Book Talk
with Smiffs book & card store, Nerja
Village Of The Lost Girls
(l), the haunting debut
novel set in the Spanish
Pyrenees by the
renowned screenwriter
Agustín Martínez (b.
1975) becomes available
in English this month.
The village of
Monteperdido still
mourns the loss of Ana
and Lucia, two 11-year-
old friends who left
school one afternoon
five years ago and were
never seen again. Now,
Ana reappears
unexpectedly inside a
crashed car. She is
wounded but alive. The
case reopens and a race
against time begins to
discover who was behind the girls’ kidnapping. Most
importantly, where is Lucia and is she still alive? Police
inspector Sara Campos and her boss Santiago Bain, from head
office in Madrid, are forced to work with the local police. Five
years ago, fatal mistakes were made in the investigation and it
must not happen again.
Snow (l), by Will Dean; Day
Of The Dead (p), by Nicci
French; The Flower Girls (l),
by Alice Clark-Platts;
Heartbreak Hotel (p), by
Jonathan Kellerman;
Displaced (p), the sixth
Hakim and Arnold mystery
by Barbara Nadel; Texas
Ranger (p), a US Western
thriller by James Patterson;
and, Blood & Sugar (l), by
Laura Shepherd-Robinson.
Turning to general fiction,
we have looked out a
quartet of titles that, at least
for the length it takes to
read each of them, could
provide some escape from
all the doom, gloom and fractiousness that dominate politics
and economics just now.
Good things are being said
about The Binding (l), the
first-ever novel for adults
from Bridget Collins, UK
actor, playwright, and
author of seven acclaimed
books for young adults.
Emmett Farmer is working
in the fields when a letter
summons him to begin an
apprenticeship to a
Bookbinder. It is a vocation
that arouses superstition,
fear and prejudice, but his
family cannot afford to
refuse. He will learn to hand
craft beautiful volumes. In
each, he will capture
something unique and
extraordinary: a memory. If there is something you want to
forget or erase, your past
can be stored safely in a
book. You will never
remember your secret,
however terrible. In a vault
under his mentor’s
workshop, rows of books
and memories are
meticulously stored and
recorded. Then one day
Emmett makes an
astonishing discovery: one
of them has his name on it.
Village Of The Lost Girls leads off this month’s Soltalk Hotlist
of titles, some entirely new, others moving into small
paperback format for the first time or being reissued,
sometimes after years out of print. All are due for publication
on dates in January, with availability in print this month or in
early February. The Hotlist helps readers to plan and budget
for book ordering; and do not forget that delivery times can be
more erratic in the festive period.
Closer to home, terror
comes to the Costa del Sol
in The Angry Sea (l), by
James Deegan. Former
special services soldier John
Carr is relaxing on the
beach when his attention is
attracted by a man who
seems fixated on a group of
young British people. The
man does not notice Carr,
and soon moves on. Within
the hour though, the Costa
is plunged into one of the
most audacious and
horrifying terrorist attacks
that Europe has ever seen.
In a co-ordinated strike,
armed men storm both the
beach and a cruise ship
anchored further up the coast. But the terrorists, hiding their
personal greed behind a veil of religious extremism, have an
even bolder plan.
Or, try When All Is Said (l),
a much-lauded debut from
Dublin-born author Anne
Griffin, now of Mullingar,
Ireland. If you had to pick
five people to sum up your
life, who would they be? If
Also worth considering are: Twisted (l), by Steve Cavanagh;
The Wanted (p), an Elvis Cole novel by Robert Crais; Red
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