The dazzling, powerful story of a gutsy showgirl who tries to conquer her past amongst the glamour of 1960s Las Vegas – finding unexpected fortune, friendship and love.
Like most people my age I read the ubiquitous ‘big three’ dystopian novels (Atwood, Huxley, Orwell) in year 9 English and wrote some execrable essays about characterisation in them. Thanks to the pre-internet generosity of my teacher (and because she suspected it might be a good way of weaning me off the pulp space-operas I ploughed through by the shelf) I also walked around with Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange and Riddley Walker in my vast hold-all. (I carried every book for every subject with me at all times because I was terrified of forgetting one). Perhaps the two which made the biggest impact on me – deep cuts from my newly-qualified teacher’s collection – were We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Nabokov’s Bend Sinister. The latter is a novel so spiritually horrifying that the author interjects towards the end to remind us that it isn’t real.
The story and characters of Miss Treadway and her world came to me in a great burst, an avalanche really, as I sat beside an ill child – filled with Calpol and blissfully asleep – watching At Bertrams’ Hotel in the dull, winter days of 2014. Read more…
A very happy New Year to you and all you know, from 4th Estate. 2014 was a fantastic year for books, wasn’t it? Or, to borrow the phrase from Andy Miller, it truly was The Year of Reading Dangerously. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie taught us that We Should All be Feminists, while Lena Dunham told us how she came to be one in Not That Kind of Girl. David Cronenberg put us off our dinner with the fantastic techno-thriller Consumed, but Anna Jones set us back on track with her astonishing debut recipe book A Modern Way to Eat. The phenomenal Sali Hughes taught us all we needed to know about beauty (and all we didn’t know we should) in Pretty Honest: The Straight-Talking Beauty Companion, a guide we should all start referring to daily in the new year. Read more…
This autumn, we’re celebrating 30 years of 4th Estate, and with it, we’ve hand-picked 30 of our memorable, moving and award-winning titles. While remember, remembering the 5th of November, we’ll be looking beyond (or behind?) Bonfire Night, and reaching far back into our memories, touching on our specially selected classic 30 titles. Read more…
Short stories really hit the big time in Britain in the Victorian and modernist period – at exactly the same time that the professional woman writer became a force to be reckoned with. The two have been wed ever since in a spectacularly successful union. The BBC short story award had an all-woman shortlist this year, as it did the year before. And, as usual, the 4th Estate list showcases some of the very best female short story writers around.
Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, recently asked his incredibly talented friend Jim’ll Paint It to paint him a picture. For those of you unaware of Jim’ll Paint It’s work, he sums it up perfectly in his own words: ‘Got something in your brain that you’d really like to see with your eyes? Just ask and if I like the sound of it I’ll paint it for you for free using incredibly high tech and sophisticated MS Paint software.’
A boy is trapped beneath the ruins of a city; from far above and across the airwaves, a girl reads aloud to him. Anthony Doerr explores the inspirations behind his new novel, All the Light We Cannot See – published in the UK on 8 May 2014.
