Make Mine an Indie: Seren Books

It's Saturday, and that means it's time for Make Mine an Indie! In case you're new around these parts, I've made a commitment during 2016 that 9 out of 10 of the books that I buy will be either published by or bought from independent publishers and bookshops, and that 50% of what I read this year will be independently published. In order to help myself discover great titles I feature a different independent publisher on the blog each Saturday!

This week's publisher, Seren, was founded in 1981 and describe themselves as 'Wales' leading independent literary publisher'. They publish a wide variety of genres across poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and many of their titles have been shortlisted for major literary awards. They specialise in English language writing from Wales, but also publish many international authors. On their website they have a free short story every month, and you can sign up for their book club which gets you 20% off books on their website and other fun stuff! If you like poetry but aren't sure where to start with poetry collections then may I recommend Seren's blog, where they have a Friday poem each week, and just browsing through for this post I've discovered several that I really liked.

Now, as usual, some titles I'm excited about!

Boom! by Carolyn Jess-Cooke
From Seren's website:

The title poem of this new collection of poems by Carolyn Jess-Cooke: ‘Boom!’ enacts the moment when the new baby arrives in the family ‘like a hand grenade’. ‘Becoming a mother changed me in every single way,’ says the author, ‘my first child – born in October 2006 – just about knocked me sideways. There were many reasons for this, but here’s the biggest one: I could not believe how public and political the (hugely personal) experience of motherhood was.’ 

A noted academic, author of a book about film and Shakespeare, and a best-selling popular novelist ‘The Guardian Angel’s Journal’ and ‘The Boy Who  Could See Demons’, Jess-Cooke found, as many parents do, that the juggling act required to raise young children and continue a professional and creative life, is both exhausting and fulfilling. 

The poems chronicle the rapturous moments, such as ‘Wakening’  where the baby is observed: ‘the seedling eyes stirred by sunlight’. There are also the tragi-comic ‘Nights’ full of ‘small elbows in the face’ and ‘assailed by colds and colic’. Jess-Cooke doesn’t flinch from the darker fears and depressions that can afflict parents. There are also pieces of pointed satirical intent and socio-political comment such as ‘Poem made from bits of Newspaper Headlines ’ and ‘The Only Dad in Playgroup’.  

Viewing motherhood from a multiplicity of artful angles, the author says, ‘Coupled with all this was the love I had for my children. It completely and utterly blew me away, how much I could love another human being.’

I read the title poem on Seren's blog while researching this post and fell in love. Motherhood is such an insane, profound, life altering thing to happen and yet we tend to blow it off, like 'oh yeah I just had a baby'. This collection sounds like it will give better voice to that feeling than I can. 

Love and Fallout by Kathryn Simmonds

From the Seren website:

When Tessa’s best friend organises a surprise TV makeover, Tessa is horrified. It’s the last thing she needs – her business is on the brink of collapse, her marriage is under strain and her daughter is more interested in beauty pageants than student politics. What’s more, the ‘Greenham Common angle’ the TV producers have devised reopens some personal history Tessa has tried to hide away. Then Angela gets in touch, Tessa’s least favourite member of the Greenham gang, and she’s drawn back into her muddy past.

Moving between the present and 1982, and set against the mass protests which touched thousands of women’s lives, Love and Fallout is a book about friendship, motherhood and the accidents that make us who we are. A hugely entertaining novel from debut novelist and award-winning poet Kathryn Simmonds.

Honestly, this just sounds like fun!

Six Pounds Eight Ounces by Rhian Elizabeth

From the Seren website:

Hannah King is a liar, so everyone says. That means her stories of growing up in the Rhondda, as told in Six Pounds Eight Ounces, must be treated with caution. Debut novelist Rhian Elizabeth opens Hannah’s notebook up on her own little world of crazy friends and crazy family, and a crazy school with crazy teachers who aren’t always what they seem. From dolls and sherbet lemons, to a bright student who drops out of school in favour of drink, drugs and glam rock up on an estate which feels like another planet, Hannah, it seems, has always been trouble.

Unreliable narrators, such fun! This sounds a little bit quirky and a little bit coming-of-agey. All good things!

Fountainville by Tishani Doshi

From the Seren website:

Fountainville is a strange, lonely town on the edge of everywhere, with its own healing secrets, as revealed by Luna, assistant to Begum, the Lady of the Fountain, in this retelling of celtic Mabinogion myth by poet and novelist Tishani Doshi. Under their care the town flourishes, but when the mysterious Mr Knight arrives at their house of 24 women everything begins to change. Aided by Rafi, the giant of the woods and the all-action Leo, events begin to unravel fast for Luna and Begum.

