Kamila Shamsie; A God in Every Stone

'Kamila Shamsie's new novel deals with vast sweeps of history. Within its 300 pages, a story unfolds that covers the travels of the fifth-century BCE explorer Scylax, working on behalf of the Persian king Darius I; an attempt by early 20th-century archaeologists to recover the circlet worn by Scylax; the outbreak of the first world war; the experiences of Indian Army troops on the western front and later as injured servicemen in Brighton hospitals; the rise of the non-violent independence movement in Peshawar and the bloody killing of non-violent protesters by the British Army in 1930, in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani Bazaar.

The story follows a young Londoner, Vivian Rose Spencer, from an archaeological dig in Turkey back to Britain where she works as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the first world war. After a crucial betrayal, she travels on to Peshawar. At the same time, the Pashtun soldier Qayyum Gul goes to Flanders with the 40th Pathans, who fought heroically and suffered devastating casualties during the second battle of Ypres in April 1915. Wounded, Qayyum is treated in Brighton before returning home to Peshawar to wrestle with his injuries and changed loyalties. Qayyum's brilliant younger brother, Najeeb, completes the circle by becoming Vivian's pupil, and later an archaeologist and "campaigner for the freedom from Empire for the peoples of India and Britain". On its way, A God in Every Stone takes in British women's battle for suffrage and the prelude to the Armenian genocide.

A novel that successfully connects and brings to life such a mass of material must be exceptionally brilliant, and possibly quite long. A God in Every Stone is an ambitious piece of work, and its pages are lit by Shamsie's eloquent prose'....Read more at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/18/a-god-every-stone-kamila-shamsie-review-story-histories

Kamila Shamsie will be in conversation with Xiaolu Guo at Mountains to Sea on Saturday September 13th at 6.30pm. This event will be chaired by Dublin novelist, short story writer and dramatist Mia Gallagher. Both authors were nominees for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2013. Get your tickets now!

Interview with author Lee Child 

about JACK REACHER and Tom 

Cruise's height!!

Jessica Mazo interviews bestselling author Lee Child, who writes the Jack Reacher Novels, at ThrillerFest in NYC. They discuss what it's like to get your books turned into films, and how he feels about Tom Cruise!

Get your tickets now to see LEE CHILD at Mountains to Sea 2014 on 14th Sept at 4.30 in the Pavilion Theatre. http://www.mountainstosea.ie/2014-Events/lee-child.html

LEE CHILD
Jack gets personal with rogue sniper

Myles McWeeney on the latest Reacher novel from Lee Child, already lined up for a Tom Cruise movie

Personal is the latest story in the highly successful series of adventures penned by British-born author Lee Child about Jack Reacher, a former hard man in the US Military Police who, by his own choice, became a rootless drifter roaming America righting wrongs and dispensing his own frequently lethal form of justice. 

In this story he is in Seattle when the army reaches out to him. An expert sniper has a shot at the French president and the army brass suspects the shooter could be a former American Special Operations operative called John Kott. Reacher and Kott have history, because 16 years ago Reacher had tracked him down and put him in prison after he had committed a rather messy murder. The army wants him to do that all over again.

Reacher is sent across the Atlantic in the company of a young female CIA operative called Casey Nice, first to France to assess the scene of the unsuccessful assassination attempt, and then to London, where a G8 Summit is due to be held which will be attended by the President of the United States.

The US military are convinced Kott is targeting a head of state at the G8 Summit, but Reacher has come to realise that Kott is actually seeking revenge for the 15 years he has spent in prison and that he himself is the real target. Reacher discovers that Kott is in the employ of Little Joey, a vicious London crime lord, and to flush him out into the open he must penetrate the crime boss's secure base.

