age of fifty-three, she is offered a place on the training programme for the first crewed mission to Mars, she cannot refuse a last chance to walk among the stars.

Her fellow astronauts are Sergei, a gruff Russian whose teenage sons are less mysterious to him than they’d like to think; and Yoshi, kind and focused, whose exhaustive carefulness has led him ever further from his wife.

The three will be enclosed for months in a tiny spacecraft, while outside their loved ones negotiate life on Earth. How far will the wanderers travel in the pursuit of endeavour, and what will it be like to come home?

The Wanderers is a brilliant, witty and sharply observed novel from an exciting new voice.

---

“‘An expansive tale of the costs of human ambition, The Wanderers is unquestionably the work of a brilliant writer at the height of her powers.’”

— J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest

“‘The Wanderers is a stealthily brilliant novel… simple, gorgeous, and profoundly moving.’”

— Peter Nichols, author of The Rocks and A Voyage for Madmen

---

Meg Howrey is a novelist and a former professional dancer and actor. Her non-fiction writing has been published in Vogue, and she is the author of two previous novels Blind Sight and Cranes Dance. The Wanderers is her UK debut.  She lives in Los Angeles.

More information

For more information about this book please contact us.

The Tartan Turban: In Search Of Alexander Gardner by John Keay

In this compelling investigative biography, bestselling author of India: A History, John Keay, takes readers on a quest from the American West to the Asian East to unravel the greatest enigma in the history of travel.  Alexander Gardner – a 19th-century Scots-American traveller, adventurer and mercenary – lived a life many found too outrageous to believe and using a wealth of original material and compelling new evidence, Keay uncovers the truth about a character seemingly from the ‘Flashman’ stories.

“Among the many gripping tales of travel and exploration the tale of Alexander Gardner is surely one of the most extraordinary. Master storyteller John Keay deftly sifts truth from myth-making to uncover fascinating new evidence, revealing an amazing tale worthy of Kipling or Flashman of a life lived further out on the edge than most could even imagine.”

— Michael Wood

---

HB ǀ £25.00 ǀ 9781911271000 ǀ 16 February 2017 ǀ Kashi House (distributed by Allison and Busby)

Like the travels of Marco Polo, those of Alexander Gardner clip the white line between credible adventure and creative invention. Either he is the nineteenth century’s most intrepid traveller or its most egregious fantasist, or a bit of both. Contemporaries generally believed him; posterity became more sceptical. And as with Polo, the investigation of Gardner’s story enlarged man’s understanding of the world and upped the pace of scientific and political exploration.

For before more reputable explorers notched up their own discoveries in innermost Asia, this lone Scots-American had roamed the deserts of Turkestan, ridden round the world’s most fearsome knot of mountains and fought in Afghanistan ‘for the good cause of right against wrong’. From the Caspian to Tibet and from Kandahar to Kashgar, Gardner had seen it all. At the time, the 1820s, no other outsider had managed anything remotely comparable. When word of his feats filtered out, geographers were agog.

Historians were more intrigued by what followed. After thirteen years as a white-man-gone-native in Central Asia, Gardner re-emerged as a colonel of artillery in the employ of India’s last great native empire. He witnessed the death throes of that Sikh empire at close quarters and, sparing no gruesome detail, recorded his own part in the bloodshed (the very same featuring as the exploits of ‘Alick’ Gardner in the ‘Flashman’ series).

Fame finally caught up with him during his long retirement in Kashmir. Dressed in tartan yet still living as a native, he mystified visiting dignitaries and found a ready audience for the tales of his adventurous past - including saving the city of Lahore in 1841 by singlehandedly killing 300 invaders. But one mystery he certainly took to the grave: the whereabouts of his accumulated fortune has still to be discovered. 

JOHN KEAY has been a professional writer, scholar, broadcaster and traveller for more than 40 years. He has written and presented over 100 documentaries for BBC Radios 3 and 4 and is the author of some two dozen books mainly on Asia and exploration. His narrative histories India: A History, China: A History and The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company are widely regarded as standard works. A Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, his prose has been described as ‘exquisite’ (Observer) and his historical analysis as ‘forensic’ (The Guardian). He has also edited The Royal Geographical Society’s History of World Exploration and encyclopaedias of both Scotland and London. For his literary contribution to Asian studies he was awarded the Royal Society for Asian Affairs' Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal in 2009. He lives in Argyll.