Seren publish a series similar to Canongate's Myth series, of retellings of stories from the Mabinogion. In case you're unfamiliar (which I somehow was until I watched a thing with Cerys Matthews on the BBC a couple of years back!) the Mabinogion is Britain's earliest prose literature and is made up of eleven prose stories from the oral tradition compiled in the 12th and 13th centuries by Welsh medieval authors. This seemed like a great place to start with a series I will clearly want to read all of! Plus the covers are beautifully designed for the entire series!

In case you're interested or in need of indie inspiration, I'm making a wishlist of indie titles, feel free to check it out!

Catch up with the rest of the Make Mine an Indie series here. 

Find Seren on their website, Facebook, twitter or Pinterest.

Make Mine an Indie: Bluemoose Books

Happy Saturday everyone, and welcome back to another edition of Make Mine an Indie; my weekly series featuring independent publishers and bookshops. Since starting this project I've been keeping a list and whenever I discover a new indie through browsing in bookshops, people tweeting stuff, blog posts or just idle googling, they get added onto the list. It's currently a little bit obscene, and the more publishers I add to it the more ashamed I am that only 30 or so of my 300 strong TBR is published by independents. There is no reason for this besides laziness really and I shall rectify it!

Which brings me onto this weeks publisher. Bluemoose Books have an absolutely incredible logo, as you can see, but as well as that they publish some brilliant sounding books! They were founded by Kevin and Hetha Duffy in 2006 in response to a deluge of celebrity biographies taking up all the shelf space and most of the budgets of the big publishing houses. Bluemoose exists (in their words) 'to publish cracking stories that engage and inspire'. They work very hard on the design of their books and want them to pass the 'strokeability' test (come on, we've all done it) and they operate as a family of readers and writers. So far while researching this series this has been my favourite thing about independents vs. the big publishing houses - they feel so much closer knit and like you as the reader can get much closer to them. 

Sometimes when I'm browsing catalogues looking for things to put in this section I have to push myself a little - not that I'm ever not looking forward to the things I say I'm looking forward to, but some more than others- but this week there was no pushing. It was difficult to make myself stop at four!

Beastings by Benjamin Myers

From the Bluemoose website:

A girl and a baby. A priest and a poacher. A savage pursuit through the landscape of a changing rural England. When a teenage girl leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is called upon to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of a distant past, the girl fights starvation and the elements, encountering the hermits, farmers and hunters who occupy the remote hillside communities. Like an American Southern Gothic tale set against the violent beauty of Northern England, Beastings is a sparse and poetic novel about morality, motherhood, and corruption.

I have to say I really love the cover of this novel and that was what first caught my eye, but when I read the synopsis it sounds fascinating. 

If you look for me, I am not here by Sarayu Srivatsa

From the Bluemoose website:

When Mallika loses her longed-for daughter at birth, it is not the only loss in the family: the surviving twin - a boy - loses the love of his mother. He grows up needing to be the daughter his mother wants, the son his scientist father accepts, and more, with the guilt of being the one who survived. In a recently independent India, haunted by its colonial past and striving to find its identity, he struggles to find his own self. Sarayu Srivatsa has created a moving family portrait, richly-coloured by the vibrant culture and landscape of India, where history, religion and gender collide in a family scarred by the past and struggling with the present.

This sounds really fascinating and ties in with my challenge to read more diversely as well as to support indies. 

A Modern Family by Socrates Adams

From the Bluemoose website:

Television’s most popular car show presenter lives his life in the shadow of his career and his persona. He has the perfect job. He doesn’t have the perfect family. His wife retches in the bathrooms of exclusive restaurants; his daughter’s obsession with a friend is consuming her; his son lives a double life selling pornography by day and gaming on-line by night. The presenter views his family from the outside and watches as they slowly disintegrate in front of him, unable to control anything that is not scripted.

Socrates Adams perfectly mirrors what magazines sell to their readers in a bleak, satirical look at what modern families might think they want to be.

I love the sound of this. I'm always interested in books that have famous people as their protagonist, especially when they centre around the family dynamics. Honestly I just enjoy books that are about families and the way they work (or fail to) and this sounds fantastic. 

King Crow by Michael Stewart

From the Bluemoose website:

Paul Cooper is an outsider. When he looks at people he wonders what bird they are. He finds making friends difficult especially when he has to move from school to school, so he obsesses about ornithology until he meets Ashley.