Packed with arcane and fascinating detail about the mechanics of sniping and a whole range of other subjects, Child's almost trademarked and seriously addictive clipped prose and dialogue keeps Personal clipping along at breakneck pace with the tension ratcheting up satisfactorily to the inevitably bloody conclusion

- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/jack-gets-personal-with-rogue-sniper-30524134.html#sthash.Kxhgt1xu.dpuf

Book your tickets now for Lee Child in conversation with Declan Hughes, on Sunday Sept 14th @ 4.30pm  http://www.mountainstosea.ie/2014-Events/lee-child.html

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/jack-gets-personal-with-rogue-sniper-30524134.html

One Day to go to the first event 

of Mountains to Sea 

2014 

Martin Amis we await you!!!

Listen out for On Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival Curator Bert Wright talking books with Edel Coffey after 11am on Today with Sean O'Rourke on RTE Radio 1.
Matin Amis talks to Pat Kenny on NewsTalk this morning after 10.30 am.

 Don’t miss Mountains to Sea’s first cabaret event!

We are delighted to announce that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Writer in Residence for 2014-15, Colm Keegan, will present an eclectic mix of arts and entertainment in the Maritime Museum on Friday 12th September @ 7pm. Colm contributes to RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena and his debut collection, Don’t Go There was released in 2012. 

Since he started his residency, he has seen the reopening of Blackrock Library and the move into the new dlr LexIcon in Dún Laoghaire where he has a dedicated room on the top floor.

With poetry from acts due to feature in the upcoming Lingo Festival in October, music from Ailie Blunnie, comedy from Eleanor Tiernan and more, this will be the springboard event for a series showcasing Dublin’s burgeoning independent live arts scene. Get booking now! 

It all sounds a bit like the Rose of Tralee – but even scarier...

Robert Dunbar's review of Louise O’Neill’s remarkable debut novel, Only Ever Yours (Quercus),  from the Irish Times on Saturday 23rd August. Louuse o'Neill will be at Mountains to Sea for 'Going Too Far? Panel Discussion on Young Adult fiction' on Saturday 13th September at 4.30pm in the dlr LexIcon. Elaina Ryan, CBI Director will be chairing this discussion. Get booking now! http://bit.ly/1okFjHO

'Louise O’Neill’s remarkable debut novel, Only Ever Yours merits attention and commendation on several levels. In one sense, and particularly because of its structure and suspense-fuelled plot, it qualifies as an easy read, but in terms of its content, little about it is easy: numerous moments may well remind readers of those television news programmes that warn viewers that they may find certain images in the bulletin distressing.....

The novel is set in an unyieldingly strict boarding school where the student body (a phrase which here assumes a special significance) is exclusively female, the students being known as “eves”. As they approach their 16th year they prepare for “the Ceremony”, the final stage of the destiny that has awaited them since their creation, their entry into a world that in one way or another is male-ordered and male-controlled. Some will end up as “companions”, some will become “concubines” and some will remain, as “chastities”, teaching in the school.

In a book with many brilliantly realised sequences involving high drama, cruelty, exploitation and manipulation, the depiction of the particular selection process described here stands out as utterly compelling. A superb set piece, it all sounds a bit like the Rose of Tralee – but even scarier.

From such a scenario O’Neill has created a picture of young womanhood tortured by misogynistic demands and societal expectations into a grotesque caricature, overly concerned with their appearance, their sexual attractiveness and their standing with their peers.

This is, fundamentally, an extremely serious book, although along the way are pointed witty asides on today’s obsessions with the absurd trivia of our pop-culture world. Labelling it dystopian merely makes for facile categorisation: it has a much sharper focus than the term generally implies...' 

Read the full review at  http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/children-s-books-it-all-sounds-a-bit-like-the-rose-of-tralee-but-even-scarier-1.1901679

TG Lurgan at Mountains to Sea 2014!

Teachers, families, bright young things,be sure not to miss the massive Colaiste Lurgan outfit at Mountains to Sea 2014 - Sat 13th Sept @ 12.30pm.