---

Talking Points

Exploration and travel

The travels of a maverick mercenary who, having crossed Central Asia's arid deserts and high
mountain passes in the hope of finding ‘happiness among wild races and in exploring unknown lands’, astounded his contemporaries in ways no man had since Marco Polo

Lone Survivor

What are the odds of a lone traveller surviving thirteen years amidst some of the harshest conditions in Asia, roaming the deserts of Turkestan, trekking round the world’s most fearsome knot of mountains, fending off a wolf-pack, evading the clutches of Central Asian slave-traders, engaging in raids and ambushes against bandits in Afghanistan, and spending nine months in an underground dungeon?

Lost treasure

The fabulous treasure horde, amassed by an American soldier of fortune who had the opportunity to steal the Koh-i-Noor diamond, remains waiting to be discovered somewhere in the subcontinent

Inspiration for Kipling?

As the first white man to trek across the secretive anti-Islamic mountain enclave of Kafiristan (‘Land of the Unbeliever’) and live to tell the tale, was Alexander Gardner the real inspiration behind Kipling’s famous novel, The Man Who Would Be King?

The First American in Afghanistan

Revealing the remarkable tale of a lone American who, two centuries before the United States’ began its military action, became the first of his nation to venture into Afghanistan.

A Son of Scotland & His Tartan Turban

Exploring the ancestry, shifting identities, achievements and tartan tastes of a pioneering Scots American who went native in Asia.

The fashion of white men wearing turbans

Alexander Burnes - British political agent in Afghanistan who lost Alexander Gardner’s crucial Kafiristan journal in the 1840s

Queen Victoria’s sons - they were dressed up like Sikh princes by Maharaja Duleep Singh
(who Gardner had guarded when he ruled at Lahore) soon after his arrival in the UK in 1854
William Simpson - war artist who, like George Landseer who captured Gardner’s portrait, was in
Kashmir in 1860s; the works of both artists are in the collections of the Victoria & Albert
Museum

George Hayward - a military man who turned explorer consulted Gardner on routes into the
Pamir mountains

August Schoefft - painter who travelled across India in the 1830s-40s and produced works
connected to the court of Lahore (captured other white officers but not Gardner, who may
have been away on campaign)

Victorian / Edwardian military officers - men like General Sir Samuel James Browne VC (Sam Browne’s Cavalry), Captain Robert Shebbeare VC (15th Punjab Infantry) and Sir John Smyth VC, who wore turbans on campaign, all commanded men (or their descendants in the case of Smyth) from the disbanded Sikh army when Britain took control of Punjab

---

For more information about this book please contact us.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter

An extraordinary debut novel, drawn from author’s family history of survival in the Nazi Holocaust.

“Reading Georgia Hunter’s We Were the Lucky Ones is like being swung heart first into history … A brave and mesmerizing debut, and a truly tremendous accomplishment.”

— Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

---

14 February 2017 / Hardback / Allison & Busby / £14.99 / fiction 

‘By the end of the Holocaust, 90 per cent of Poland’s three million Jews were annihilated; of the more than 30,000 Jews who lived in Radom, fewer than 300 survived.’

The Kurc family shouldn’t have survived the Holocaust. In the spring of 1939 three generations are living relatively normal lives in Poland, despite the hardships Jews face. When war breaks out and the family is cast to the wind, the five Kurc siblings do everything they can to find their way through a devastated continent to freedom.

Addy, a musician, charms his way into possession of a Brazilian visa and into the first class piano lounge on a ship full of refugees bound for Rio; Jakob marries the love of his life in an abandoned house to a soundtrack of air sirens; Mila hides her daughter in a Catholic convent outside of Warsaw, only to return weeks later to find the convent in ruins; Genek endures a brutal winter in a Siberian gulag before embarking with his wife and newborn son on a yearlong exodus through Persia to fight for the Allies; and Halina attempts to flee over the Austrian Alps on foot – while pregnant. All this, across continents and often in ignorance as to the fate of the rest of their family, while the wheels of war turn.