Ashley is everything that Cooper isn’t, he’s tough and good looking, with so much street cred he can divvy up some for Paul as well. When they get into trouble with a local gang they steal a car and head for the Lakes – Ashley because he thinks he may have killed somebody, and Cooper because he wants to see ravens. Their flight is hectic and intense, and in the middle of it all one of them meets a girl and the other feels pushed out. The three of them find refuge for a time in Helvellyn, but things are falling apart and soon their road trip makes national headlines… for all the wrong reasons.

This just sounds awesome to be honest. I have no better reason than that. 

Find Bluemoose Books on their website and twitter. 
Catch up with the Make Mine an Indie series here.

Make Mine an Indie: Self Made Hero

I've been doing this feature for almost six months now and I thought it was about time that I mentioned a graphic novel publisher! A few weeks ago I was up in London and browsing in Foyles. I'd given myself a one book allowance and couldn't decide between The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman and Scott McCloud's The Sculptor, which I've been hearing incredible stuff about for ages. Then I remembered my Make Mine an Indie goal this year, and so I went with The Sculptor which is independently published. The Sandman, while still incredible, is Vertigo. It had the added bonus of bringing another independent publisher to my attention, and so I give you this week's feature!

Self Made Hero was founded in 2007 by Emma Hayley, who was named UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year in 2008. She saw a gap in the market for high quality graphic novels and now publishes "independently minded, commercially successful" work along with graphic novels in translation, which is something I am always interested in! 

The nice thing about Self Made Hero is the range of things they produce. As well as original fiction and non-fiction, they have a series called Art Masters, currently consisting of Pablo, Vincent and Rembrandt, with Munch forthcoming this May, and Graphic Freud, which is Sigmund Freud's most famous case studies in graphic form. Besides these they publish Manga Shakespeare and a wide range of graphic biographies, Sci Fi & Horror, Crime, Humour and Short Stories, which really dispells the myth that graphic novels are all about superheroes...

On browsing their website it transpires that a lot of the fiction they publish is things I've already been eyeing up in the indie section of Forbidden Planet for the past year or so, so without further ado here are a few of their titles I'm looking forward to! 

Ruins by Peter Kuper

From the Self Made Hero website:

Samantha and George are a couple heading towards a sabbatical year in the quaint Mexican town of Oaxaca. For Samantha, it is the opportunity to revisit her past. For George, it is an unsettling step into the unknown. For both of them, it will be a collision course with political and personal events that will alter their paths and the town of Oaxaca forever. In tandem, the remarkable and arduous journey that a monarch butterfly endures on its annual migration from Canada to Mexico is woven into Ruins. This creates a parallel picture of the challenges of survival in our ever-changing world. Ruins explores the shadows and light of Mexico through its past and present as encountered by an array of characters. The real and surreal intermingle to paint an unforgettable portrait of life south of the Rio Grande. 

I don't remember where I first heard about this but it's been on the ridiculously big pile of graphic novels I carry round the shop with me and then put back more times than I care to remember. I think this year is probably its year...

Celeste by I.N.J Culbard

From the Self Made Hero website:

In London, the moment two commuters, Aaron and Lilly, lay eyes on each other on a packed Monday morning tube train, everyone else around them vanishes. In Los Angeles, Ray is sitting in gridlock on the 405 Freeway when he receives a call from an LAPD officer about his wife. Ray fears the worst. But just as the officer is about to give Ray the news, he is cut off. The caller has disappeared, and so has everyone else around him. Everyone except for a badly beaten man tied up in the trunk of another car. In Japan, comic artist Yoshi has come to the demonhaunted Aokigahara Forest to die, but the spirits of the forest have other ideas. Taking us through the deserted streets of London, the empty freeways of Los Angeles, and the dream world of the Aokigahara Forest, Celeste is a compelling and profound graphic novel about the choices we make and the courage it takes to make them.

I'd never heard of this before I started browsing Self Made Hero's website but it sounds like an extremely intriguing concept! I love it when things sound quirky and this definitely does!

Terra Australis by L.F Bollee and Philippe Nicloux

From the Self Made Hero website:

Over two centuries ago, a fleet of ships set sail from England led by Admiral Arthur Phillip. Of the thousand men and women on board, most were convicts, sentenced to transportation for crimes against the crown, and banished to exile. They were bound for Botany Bay, on the other side of the world, in the freshly charted territory of New South Wales. The journey to their new home would take them across three oceans, cover 15,000 miles, and leave them on the shores of a vast and virgin continent.

Five years in the making, LF Bollée and Philippe Nicloux present Terra Australis, the vivid and sweeping tale of an epic journey and an unflinching account of the founding of modern Australia.