We are delighted to welcome TG Lurgan to Mountains to Sea 2014! Thousands of students travel to Lurgan in Indreabhán every summer to brush up on their Irish, meet new friends and join in all the activities, céilís and fun. The students of Lurgan have an amazing reputation for high quality music videos with millions of followers on YouTube. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to join them as they bring their live music, infectious rhythms and film from the West to the East coast!

SPOTLIGHT ON ... TV EVENT

Over the next three weeks before the festival begins, we will highlight a number of events that you won't want to miss. First up is Making a Scene with Jed Mercurio and Michael Hirst. Over the last few years, our TV event has wowed audiences and we are delighted to welcome back script editor Rachel O'Flanagan who will chat to Jed Mercurio and Michael Hirst on Sunday September 14th at 6.30pm in the Pavilion Theatre.

Jed is best known for the series Line of Duty which was named in the Top 50 BBC2 Shows of All Time and two further series have been commissioned for 2015 and 2016. He has also written Bodies (based on his 2002 novel), The Grimleys and Cardiac Arrest.

Our second featured writer is Michael Hirst who created Vikings starring Gabriel Byrne (Season 3 is now in production in Ireland). He was also creator, executive producer and head writer on the Emmy-award winning and Golden Globe nominated series The Tudors starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Michael was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay for his feature filmElizabeth starring Cate Blanchett.

Make a note in your diary - you won't want to miss this one.

Bookings: http://www.mountainstosea.ie/2014-Events/making-a-scene-mercurio-hirst.html

Paperback Writer: Do Irish writers make a living?

These are tough times for publishing. It is a late but definite casualty of the recession, with falling sales, the steady rise of self-publishing and yet another crisis of identity in 'serious' literature. Emily Hourican asks if it is still possible to make a living as a writer

John Boyne, who is appearing at Mountains to Sea 2014 with David Mitchell on Friday, September 12th @ 8.30pm. 

'Anyone who was in London this summer, and saw posters for Eimear McBride's debut novel, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing plastered across the sides of buses, would have been forgiven for thinking this was the hot summer blockbuster and McBride the new EL James. A bonk-buster, perhaps; chick lit, certainly. In reality, McBride has been called Joycean, even Beckettian, by reviewers clearly struggling with conveying the substance of a book that has no formal plot. This is a work of 'serious' literature, with claims to rewriting the duties and scope of 'The Novel', but for promotional purposes, it's getting the Carrie Bradshaw treatment - the side of a bus.

It's a bit bizarre alright, but then, these are angsty times for publishing - falling sales and profits, bulk discounting, the rise of self-publishing, even a crisis of identity and aspiration in fiction. The novel, Will Self intoned in May, is dead, "and this time it's for real". Fearful publishing companies are reluctant to take chances any more, instead they are casting around for a 'sure thing', something to halt the rot.

So, what is catching their eye? Well, there is the slightly manic crossing of lines at the moment - a kind of tarts and vicars party in which serious writers masquerade as genre writers. This is not entirely new - Graham Greene wrote what he called 'entertainments', books like The Third Man and This Gun For Hire, alongside his 'serious' novels, like The Power and the Glory - but it is increasing.' .... see the full article on the Irish Independent website here

Teddy Bear Sleepover at Mountains to Sea 2014 is Coming!!

Look for the Mountains to Sea Teddy Bear Sleepover 

in September in the brand new LexIcon library - 

Are the teddies ready?

Would your Teddy or animal friend like to take part in our very special Library Sleepover? Drop her/him off at the festival tent and she/he will be escorted to the library for lots of sleepover fun with other bears – Teddy Bear Story Time, Teddy Bear Tea Party and lots more. Follow your Teddy’s antics on our festival’s Facebook page  during the evening from 7pm until their bedtime at 8pm.

Teddy bears or soft toys welcome (Their owners will be sleeping at home!)

