Waterstone's Bookclub

Dorothy Koomson - live webchat 9/3/2010 (1-3pm)

Dorothy Koomson is the author of six novels. Her first novel, The Cupid Effect, was published in 2003. After that, she didn't look back - The Chocolate Run was published in 2004, and then her "breakthrough" novel, My Best Friend's Girl, was released in 2006. It was picked for the Richard and Judy Summer Reads Book Club and went on to sell over 500,000 copies. Dorothy recently spent two years living in Sydney Australia, but is now back in England, but only for the time being, as she has been "well and truly bitten by the travel bug".

Her latest book is The Ice Cream Girls.

About The Ice Cream Girls:

"At only eighteen years of age, Poppy and Serena were the only witnesses to a tragic event. Amid heated public debate and scrutiny, the two glamorous teens were dubbed "The Ice Cream Girls" by the press and forced to go their separate ways and to lead very different lives. Twenty years later, Poppy is keen to set the record straight about what really happened, while married mother-of-two Serena wants no one in her present to find out about her past. But some secrets will not stay buried - and if theirs is revealed, their lives will start to unravel all over again..."

Read more about Dorothy on her author page

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Andrea Levy - live webchat - 18/2/2010

Andrea Levy was born in London, England in 1956 to Jamaican parents. Her first three novels explored - from different perspectives - the problems faced by black British-born children of Jamaican emigrants. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), is the story of a Jamaican family living in London in the 1960s. Her second, Never Far From Nowhere (1996), is set during the 1970s and tells the story of two very different sisters living on a London council estate. In her third, Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Faith Jackson, a young black Londoner, visits Jamaica after suffering a nervous breakdown and discovers a previously unknown personal history.

Small Island, her fourth novel,( the historic winner of both the 2004 Orange Prize and the 2005 Whitbread Prize for Fiction), is set in 1948 and, through the stories of both English and Jamaican characters, it explores a point in England's past when the country began to change. It was successfully adapted for television in 2009. Her latest book is The Long Song.

About The Long Song:

"You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed. July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity and it is her life that is the subject of this tale. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831, and she was also present when slavery was declared no more..."

Read more about Andrea on her author page

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Nick Cave - live webchat - 3/9/2009

The lead singer of The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Nick Cave has been performing music for more than 30 years. He has collaborated with Kylie Minogue, PJ Harvey and many others. As well as working with Warren Ellis on the soundtrack for the film of The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he also wrote the screenplay for the film The Proposition. His debut novel And the Ass Saw the Angel was published in 1989. Born in Australia, Cave now lives in Brighton. His latest book is The Death of Bunny Munro.

About The Death of Bunny Munro:

The Death of Bunny Munro recounts the last journey of a salesman in search of a soul. Following the suicide of his wife, Bunny, a door-to-door salesman and lothario, takes his son on a trip along the south coast of England. He is about to discover that his days are numbered. With a daring hellride of a plot The Death of Bunny Munro is also a modern morality tale of sorts, a stylish, furious, funny, truthful and tender account of one man's descent and judgement.

"Put Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka and Benny Hill together in a Brighton seaside guesthouse and they might just come up with Bunny Munro. A compulsive read possessing all Nick Cave's trademark horror and humanity, often thinly disguised in a galloping, playful romp.".

Irvine Welsh

Read more about Nick on his author page

***PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A BOOK-RELATED DISCUSSION AND NOT A MUSIC FORUM. QUESTIONS NOT RELEVANT TO THE DISCUSSION WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED ON THE BLOG***

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Nick Hornby, live webchat - 8/9/2009

Nick Hornby was born in 1957. He is the author of five previous novels, High Fidelity, About a Boy, How To Be Good, A Long Way Down (shortlisted for the Whitbread Award) and Slam; three works of non-fiction, Fever Pitch (winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award), 31 Songs (shortlisted for the National Books Critics Circle Award) and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree; and a Pocket Penguin book of short stories, Otherwise Pandemonium. His new novel, Juliet, Naked, is published in September 2009 and he recently wrote the screenplay for the film An Education, which is due for release in the UK in October 2009. Nick Hornby lives and works in Highbury, north London.

About Juliet, Naked:

Annie and Duncan are a mid-thirties couple who have reached a fork in the road, realising their shared interest in the reclusive musician Tucker Crowe (in Duncan's case, an obsession rather than an interest) is not enough to hold them together any more. When Annie hates Tucker's 'new release', a terrible demo of his most famous album, it's the last straw - Duncan cheats on her and she promptly throws him out. Via an internet discussion forum, Annie's harsh opinion reaches Tucker himself, who couldn't agree more. He and Annie start an unlikely correspondence which teaches them both something about moving on from years of wasted time...

Read more about Nick on his author page

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Marina Lewycka - live webchat - 8th July, 2009

Marina Lewycka is of Ukrainian origin and was born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, during World War II. She studied at Keele University, and has written a number of books of practical advice for carers of the elderly, published by Age Concern, as well as two bestselling novels. She lectures in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University. Her latest book is We Are All Made of Glue.