I have family in Australia and I've been there and it just seems wrong that I don't know more about it besides that we send all our convicts there. Graphic form for me is a great way to learn things in an absorbing and interesting way, because it's usually quite a quick read. I'm looking forward to this. 

A Chinese Life by Philippe Otie and Li Kunwu

From the Self Made Hero website:

Already a modern classic, this remarkable book traces a personal journey through modern history, from the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to the present day. Li Kunwu has created a timely and compelling memoir of state and self that is at once epic and intimate, comic and tragic, in scope.

Another one I've picked up so many times before. It's no secret that I'm obsessed with Chinese history and the artwork for this is beautiful as well as the subject being fascinating to me. I may have bought this already by the time this post goes up!

As well as these titles I should also include The Sculptor by Scott McCloud, which I'm going to start reading next, and Bryan Lee O'Malley's Seconds which I read in 2015 (without paying aaaaany attention to who published it!) and really enjoyed. 

Catch up on the Make Mine an Indie series here. 

Find Self Made Hero at their website, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

London Bookshop Crawl: London Review Bookshop

It's another not really edition of Make Mine an Indie featuring another stop on our London Bookshop Crawl! It's just a couple of weeks away and honestly browsing the websites to write these posts has ramped my excitement levels up to fever pitch. When the day actually comes I may be so excited I'll have lost all ability to actually make words and will just run round waving all my bookish tote bags at people. You have been warned...

When we voted for the shops we wanted to include in the itinerary for this event the London Review Bookshop came top, and looking at the website I can see why. It looks like it has everything I want in a bookshop; space to browse without falling over each other, amazing cake and a lot of books. I watched their short video of their customers talking about why they love the bookshop and several people said something about wanting to go to bookshops to find the thing they didn't know they wanted to read and I was there nodding along. I've steered myself away from writing any kinds of lists for the crawl as I want to surprise myself with what I'll find and I'm particularly excited about what I might find here.

The London Review Bookshop was opened by the London Review of Books in 2003 and considering it's round the corner from the British Museum and has cake it's a bit of a travesty that I've not yet been there. They stock over 20,000 titles in a massive range of subjects and aim to be "intelligent without being pompous; engaged without being partisan". Honestly, I think we're going to do very well there...

If you haven't already please, please check out their website. In the about section they have a little map of all the things they think you should do around Bloomsbury once you've visited them, and I kind of wish we could. I once did a writers walk around that area, finding blue plaques for Virginia Woolf et al and it was awesome... Another thing for another time!

Add to all of this the fact that they have their own cake shop, in which the tea is served 'in the manner that most complements its flavour'. They have an actual tea menu and it's nine pages long. I feel like I've found my spiritual home, after all this time.

As you can see, these posts are a little more biased than my Make Mine an Indie posts usually are, but that's because I've been excited about organising the bookshop crawl for so long now that it's literally getting to the point where all I can do is jump up and down and squeak about it. Also all of these bookshops look so awesome that it's impossible not to get excited about them. Honestly I think my excitement levels show how I did exactly the right thing starting this blog.

If you've been and have other good things to say about it that I've missed out please feel free to say them in the comments, and if you're on the bookshop crawl with me please be aware that you may have to physically remove me from this shop...

Find the London Review Bookshop on their website, twitter (for the book shop and the cake shop), Facebook and Instagram or with us on February 6th!

Check out my posts about other #LondonBookshopCrawl stops Orbital Comics and Persephone or catch up with the rest of the Make Mine an Indie series here.

Make Mine an Indie: Oneworld

Today's publisher for Make Mine an Indie I discovered not through my usual trawling of the internet, but through actual browsing in an actual bookshop. I was in Waterstone's a few weeks back and as per my resolution, since it's not an independent I was looking for a book published by an independent. Off the top of my head, of course, I couldn't remember the titles of anything I'd been intrigued by before in this series, so I was just picking stuff up at random and came across The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-Mi Hwang which as well as having a beautiful cover and a Korean author (hello diversity) was also published by an independent. Obviously I bought it, and then I did a little digging about the publisher. 

Oneworld was founded in 1986 and originally focused on publishing non-fiction. Nowadays they publish a wide range of stuff and have two imprints; Rock the Boat for children's and young adult fiction, and Point Blank which specialises in crime and is launching in spring of this year. They have a commitment to great writing and editorial excellence and their fiction aims to introduce readers to different cultures or historical periods or events. I'm shocked I'd not heard of them before, and it just shows how little attention I've been paying to who publishes my books because I got My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem as part of the Nonfiction Book Swap, which is published by them and didn't even notice!