We Were the Lucky Ones is a profoundly moving and memorable novel, and a gripping tale of bravery, based on the author’s family experiences.  It takes you on a journey through unimaginable darkness to a place of hope/ 

When Georgia Hunter was fifteen years old, she learned that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors. We Were the Lucky Ones was born of her quest to uncover her family’s staggering history. She lives in Connecticut, USA, and is available for interview and to write features.

---

Talking points

Discovering her Polish / Jewish heritage, aged 15

Growing up, while Georgia was close to her grandparents, she had no idea she was a quarter Jewish, or that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors - it wasn’t a big secret, just a piece of her grandfather’s past he had chosen to put behind him.

 At a family reunion in 2000 she discovered the greater Kurc family saga.  Snippets of stories overheard include: a sister who walked over the Austrian Alps, pregnant; a cousin born in the Siberian gulag, where it was so cold his eyes would freeze shut in the mornings and his mother had to use the warmth of her breast milk to coax them open; a harrowing mother-daughter escape from the Radom ghetto; a secret wedding in a blacked-out house in Lvov.

Travelling through Europe, tracing her family’s footsteps

Georgia followed in the Kurc family’s footsteps, travelling the route her family travelled, through Poland, Austria, Italy, and Brazil.  Some of the most moving moments were wandering the streets of Radom, where she discovered a mezuzah - one of only 2 remaining - in the doorway to their old apartment building, and standing with her son on the train platform in Bari, where several relatives reunited after the war.

Researching her family story

The story came together through travel, extensive interviews and outside research, with key findings through the Shoah Foundation, the Hoover Institution at Stamford and the UK Ministry of Defence.

Fact to fiction

While the bones of the story are all true (e.g., who was where, when), Georgia’s goal in writing We Were the Lucky Ones was to put readers in the shoes of her relatives, which is why she chose to write the novel in the present tense - to help the story feel relevant, visceral, memorable.  When she finally allowed herself to fictionalize the details it helped to bring the story closer to the truth.

---

For more information about this book please contact us.

Purged by Peter Laws

Debut crime novel, first in a series, by Baptist minister Peter Laws

Introducing Matt Hunter, a sociology professor, who also assists the police over religiously-motivated crimes…

“A tight and gripping story…Purged [is] a book that is nigh impossible to put down and will leave the reader hooked from start to finish…let’s welcome Matt Hunter to the world of macabre crime fiction. He’s a damaged, complicated and interesting man, and we’re looking forward to spending more time with him.”

— Starburst Magazine

---

Purged by Peter Laws
Allison & Busby / 16 February 2017 / £12.99 / trade paperback 

Matt Hunter lost his faith a long time ago. Formerly a minister, now a professor of sociology, he’s writing a book that debunks the Christian faith while assisting the police with religiously motivated crimes. 

On holiday with his family in Oxfordshire, Matt finds himself on edge in a seemingly idyllic village where wooden crosses hang at every turn. The stay becomes more sinister still when a local girl goes missing, followed by further disappearances. Caught up in an investigation that brings memories to the surface that he would prefer stay buried deep, Matt is on the trail of a killer determined to save us all.

Peter Laws is an ordained Baptist minister with a taste for the macabre. He writes a monthly column in The Fortean Times and also hosts the popular podcast and YouTube show The Flicks That Church Forgot which reviews horror films from a theological perspective. He regularly speaks and preaches at churches and has spoken at movie premieres, beer tasting evenings and paranormal conferences. He lives with his family in Bedfordshire.  Unleashed, the next Matt Hunter novel, will be published in 2018.  He is currently writing a non-fiction book for Icon Books exploring why we are drawn to the morbid (to be published in 2018). He's travelling the country drinking with vampires, hunting werewolves and meeting the women who collect dead babies (in Reborn doll form). 

