On 10 April the Indie Press Network held its Spring Showcase via a Zoom meeting, which I was fortunate to be invited to join. The presentation was hosted by Marina Sofia of Corylus Books and featured six small independent published talking about their books that are about to be published this spring, or recently published.
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Arachne Press is a small publisher of fiction and poetry by writers who are LGBTQ+, disabled, Global Majority, older women, and/or geographically isolated.
The City-State of Tligol is ruled by dictators, holds monthly public executions and is haunted by a benign, fishing, giant, but by and large the inhabitants are content, and the food is amazing. The perfect place for a city break, just as long as you don’t want to leave. Ever.
Language has its own relationship to time.
When Jennifer falls for Sam at his execution, she doesn’t immediately realise that she can still find and live with him; but the city of Tligol has trains that will take her anywhere, including her own past, and future, and multiple possible variations, just as long as she doesn’t leave the city. Jennifer rides the trains, loops around in time and sets an unplanned series of events in motion. For lovers of The City and The City… and Hotel California!
Corylus Books is a place to discover new voices, translated crime fiction with a social edge.
Corylus had two books to promote, one of which I have already reviewed and blogged (Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case), the other (Murder under the Midnight Sun) I will be blogging on 10 May.
A key figure in the politics and literature of Argentina, Rodolfo Walsh wrote his iconic Letter to my Friends in December 1976, recounting the murder of his daughter Victoria by the military dictatorship. Just a few months later, he was killed in a shoot-out – just one of the Junta’s many thousands of victims.
What if this complex figure – a father, militant, and writer who delved the regime’s political crimes – had also sought to reveal the truth of his own daughter’s death?
Elsa Drucaroff’s imagining of Rodolfo Walsh undertaking the most personal investigation of his life is an electrifying, suspense-filled drama in which love and life decisions are inseparable from political convictions as he investigates the mystery of what happened to his own daughter.
The head of intelligence for Montoneros, a clandestine Peronist organisation co-ordinating armed resistance against the dictatorship, Rodolfo Walsh was also a prolific writer and journalist, seen as the forerunner of the true crime genre with his 1957 book Operation Massacre.
What if beneath the surface of his Letter to my Friends lay a gripping story lost to history?
What does a woman do when her husband’s charged with the frenzied murder of her father and her best friend? She calls in Stella Blómkvist to investigate – however unwelcome the truth could turn out to be.
Smart, ruthless and with a flexible moral code all of her own, razor-tongued lawyer Stella Blómkvist is also dealing with a desperate
deathbed request to track down a young woman who vanished a decade ago.
It looks like a dead end, but she agrees to pick up the stone-cold trail – and she never gives up, even if the police did a long time ago.
Then there’s the mystery behind the arm that emerges from an ice cap, with a mysterious ruby ring on one frozen finger? How does this connect to another unexplained disappearance, and why were the police at the time so keen to write it off as a tragic accident?
Brutal present-day crimes have their roots in the past that some people would prefer to stay forgotten.
As Stella pieces together the fragments, is she getting too close to the truth and making herself a target for ruthless men determined to conceal secret sins?
Hobeck Books, based in Staffordshire, is a family-run independent publisher of award-winning crime, thriller, mystery and suspense books. They publish approximately twelve titles per year.
Hobeck Books also had two books to showcase, one of which I have already reviewed and blogged (Edge of the Land), the other (The Midnight Man) I will be blogging on 1 May.
The waterways of the Liverpool docks contain many ghosts and shadows. It’s a place to disappear… or die.
Detective Inspector April Decent and Detective Sergeant Skeeter Warlock fear for the welfare of a vulnerable young man injured in an attack ordered by drug dealers. Originally questioned at the scene, Danny Maynard denies the attack and refuses to co-operate with the police. He soon disappears. Clues to his whereabouts are seeded, a cry for help maybe, but he continues to be elusive.
The team are also dealing with a spate of deaths in the city, with one thing in common: the victims are all homeless and seemingly ravaged by addiction. Once that connection is realised – the hunt for a potential serial killer is on.
Is there a link between the missing man and the other deaths? Could he be the missing piece of the puzzle which will solve the mystery behind the brutal murders?
Winter 1946
One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door.
Two women from the hospital join forces to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue – The Midnight Man.
BEWARE THE DARKNESS BENEATH
Jantar Publishing is an independent publisher of Central European Contemporary Literary Fiction, Classic Fiction, Science Fiction and Poetry based in London.
A genius and trickster, apparently dies at the Battle of Königgrätz in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. However, he has not died and instead is able to procure the brain of Isaac Newton to replace his own. Subsequently, he uses Newton’s knowledge of the laws of nature to overcome them, using a strange device to travel faster than the speed of light, and also to photograph the past. Newton’s Brain was published 18 years before H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and has been considered a strong influence on Wells.
The author. Jakub Arbes (12 June 1840, Prague (Smíchov) – 8 April 1914) was a Czech writer and intellectual. He is best known as the creator of the literary genre called romanetto and spent much of his professional life in France.In 1867, he began his career in journalism as editor of Vesna Kutnohorská, and from 1868 to 1877, as the chief editor of the National Press. Arbes was also an editor of political magazines Hlas (The Voice) and Politiky (Politics), and a sympathizer of the Májovci literary group. During this time, Arbes was persecuted and spent 15 months in the Czech Lipa prison, for leading opposition to the ruling Austro-Hungarian Empire.[1] He left Prague soon after, spending time in Paris and the South of France as part of the intellectual community there. In France, he was an associate of other “Bohemian Parisiens” such as Paul Alexis, Luděk Marold, Guy de Maupassant, Viktor Oliva, and Karel Vítězslav Mašek, as well as the French writer Émile François Zola.
Sans. PRESS is a Limerick-based indie press with a love for short stories. Under the motto fresh & weird, we celebrate new voices and narratives.
Stranger
This will be an anthology of short stories and if the cover is anything to go by they are likely to be very strange indeed.
Wild Hunt Books’s mission is to foster strong and distinct literary voices and those experimenting with narrative, plot, structure, and authors dabbling in darker genres and liminal spaces.
When Jade Hunter goes missing in the Alaskan wilderness, everyone is shocked. She was scheduled to speak at an academic symposium but never turned up. What was Jade really doing in Alaska?
Blood is found in the woods and suspicion immediately falls on the reclusive survivalist Ursula Smith. She is swiftly arrested and convicted of Jade’s murder – even though a body has not been found.
Several years later, Jade’s doctoral thesis leaks online, fuelling rumour and conspiracy over the true nature of her disappearance, leading investigative journalist Carla Young to dig through Jade’s life and discover what did happen to Jade Hunter.
Peter turns the page 