Oneworld are responsible for publishing the UK editions of the 2015 Man Booker Prize Winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, in the course of which I am reliably assured that more than seven people die. They also published Bailey's Prize Longlisted Reasons She Goes to the Woods by Deborah Kay Davies and Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlisted (in good company with the amazing - not published by Oneworld - If I Fall, if I Die by Michael Christie) The Orenda by Joseph Boyden. I haven't read either of these but they are both on my TBR so it was exciting to learn who's getting them into my hands!

With that in mind, obviously the books that I'm interested in reading from this publisher immediately include The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly and My Life on the Road, but besides those two here are a few which have immediately caught my eye:

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

From the Oneworld website:

In post-9/11 New York, Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant from northwest China. A Muslim with a Uighur mother and a Han soldier for a father, she’s a pariah even within the Chinese community. Forced to work fourteen-hour days and live in squalor, she nevertheless embraces the many freedoms her adopted homeland has to offer.

Damaged by three tours in Iraq, veteran Brad Skinner comes to New York with the sole intention of partying as hard as he can in order to forget what he’s seen. Impulsive and angry, Skinner’s re-entry into civilian life seems doomed. But when he meets Zou Lei they discover that new beginnings may be possible for both of them, that is if they can survive homelessness, lockup and Skinner’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

Set in the underbelly of New York, Preparation for the Next Life exposes an America as seen from the fringes of society in devastating detail and destroys the myth of the American Dream through two of the most remarkable characters in contemporary fiction. Powerful, realistic and raw, this is one of the most ambitious – and necessary – chronicles of our time.

Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont

From the Oneworld website:

Jack Shanley is a well-known New York artist, charming and vain, who doesn’t mean to plunge his family into crisis. His wife, Deb, gladly left behind a difficult career as a dancer to raise the two children she adores. In the ensuing years, she has mostly avoided coming face-to-face with the weaknesses of the man she married. But then an anonymously sent package arrives in the mail: a cardboard box containing sheaves of printed emails chronicling Jack’s secret life. The package is addressed to Deb, but it’s delivered into the wrong hands: her children’s.
 
With this vertiginous opening begins a debut that is by turns funny, wise, and indescribably moving. As the Shanleys spin apart into separate orbits, leaving New York in an attempt to regain their bearings, fifteen-year-old Simon feels the allure of adult freedoms for the first time, while eleven-year-old Kay wanders precariously into a grown-up world she can’t possibly understand. Writing with extraordinary precision, humour, and beauty, Julia Pierpont has crafted a timeless, hugely enjoyable novel about the bonds of family life – their brittleness, and their resilience.

French Concession by Xiao Bai

From the Oneworld website:

A boat arrives in Shanghai harbor to the raucous sound of firecrackers. An important official in the Nationalist Party has returned from Hong Kong, accompanied by his striking wife, Leng. An assassin suddenly appears, firing three bullets before killing himself. Leng disappears in the ensuing chaos.

Hseuh, a Franco-Chinese photographer, is captivated by Leng’s beauty. But he has his own problems: he suspects that his White Russian lover, Therese, is cheating. When Hseuh is arrested in the French Concession and forced to become a police spy, he realizes that in the seamy, devious world of Shanghai, no one is who they appear. Therese is secretly an arms dealer, supplying Shanghai’s gangs, while Leng, has her own ties to a menacing new gang, one led by a charismatic Communist whose acts of  terrorism could have a devastating impact on the entire country. Soon Hseuh is forced to play both sides, spinning his own lies in a feverish struggle to stay alive.

Unfinished Busines: Men Women Work Family by Anne-Marie Slaughter

From the Oneworld website:

When Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic article,"Why Women Still Can't Have it All"first appeared, it immediately went viral, sparking a firestorm of debate across countries and continents. Within four days, it had become the most-read article in the history of the magazine. In the following months, Slaughter became a leading voice in the discussion on work-life balance and on women's changing role in the workplace.

Now, Slaughter is here with her eagerly anticipated take on the problems we still face, and how we can finally get past them. In her pragmatic, down-to-earth style, Slaughter bursts the bubble on all the"half-truths"we tell young women about"having it all", and explains what is really necessary to get true gender equality, both in the workplace and at home. Deeply researched, and filled with all the warm, wise and funny anecdotes that first made her the most trusted and admired voice on the issue, Anne-Marie Slaughter's book is sure to change minds, ignite debate and be the topic of conversation.

The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley

From the Oneworld website:

After Ann Walmsley was mugged near her house in Hampstead, she found she was unable to walk alone down the street and it shook her belief in the fundamental goodness of people. In Canada a few years later, when her friend Carol asked her to participate in a bold new venture in a men’s medium security prison, Ann had to weigh her curiosity and desire to be of service with her anxiety and fear.