Venue: dlr LexIcon
Register: Saturday September 13th between 2pm and 4pm at the festival desk at dlr LexIcon.*
Collect your bear: Sunday September 14th between 2pm and 4pm (at the festival desk)**
Age: all ages welcome
Free - no booking required

** Please collect your Teddy Bears on time or they will worry!

Unsettling, audacious Martin Amis: The Zone of Interest

In last Saturdays Irish Times (16th August), Eileen Battersby celebrated the "rampaging talent" of Martin Amis and his new novel: 'The zone of interest'.

 'For the prose alone it will be received as one of his most accomplished performances'. Martin Amis will be in conversation with Sean Rocks on Wednesday August 27th @ 8pm at Mountains to Sea 2014. Tickets available from Mountains to Sea 2014 website:  http://www.mountainstosea.ie/2014-Events/martin-amis.html

Review: A brave, humane novel, set in a concentration camp, takes a hard look the atrocities of the second World War 

'A man admits to watching a woman and her two daughters, all three wearing white dresses and cream-coloured straw hats, as they proceed along a tree-lined avenue. The narrator keeps pace, describing the scene as if it were a painting, and sounds smitten: “Something happened at first sight. Lightning, thunder, cloudburst, sunshine, rainbow – the meteorology of first sight.”

Later he confides to an old friend that it had made him feel young again. “It was like love . . . I said like love. Don’t look so stricken.Like love. A feeling of inevitability. You know. Like the birth of a long and wonderful romance. Romantic love.”

It begins casually, two youngish men chatting, lamenting their slightly younger selves, mocking the slightly older superior who managed to marry a beauty, the narrator’s love object. The men could be sitting in a country pub. Instead they have been posted to a wartime concentration camp. Exactly which one it is becomes clear at the mention of Ilse Grese, an infamous guard at Auschwitz who was later hanged for her war crimes. And “Uncle Martin” is not Amis taking a walk-on part; it is a reference to Hitler’s private secretary,Martin Bormann.

As a writer Martin Amis has consistently been daring and original, shocking and funny, and at times profoundly moving. He is a natural stylist and at his best – as in Money(1984), The Information (1995) and House of Meetings (2006), and in the nonfiction of his essays and memoir – he is the finest of British writers, a divider of opinion. With his linguistic panache and wicked humour, his inspired feel for a phrase or an image, Amis is always exciting.

The famous son of a famous father, Amis junior soon outwrote Kingsley. Although the life and times, loves and teeth of Martin Amis have filled many column inches, his work is the real story. His new novel is moral and emotive, a minefield through which Amis moves with a lightness of touch and profound intent.

The great WG Sebald maintained of the inhuman atrocities carried out in eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945 that no serious person could ever think about anything else, and Amis, for whom evil has become a prevailing theme, has taken this to heart. How did it happen? How could it happen? Novelists try to explain because historians have failed..'....

Continue reading at: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/unsettling-audacious-martin-amis-the-zone-of-interest-1.1895758

An Afternoon with Lee Child! By Will Ryan 

Just bought my tickets to the Lee Child event at this years Mountains to Sea dlr Book festival!(About ten seconds after I received the marketing email!). I'm a huge Lee Child fan and it was picking up a copy of Echo Burning that brought me back to reading fiction after years away reading nothing but books on Quantum physics!

Lee Child Author of the Jack Reacher Series

Back when I was writing The Harder They Fall I listened to a lot of his interviews and in a sense it was his assertion that a book has to grow organically from its writer that allowed me to take my book in the directions it needed to go. There were times when I knew I wasn't following the "rules" of writing thrillers but to stick to what other people said was right would have damaged what I saw as the necessary arc for the story and the characters.

Really looking forward to the opportunity to hear him speak in person and maybe get a chance for a quick chat!

The rest of the festival programme is available here and includes lots of writing workshops for all genres. For those of you also into crime/thriller writing the workshops with Jane Casey are definitely worth a look.

The above post is by Will Ryan and was posted on his blog: http://willryanthrillers.blogspot.ie/ . Thanks Will for allowing us to repost. 