Follow Peter on twitter @revpeterlaws and find out more at www.peterlaws.co.uk.  
He is available for interview, events and to write features.

For more information about this book please contact us.

Kill the Father by Sadrone Dazieri

Published in hardback by Simon & Schuster on 9 February 2017 at £12.99

• Introducing an exciting new author, Sandrone Dazieri, with a brilliant, original and compelling debut thriller.
• A bestseller throughout Europe
• First in a planned series featuring Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre

“Absolutely electrifying. Kill the Father is one of those rare treasures: a page-turning thriller—in every sense of the phrase—that is also brilliantly nuanced and rich with insight into the complex and compelling minds of those, good and bad, who inhabit its pages. This novel is the new definition of a one-sitting read.”

— Jeffery Deaver

Two people, each shattered by their past, team to solve a series of killings and abductions...

‘The world is a curving wall of grey cement.  The world has muffled sounds and echoes.  The world is a circle two times the length of his out-stretched arms.  The first thing the boy learned in that circular world were his new names.  He has two.  Son is the name he prefers.  He has a right to it when he does the right things, when he obeys, when his thoughts are clear and quick.  Otherwise, his name is Beast.  When he’s called Beast, the boy is punished.’

When a woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome and her six-year-old son goes missing, the police unit assigned to the case sees an easy solution: they arrest the woman’s husband and await his confession. But the Chief of Rome’s Major Crimes unit doubts things are so simple. Secretly, he lures to the case two of Italy’s top analytical minds: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli, a fierce, warrior-like detective still reeling from having survived a bloody catastrophe, and Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo. Fed through the gloved hand of a masked kidnapper who called himself “The Father,” Dante emerged from his ordeal with crippling claustrophobia but, also, with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and hyper-observant capacities.

All evidence suggests that the Father is back and active after being dormant for decades. Indeed, he has left tell-tale signs that signal he’s looking forward to a reunion with Dante. But when Columba and Dante begin following the ever-more-bizarre trail of clues, they grasp that what’s really going on is darker than they ever imagined.

SANDRONE DAZIERI is the bestselling author of more than fifty screenplays. Kill the Father, the first in a planned series featuring Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre, is his British debut.

Early Praise for Kill The Father

• 'Ingenious’ John Verdon
• 'A mind-bending, stunningly original page-turner’ - Jonathan Kellerman
• 'An intense, gripping, and entirely unforgettable story…A thriller of the highest order.’ - Christopher Reich
• '[A] dazzling U.S. debut.... Told in brutal, often wrenching detail, this is not an odyssey for the faint of heart.’ - Publishers Weekly
• 'A dark treat for mystery buffs.’ - Kirkus Reviews
• 'Don't be surprised if Kill the Father becomes the next Big Thing in international crime fiction.' - Booklist, starred review

For more information, please contact us.

Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? by Ian Dunt

Paperback / Canbury Press / 17 November 2016 / £7.99
The ultimate guide to Brexit: How our divorce from Europe will change life in the UK forever. 

“I wanted to write a book which could be read in a few hours, but allow someone to win arguments about Brexit for the next decade. This is the biggest story of our lifetime, but the debate around it is filled with sloppy thinking, half-truths and self-interested speculation. It’s almost impossible for people to find one single, readable account of what is really going on. Hopefully this book will address that.”

— Ian Dunt

Our departure from the European Union is filled with propaganda, myth, and half-truth – but the risks of a chaotic Brexit are very real. Mishandling the negotiations with Brussels could lower our global status, diminish our quality of life, and throw our legal system into turmoil. 

With the help of constitutional and trade experts, Ian Dunt argues that:

• The current approach to Brexit will be a catastrophe for the British economy. The UK urgently needs to agree transitional controls to avoid a financial cliff edge in 2019, which would thump the City and manufacturing. Two years is simply not long enough for what the government wants to do, but the May government shows no signs of pursuing an interim deal.
• Brexit massively increases the power of the government: Theresa May’s great repeal bill will feature powers allowing ministers to use statutory instruments to alter forty years of entwined EU/UK law without the need for parliamentary debate. So far no democratic safeguards have been announced to ensure the Government does not misuse this power. If the effect of Brexit is as calamitous as expected, ministers will be encouraged to deliver trade deals by unilaterally reducing workers rights, environmental standards and consumer protections.  
• Brexit will hurt the poor first: Manufacturing communities will be first hit by tariffs and non-tariff barriers. The working communities who voted for Brexit will be the first to be hurt by it.