But she signed up and for eighteen months went to a remote building a few hours outside of Toronto, meeting a group of heavily tattooed book club members without the presence of guards or security cameras. There was no wine and cheese, plush furnishings, or superficial chat about jobs or recent vacations. But a book club on the inside proved to be a place to share ideas, learn about each other, and regain humanity. 

For the men, the books were rare prized possessions, and the meetings were an oasis of safety and a respite from isolation in an otherwise hostile environment. Having been judged themselves, they were quick to make judgments about the books they read. As they discussed the obstacles the characters faced, they revealed glimpses of their own struggles that were devastating and comic. From The Grapes of Wrath to The Cellist of Sarajevo, and Outliers to Infidel, the book discussions became a springboard for frank conversations about loss, anger, redemption, heroism and loneliness.

I'm sticking to four as usual for this, but I urge you to go and look through their catalogue as it's full of wonderful sounding and intriguing titles!

You can find Oneworld on their website, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Catch up with the entire Make Mine an Indie series here, my indie resolution here, and if you're in need of inspiration, my mostly indie wishlist here. Follow along on twitter #MakeMineanIndie. 

Make Mine an Indie: Far Far Away Books

Make Mine an Indie has been on an unexpected hiatus for several weeks, but I'm back this week with a post that's a little out of the ordinary.

A while ago we read a book from the library, Sylvester and the New Year and I was so enchanted by it - the story, the illustration, the production of the book, everything - that I had to contact the publishers and thank them for it, and they were kind enough to send me some books to read with my kids and review here on the blog! So instead of my usual post, this week I will talk a little about the publisher and then review four of the seven books that they sent me. The others will be coming soon, I just wanted to be in keeping with the number of books that I usually talk about!

There isn't a huge amount online about Far Far Away Books, but I have discovered that they were founded in 2011 and are a publisher of a large number of beautiful picture books for children of various ages. They also publish a beautiful range of fairy tales, one of which will be featured in this post, and for all of which they plant a tree for every book sold. You can see the book trailer for The Three Little Pigs here.

The books are also all beautiful, colourful and printed on high quality paper (and would make brilliant Christmas presents this time of year!).

I'll start with our favourite of the lovely books we were sent. Rumplestiltskin by Noel Grammont and Peter Bailey is a retelling of the popular fairy tale, of which I've always been a fan. In a lot of ways this retelling is very faithful to the original which I really liked as I don't like it when fairy tales are totally changed in order to cater to kids, but the ending is a little nicer and more resolved than the original tale as I remember it, which I thought worked very well. We took it on a train journey with us the day it arrived and read it about five times that day alone I believe - high praise from my three year old! My favourite thing about it though is how eye catching it is. Inside the text is often in different sizes and colours for emphasis and it makes it really fun to read. I also thought the illustration was absolutely beautiful; not at all overdone and pretty much perfect to compliment the story. I forsee it being loved for a long time to come!

Also by Noel Grammont with Nina Filipek and Emmeline Pidgen is The Ocean Counting Book, a simple and sweet little story about a giraffe who is tired of looking at trees and builds a boat to discover new things in the ocean. Again it's really colourful and charming and we had to spend a while on any page with fish on as Sam is currently obsessed with the word ('fis!' 'fis!'). It's a lovely, beautifully produced counting book with a very sweet little story.






The last two I want to talk about today are both by Chloe Elliot and Dean Russell and were also both big hits with the kids. So Frog is a great, simple little story about a frog who hops away from his mummy and all the things that he does during his busy day. As you can probably see from the cover illustrations, it's also full of colour (a recurring theme with these gorgeous books) and the rhymes are lovely. It's a much simpler story than Rumplestiltskin and suits a younger age group perfectly. Sam brings it to me a couple of times a week at the moment which is impressive considering he often won't sit through a story unless it's bedtime.

Finally Mouse and the Moon Made of Cheese tells the tale of a mouse who believes the moon is made of cheese and wants to eat it up. He goes around asking people who he thinks will be able to help him get to the moon, and despite them all telling him he's wrong and the moon is not made of cheese, he never gives up. A funny little story about not giving up on your dreams, and again gorgeously illustrated.

There are a lot of interesting looking titles coming in 2016 from Far Far Away Books and I'm so thankful to them for sending us these beautiful books to read and love! Reviews of the other three will be coming very soon, but in the meantime you can find out about them on their website.