Xiaolu Guo; I Am China

‘a book so piercingly urgent and relevant it is as if Guo has not so much published it as pressed it into your hand the very moment after writing the final sentence.’ (The Independent)

If you can’t decide which Book Festival events to come and see, here is something to wet your appetite from the press -- some glowing reviews of books featured in our programme.

Xiaolu Guo; I Am China ; ‘a book so piercingly urgent and relevant it is as if Guo has not so much published it as pressed it into your hand the very moment after writing the final sentence.’ (The Independent)

In 2010, the Chinese writer Liao Yiwu wrote an open letter to Angela Merkel, to express his deep disappointment that the Chinese authorities had prevented him from travelling to Germany to take part in a programme of literary events. In his letter, he imagines himself visiting Germany, but returning to China: "It is unimaginable," he wrote, "that a writer would be able to do anything once he has left the place of his mother tongue." 

1. I Am China
2. by Xiaolu Guo
3. 

1. Tell us what you think:Star-rate and review this book

Liao is now in exile in Germany after escaping from China on foot in 2011, and perhaps he might find comfort in the examples of other Chinese writers who, despite having left the place of their mother tongue, remain engaged and prolific artists. Some of them, such as the novelist Ma Jian, continue to write in Chinese; others, such as Xiaolu Guo, who has lived in Britain since 2002, now write in English.

Just click on the link to read the full review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/28/i-am-china-xiaolu-guo-review-novel

You can see Xiaolu Guo with Kamila Shamsie at Mountains to Sea Book Festival on Saturday, September 13th at 6.30pm, £10 (£8)

PROGRAMME AVAILABLE

The programme and tickets for the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival 2014 are available on the festival website:  www.mountainstosea.ie. The  brochures will be available widely in libraries and bookshops in the coming weeks. Check out our Press Release on our Home Page to catch a flavour of what we have in store for you this year. After a pre-festival reading by Martin Amis on Wednesday 27th August, the weekend of 11th-14th September is packed with over 40 events for you to enjoy. Lynn Barber, Lee Child, Anthony Cronin, Kamila Shamsie, David Mitchell, Michael Symmons Roberts, Eoin Colfer, Sinéad Morrissey, Xiaolu Guo, Vona Groake and Yasmeen Ismail are just some of the many authors, poets and illustrators joining us in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown this year. And we know you'll be intrigued by the Poetry Shed! We look forward to seeing you at the festival and sharing our new venues with you. THE IRISH TIMES POETRY NOW AWARD - SHORTLIST 2014 Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is delighted to announce this year's official shortlist for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. This coveted award will be presented at the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival on Saturday 13th September 2014 at dlr LexIcon, the new central library and cultural centre in Dún Laoghaire. The shortlisted poets are: Tara Bergin This is Yarrow(Carcanet), Nick Laird Go Giants (Faber & Faber), Sinéad Morrissey Parallex (Carcanet), Conor O'Callaghan The Sun King (Gallery Press) and Billy Ramsell The Architect's Dream of Winter (Dedalus Press). Our judges for this year's award are Katie Donovan, Nessa O'Mahony and Chris Morash. The Award is made possible by the generous support of The Irish Times.

SHINE/STRONG POETRY AWARD -   SHORTLIST 2014 Congratulations also to all the poets shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Poetry Award. They are: Tara Bergin This is Yarrow (Carcanet), Paula CunninghamHeimlich's Manoeuvre(Smith/Doorstop), Martin Dyar Maiden Names (Arlen House), Nicki GriffinUnbelonging (Salmon Poetry) and Jim Maguire Music Field (Poetry Salzburg). The Shine/Strong Award is presented annually to the author of the best first collection of poems published by an Irish poet in the previous year. The Shine/Strong Award is presented in memory of Rupert and Eithne Strong and is made possible by the generous support of Shine, the national organisation dedicated to upholding the rights and addressing the needs of all those affected by mental ill health. The Award will be presented at the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival on Sunday 14th September 2014. Our judge for this year's award is Mary Shine Thompson.