Dunt also offers solutions, and suggests we should be negotiating diplomatically with European partners while also leveraging what advantages the UK has on market size and military capabilities.

Ian Dunt is editor of Politics.co.uk and a pundit on Newsnight, Channel 4 News and other shows. In this book he is joined by dozens of experts from trade, law and politics to map out how Brexit will redefine Britain in the years ahead.  Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? is the ultimate guide to the least-understood issue of our time.

For further information please contact us.

The Liberation by Kate Furnivall

Paperback original / Simon & Schuster / £7.99 / 3 November 2016

Author of internationally bestselling The Russian Concubine returns with an unforgettably powerful story of love, loss and the long shadow of war.

‘Set in Sorrento and Naples this is a thrilling roller-coaster of a read, seductive, mysterious and edgy. I LOVED it’  Dinah Jefferies

The Liberation is set in Italy in 1945 as British and American troops attempt to bring order to the devastated country and Italy’s population fights to survive. Caterina Lombardi is desperate – her father is dead, her mother has disappeared and her brother is being drawn towards danger. One morning, among the ruins of the bombed Naples streets, Caterina is forced to go to extreme lengths to protect her own life and in doing so forges a future in which she must clear her father's name. An Allied Army officer accuses him of treason and Caterina discovers a plot against her family. Who can she trust and who is the real enemy now? And will the secrets of the past be her downfall?

Detailed research and wonderfully drawn characters make this a powerful, gripping read.

Kate Furnivall is the author of eight novels, including the international bestseller The Russian Concubine. She lives in Devon.

Praise for Kate Furnivall

• ‘Wonderful . . . hugely ambitious and atmospheric’ Kate Mosse 
• ‘The definition of a terrifically well-written page-turner’ Dinah Jefferies
•  ‘A thrilling plot ... Fast-paced with a sinister edge.’ Times 
• ‘Gripping . . . poignant, beautifully written ...will capture the reader to the last’ Sun 
• ‘Truly captivating’ Elle  
• ‘Perfect escapist reading’ Marie Claire  
• ‘An achingly beautiful epic’ New Woman
• ‘A rollicking good read’ The Daily Telegraph 
• ‘Breathtakingly good’ Marie Claire  

For further information please contact us. 

Mercy Killing by Lisa Cutts

Paperback original / Simon & Schuster / 20 October 2016 / £7.99

Award-winning writer and Detective Constable Lisa Cutts returns with gripping and authentic new series featuring Detective Inspector Harry Powell

‘I SO enjoyed Mercy Killing. Taut. Tense. Insider knowledge leaps from every page’ 
Simon Booker, author of Without Trace

'Brutal, harrowing and compelling…Lisa Cutts has a unique voice: empathetic, observant, incisive. ‘
Elizabeth Haynes, author of Into the Darkest Corner

Could you ever justify murder…?

‘Usually Friday nights were Albie Woodville’s favourite part of the week.  He went home to his second-floor flat, shut the door, and after a simple meal purchased from the reduced section of his local Co-op, he settled down in front of his television to watch the programmes he had recorded that week.  However, something was wrong this particular Friday...
Albie heard the noise of the wood breaking and instantly knew that today was the day.’

The death of a local sex offender places the police officers at East Rise incident room under immense pressure – they must treat this case like any other murder, but they know what Albie Woodville did and can feel little sympathy. Except, as the investigation progresses, it becomes clear this isn’t just a one-off killing – someone is out for revenge... 

Lisa Cutts is the author of two previous police procedural novels, based on her twenty years of policing experience. She works as a detective constable for Kent Police and has spent ten years in the Serious Crime Directorate dealing mostly with murders and other serious investigations.  Her debut novel, Never Forget, won the 2014 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for best thriller