Catch up with the rest of the Make Mine an Indie series here

Make Mine an Indie: Hurst Publishers

This month I'm tying in my Make Mine an Indie features on independent publishers with an amazing event that's going on in the blogging world: Nonfiction November. I kicked off last week featuring Icon Books and this week I'm back with another nonfiction publisher! Also just in case you've not seen the Nonfiction November greatness, you can check out all of the week one posts here and catch up with my year in nonfiction and a few of my nonfiction favourites.

Hurst was founded in in 1969 by Christopher Hurst with the aim of publishing books that were scrupulously edited and produced and about subjects close to his heart. Today Hurst publishes around 80 titles per year, with their strengths being African Studies, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, South Asian Studies and War and International Relations.

All of these are things that I don't feel I know enough about, so I was excited to dig through their catalogues. As always, here are a few titles I'm excited about

Icons of Dissent: The Global Resonance of Che, Marley, Tupac and Bin Laden by Jeremy Presholdt
From the Hurst website:

The global icon is an omnipresent but poorly understood element of mass culture. This book asks why audiences around the world have embraced a small number of iconic figures and what this tells us about cross-border, trans-cultural relations since the Cold War. Prestholdt addresses these questions by examining one type of figure: the ‘anti-system’ icon. These popular icons are symbols of alienation and aspiration that can be integrated into diverse political and consumer cultures.

To illustrate these points the book examines four of the most evocative and controversial figures of the past fifty years: Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur and Osama bin Laden. Each has embodied a convergence of dissent, cultural politics and consumerism, yet the popularity of each reveals the dissonance between shared, global references and locally contingent traditions. By examining four very different figures, Icons of Dissent offers new insights into transnational symbolic idioms, the mutability of common references and the commodification of political sentiment in the contemporary world.

The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar's Hidden Genocide by Azeem Ibrahim

From the Hurst website:

The Rohingyas are a Muslim group who live in Rakhine state (formerly Arakan state) in western Myanmar (Burma), a majority Buddhist country. According to the United Nations, they are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. They suffer routine discrimination at the hands of neighbouring Buddhist Rakhine groups, but international human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have also accused Myanmar’s authorities of being complicit in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslims. The Rohingyas face regular violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, extortion, and other abuses, a situation that has been particularly acute since 2012 in the wake of a serious wave of sectarian violence. Islam is practised by around 4 per cent of the population of Myanmar, and most Muslims also identify as Rohingya. Yet the authorities refuse to recognise them as one of the 135 ethnic groups or ‘national races’ making up Myanmar’s population. On this basis, Rohingya individuals are denied citizenship rights in the country of their birth, and face severe limitations on many aspects of an ordinary life, such as marriage or movement around the country.

Fortress Europe: Inside the War Against Immigration by Matthew Carr
From the Hurst website: 

When the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, a euphoric continent hailed the advent of a new ‘borderless’ Europe in which such barriers would become obsolete. More than twenty-five years later, in the midst of the continent’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, European governments have enacted the most sustained and far-reaching border enforcement programme in history. Detention and deportation, physical and bureaucratic barriers, naval patrols and satellite technologies: all these have been part of Europe’s undeclared ‘war’ against undocumented immigration.

These efforts have generated a tragic confrontation between some of the richest countries in the world and a stateless population from the poorest. The human consequences of that confrontation have become impossible to ignore, as migrants drown in unprecedented numbers in the Mediterranean or find themselves trapped in chokepoints like Calais, Hungary and Greece. As Europe’s leaders argue among themselves, the continent’s ‘hard borders’ are breaking down and it is increasingly unclear what will replace them.

Fortress Europe, published here in a revised and updated edition, is an urgent investigation into Europe’s militarised borders. In a series of searing dispatches, Carr speaks to border officers and police, officials, migrants, asylum-seekers and activists from across the continent in a unique and ground-breaking critique of an epic political, institutional and humanitarian failure that now threatens the future of the European Union itself.

As always there are a lot more titles I could have put here, but these look the most immediately interesting to me! If you want to browse for yourself you can find their catalogue at the Hurst website, or follow them on twitter or facebook.

Catch up with the rest of the Make Mine an Indie series here.

Make Mine an Indie: Icon Books

Another Saturday, another Make Mine an Indie! As you're reading this I'm off gallivanting in London with Katie and Laura and probably buying lots of books, at least some of which will be from independent bookshops & publishers. 

This coming week marks the beginning of Nonfiction November and in honour of it I'm going to feature a publisher of non-fiction each week during the month. To kick it all off we have Icon Books, publisher of non-fiction including the series originally entitled ...For Beginners (e.g Freud for Beginners) and now entitled Introducing.. You've probably seen them on those little twirling stands in bookshops and museum and gallery giftshops. I'm very tempted by them a lot of the time. However Icon also publish a lot of other titles!

