Theakstons Thursday – Booktrails from the festival

Theakstons Thursday

Here’s a quick run down of the places you’ll be visiting in the coming months. Well, some of them at least. There were so many books at this years festival that it’s going to take some time getting through them all! So plan ahead and whilst some of the following have vague or fictional locations, their settings include a remote hotel following a nuclear bomb, a boarding school and outside the school gates listening to the gossip….

The Rumour – Fictional Frinstead – Somewhere in Essex

What happens when one person spreads a rumour? When someone else passes it on? When people want to know if a child murderer might be living amongst them and if so….

Reminiscent of cases on the news. When you realise the significance of that last line, you’ll clap your hands with glee.

Helping to launchThe Rumour at Harrogate

Perfect Liars – Set somewhere in Oxfordshire

Girls in a boarding school. Well this lends itself to so many potential scenarios. When someone dies and then the three girls who were ‘on the scene’ meet up sixteen years later…there’s going to be some recriminations. Lies linger and then pounce when you least expect it.

Trap – Iceland

An Orenda classic in the making. Second in the series (Snare being the first) this carries on that tale of drugs and conspiracies, rattles it a bit and then spits out more Icelandic chills and spills with added venom.

Buy Snare and then read this.

The Last – set in a hotel in Switzerland

The video launch to this novel in a dark room with spooky lighting was one of the best marketing launches ever. TAking place in a gothic, victorian hotel in Harrogate was genius. Are you brave enough to read it?

A few strands to this. The nuclear attacks set the scene and start the ball rolling but what takes over is much worse. Survival of the fittest. Death of the weakest. And out of twenty survivors, one is a killer.

Lord of the Flies in a hotel.

Him – Set vaguely in Bristol and Somerset

Sometimes loves goes very very wrong indeed.

The lead character has selective mutism following  a traumatic event we’re not told about at first. She hasn’t even told her husband so how are we supposed to know? The story starts and flits back to when she met someone at Bristol university and the worlds of the rich and poor clash. Lucien is the man she remembers. He’s not the man she married however…

That’s just the first five. More to be announced….