On Wednesday 8th July , between 10am and 12 noon, we hosted a live webchat with Marina Lewycka. You can read Marina's responses to readers' questions below.

About We Are All Made of Glue:

From bonding to bondage, from B & Q to Belarus, along with seven smelly cats, three useless handymen, two slimy estate agents, social workers, and a bonker lady, this is the story of a very unlikely friendship. Georgie Sinclair's husband has walked out; her sixteen-year-old son is busy surfing born-again websites; and all those overdue articles for Adhesives in the Modern World are getting her down. So when Georgie spots Mrs Shapiro, an eccentric old Jewish emigre neighbour with an eye for a bargain and a fondness for matchmaking, rummaging through her skip in the middle of the night, it's just the distraction she needs...

Read more about Marina on her author page

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Sarah Waters live webchat, June 5th 2009

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University. She has won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and was twice shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2003, she was named Author of the Year three times: by the British Book Awards, The Booksellers’ Association and Waterstone’s Booksellers. She was also chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003.

On Friday 5th June we hosted a live webchat with Sarah Waters. You can read the questions and answers below.

About The Little Stranger :

After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote The Night Watch, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.

Read more about Sarah on her author page

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Webchat with innocent - 13th May, 2009

It's been ten years since a group of three friends sold their first smoothies from a stall at a small music festival in west London. Over that period, the business has grown to have a turnover of more than £100 million and their drinks are now sold in over 8,000 outlets across 13 different countries in Europe.

A Book about innocent:

This is a book about innocent, the smoothie company that we started in 1999. We began writing it about two years ago, as we thought it was about time we started documenting the history of our business. So we racked our brains and tried to remember all of the important stuff and sat down to write it. As can happen with these things, it took us a bit longer than we thought, but we finally finished it off just after Christmas. It tells the tale of the first ten years, and is a book for anyone who wants to start their own business, bring fresh thinking to their current one or has been told their idea won't work. innocent is a business that almost didn't happen (we were turned down by every bank and investor in the land), and we hope by telling our story we can encourage other people to have a go at doing their own thing.

Read more about innocent on our innocent page

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The Book Circle - Born Under a Million Shadows

Welcome to the Book Circle.

The May Cardholders' Choice of the Month is Born Under a Million Shadows by British journalist Andrea Busfield. Join in the discussion below to share your views on this moving tale.

About the book:
The Taliban have disappeared from Kabul's streets, but the long shadows of their brutal regime remain. In his short life eleven-year-old Fawad has known more grief than most: his father and brother have been killed, his sister has been abducted, and Fawad and his mother, Mariya, must rely on the charity of family to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence. Then Mariya finds a position as housekeeper for a charismatic western woman, Georgie, and Fawad dares to hope for an end to their struggle. He soon discovers that his beloved Georgie is caught up in a dangerous love affair with the powerful Afghan warlord Haji Khan, a legendary name on the streets of Kabul. At first resentful of Haji Khan's presence, Fawad learns that love can move a man to act in surprising ways, and an overwhelming act of generosity persuades him of the warlord's good intentions. But even a man as influential as Haji Khan can't protect Fawad from the next tragedy to blight his young life, a tragedy so devastating that it threatens to destroy the one thing Fawad thought he could never lose: his love for his country.

"The story has lots of different things in it; love, violence, arranged marriages, culture and much, much more. I would recommend this to anyone, even if it isn't normally your kind of book. I thoroughly enjoyed it."
Zoey Totty

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Join the Great Adaptations discussion now!

Have your say on the books and movies in our Great Adaptations season - join our interactive discussion on the films that you think would've been better off left as books, and the adaptations that have outshone their literary counterparts.

The Book Circle - Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife

The April Cardholders' Choice of the Month is Firmin by first-time novelist Sam Savage. Join in the discussion below to share your views on this charmingly original tale.

About the book:
This is a novel told through the voice of a rat. Firmin is born in the basement of a ramshackle old bookstore but because he is the runt of the litter, he is forced to compete for food and ends up chewing on the books that surround him. Firmin soon realizes his source of nourishment has endowed him with the ability to read and this discovery fills him with an insatiable hunger for literature and a very unratlike sense of the world and his place in it. As Firmin navigates the shadowy streets of his decaying area, looking for understanding, his excitement, loneliness, fear, and self-consciousness become remarkably human and undeniably touching. But the days of the bookshop and of the close community around it are numbered. The area has been marked out for 'urban regeneration' and soon the faded glory of the bookshop, the small local theatre, the unique shops and small cafes will face the bulldozers and urban planners. Brilliantly original and richly allegorical, Firmin is brimming with charm and wistful longing for a world that understands the redemptive power of literature and treasures its seedy theaters, one-of-a-kind characters, and cluttered bookshops.

"The book is nostalgic for the time when bookshops and independent cinemas were thriving and shows that when they go, other things fall apart. The best way of describing this book is as a literary version of an intelligent Pixar movie for grown-ups. It is enchanting with wonderful illustrations which make turning the pages a pure joy."
Anja de Jager

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