Icon were founded in 1992 and have been publishing quality non-fiction since then. This being the first week of November I thought it made sense to focus on a non-fiction publisher, and I'll be keeping the focus towards the factual throughout the month.

As usual, here are some of their titles that I'm most excited about:

A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road by Christopher Aslan Alexander
From the Icon website:

The Silk Road conjures images of the exotic and the unknown. Most travellers simply pass along it. Brit Chris Alexander chose to live there. Ostensibly writing a guidebook, Alexander found life at the heart of the glittering madrassahs, mosques and minarets of the walled city of Khiva – a remote desert oasis in Uzbekistan – immensely alluring, and stayed. Immersing himself in the language and rich cultural traditions Alexander discovers a world torn between Marx and Mohammed – a place where veils and vodka, pork and polygamy freely mingle – against a backdrop of forgotten carpet designs, crumbling but magnificent Islamic architecture and scenes drawn straight from “The Arabian Nights”. Accompanied by a large green parrot, a ginger cat and his adoptive Uzbek family, Alexander recounts his efforts to rediscover the lost art of traditional weaving and dyeing, and the process establishing a self-sufficient carpet workshop, employing local women and disabled people to train as apprentices. “A Carpet Ride to Khiva” sees Alexander being stripped naked at a former Soviet youth camp, crawling through silkworm droppings in an attempt to record their life-cycle, holed up in the British Museum discovering carpet designs dormant for half a millennia, tackling a carpet-thieving mayor, distinguishing natural dyes from sacks of opium in Northern Afghanistan, bluffing his way through an impromptu version of “My Heart Will Go On” for national Uzbek TV and seeking sanctuary as an anti-Western riot consumed the Kabul carpet bazaar. It is an unforgettable true travel story of a journey to the heart of the unknown and the unexpected friendship one man found there.

Crunch Time: How Everyday Life is Killing the Future by Adrian Monck and Mike Hadley

From the Icon website:

“Crunch Time” features two award-winning journalists arguing about the impact of our unthinking everyday actions on the future of our world. Every age and every generation thinks it’s special, that it’s on the cusp of something big. This time it’s true – it’s Crunch Time, and what we do now will make or break the future. The problem is that the things that we do every day – drive to work, buy toys for our kids, prepare our meals, have a cup of coffee – are conspiring to break it. Terrorism, poverty, ecological meltdown, climate change, pandemics – this is the background noise we have all learnt to live with. But what if all these things could be laid at our own feet? What if our civilisation is structurally, tragically flawed? What if we are using up tomorrow today? Our society is moving faster than ever, yet it’s also increasingly fragile and filled with risk. In “Crunch Time”, journalists Adrian Monck and Mike Hanley argue passionately with each other about the causes of these issues and what we can do about them. Believing that living in the 21st century means being answerable to the future, they help us to understand the critical decisions that we need to make now if we want to leave anything of value to future generations.

Man Up by Jack Unwin

From the Icon Website:

This won't be published until June 2016 but it sounds fantastic. It's by the guy who wrote this article and is all about masculinity and how it's in crisis and what it even means to be a man in today's society. I cannot wait to read it. 

Finding Home: Real Stories of Migrant Britain by Emily Dugan
From the Icon Website:

Award-winning reporter Emily Dugan’s Finding Home follows the tumultuous lives of a group of immigrants, all facing intense challenges in their quest to live in the UK.

Syrian refugee Emad set up the Free Syrian League and worked illegally in the UK to pay for his mother to be smuggled across the Mediterranean on a perilous trip from Turkey. Even if she survives the journey, Emad knows it will be an uphill struggle to get her into Britain.

Australian therapist Harley risks deportation despite serving the NHS for ten years and being told by the Home Office she could stay. Teaching assistant Klaudia is one of thousands of Polish people now living in Boston, Lincolnshire – a microcosm of poorly managed migration. Aderonke, a leading Manchester LGBT activist, lives in a tiny B&B room in Salford with her girlfriend, Happiness, and faces deportation and persecution.
Dugan’s timely and acutely observed book reveals the intense personal dramas of ordinary men and women as they struggle to find somewhere to call home. It shows that migration is not about numbers, votes or opinions: it is about people.

This book sounds incredible, and such an important read given what's going on in the world right now. I've actually just had a look and it's in my library so I've ordered it in to read during Nonfiction November!

Find Icon at their website, on twitter, facebook and Pinterest.

Catch up with the rest of the Make Mine an Indie series here.