August, it seems to be

Update time.

Tomorrow I head for the west coast and a first appearance at the Sunshine Coast Festival in Sechelt, a little up the coast from Vancouver. There’s a pontoon plane that takes you there from near the Vancouver airport. If I miss the (tight) connection the gallant Penguin rep there has volunteered to hasten out to the aiport and whip me (well, drive me) to the ferry terminal for the alternative (scenic) route. I will owe her a Negroni or something if that happens.

http://www.writersfestival.ca

I’m reading there Friday evening, after which I might propose a mass migration down to the water to look up at the Perseid meteors… word is their biggest shower in a long long time (200 an hour!), and Friday midnight is peak time, we’re told. My favourite Perseid memory is watching them with my family in the countryside of Provence, the year we went back there, when I wrote Ysabel.

There are a whole slew of other appearances coming up in September and October, ‘festival season’, and I just signed off on a trip to Halifax in mid-November, too. I’ll get firm details posted on Bright Weavings, and on Twitter and Facebook nearer the dates. It is unusual for a spring book to still have ‘legs’ this far into the summer, with fall books already appearing, so I’m genuinely touched that Children has stayed on the Canadian hardcover lists for 12 weeks now. By this point that is going to be due to enthused readers and word of mouth, so when I say thank you (and I do!) I mean it.

Penguin Canada are continuing with their rejacketing of their entire backlist. The first three came out when Children did (I posted images here) and the next three are in October. Here are those covers. (Autocorrect keeps wanting to make ‘rejacketing’ into ‘rejecting’…they are not rejecting the books!)

9780143194026 9780143194033 9780143194095

I love what their designer has been doing with these (last three will appear in January; Penguin Canada have 9 of my backlist titles, Fionavar is HarperCollins in Canada). The idea of a uniform ‘look’ for an author’s work is awfully appealing.

Over in UK the good news is that Fionavar will be out very soon as ebooks from Hodder, my new publishers. Under Heaven is now on sale in Turkey (a new market for me) and the German edition is slated for October. France’s River of Stars is November. In France, as well, Ysabel has now been nominated for the Prix Elbakin as best translated book, the award Under Heaven won there last year. I do better at foreign language updates over on Twitter, as they are the sort of quick hits that suit 140 characters!

I had an essay run in Walrus Magazine last month; if you missed it, here’s the link:

https://thewalrus.ca/something-to-write-home-about/

And that’s (a bit of) the news for August 10th. Back to the Olympics with pleasure and the American elections with increasing disbelief.