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Category: The Dollmaker

Paper Dolls

April 3, 2020 /

Just a brief reminder that the paperback of The Dollmaker is now available. With the temporary closure of Gardner’s Books wholesale warehouse on Monday, market conditions have become even more precarious and challenging for booksellers, including those who had been planning to support The Dollmaker with window displays and promotions in various towns and cities across the country.

I want to thank you all anyway, for the thought and care that goes into every promotion you run, every title you select to represent your store. I also want to thank the incredible team at riverrun for their continuing support and enthusiasm for The Dollmaker and for my work generally. I know you’ll all be feeling the same sadness and frustration at not being able to operate as normal but please be assured the love and fellow feeling of your writers continues undaunted.

Stay safe and stay well, and here’s to better times.

The Dollmaker: AMA

November 4, 2019 /

Just to let you know that I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA this evening, 8 pm UK time, so do feel free to drop by and ask me questions about The Dollmaker, my upcoming novel The Good Neighbours and anything else you can think of relating to books and writing. Looking forward to you joining me at eight!

Andrew’s in America!

October 15, 2019 /

The Dollmaker is published in the US today – excuse me while I gloat over the fantastic (and creepy) cover art:

Huge thanks to Judith Gurewich and the whole incredible team at Other Press for steering Andrew on his journey across the Atlantic.

Going West with The Dollmaker

April 25, 2019 /

I’ll be out and about next month, doing some bookshop and festival events for The Dollmaker here in Scotland and down in the West Country. In fact you could almost say I’ll be following in Andrew’s footsteps! If you’re in the area and would like to find out more about how the novel came to be written, together with themes of fairy tales, the dark fantastic and the importance of landscape in fiction, do come along. There will be readings and Q&As, and of course a chance to get your copy signed and personalised. Hope to see you on the road.

WEDNESDAY MAY 8TH: GOLDEN HARE BOOKS, STOCKBRIDGE, EDINBURGH 6:30PM

In Edinburgh I will be in conversation with Kirsty Logan, whose magical second novel The Gloaming has just been released in paperback. We’ll be discussing our approaches to writing, as well as the continuing role of fairytales in contemporary fiction and what makes these stories endure, even as they shift and change to fit the times. We’re lucky enough to be hosted by Golden Hare Books as part of their Feminist Books Fortnight.

TUESDAY MAY 14TH: HUNTING RAVEN BOOKS, FROME 7PM

With Andrew’s journey very much in mind, what better place to kick off the West Country tour than the town that inspired one of his stopping places?

WEDNESDAY MAY 15TH: WATERSTONES, TRURO 7PM

Truro is the town Bramber Winters grew up in, where her love of dolls began. Come and join us at Waterstones for more discussion of The Dollmaker and its West Country roots.

THURSDAY MAY 16TH: FOWEY LITERATURE FESTIVAL 4PM

I am a guest at one of the most popular and long running West Country literary festivals – The Dollmaker meets Daphne Du Maurier!

TUESDAY MAY 21ST: PRINT POINT, ROTHESAY, ISLE OF BUTE 7PM

And it’s back home to the island, where Kirsty Logan and I will be reprising our Everyday Fairytales event with more readings and discussion.

It’s here!

April 4, 2019 /

The Dollmaker is published today. Of all my books to date, this has been the most hard fought, the longest in the making, the most intimate and personal. The novel’s principal characters, Andrew and Bramber, have been in my heart and in my mind for more than a decade. Finally, they are ready to tell their story. I hope all those readers who encounter them will love them as much as I do.

Thankfully, the process of bringing The Dollmaker to publication has not been anywhere near as stressful as writing it in the first place, and I want to thank the whole incredible team at riverrun for their support and enthusiasm in making the book a reality . As a physical object, it is a thing of real beauty., the artwork and book design perfectly in tune with the story itself. The vision and expertise involved in achieving that should not be understated. Andrew and Bramber could honestly not have been in safer hands.

I’d like to remind you that The Dollmaker is also available as an audiobook. Hearing my work come to life through the voices of others has always been a particular pleasure for me, the closest I have come to experiencing a book as a first-time reader might experience it. In this wonderful unabridged rendition by Luke Thomspon and Beth Eyre, it’s as if The Dollmaker truly takes on its own identity, apart from its author, a freedom every book needs and deserves. The extract below comes from the very start of the novel, which is coincidentally the passage I have chosen to present in my readings.

I will be taking part in author events to celebrate the launch of The Dollmaker through the month of May, both here in Scotland and in the West Country, where much of the book is set. Details to follow.

Andrew, it’s over to you. Let the journey begin.

This just in…

March 14, 2019 /

The Dollmaker will be published three weeks from today and I am delighted to report that the finished book looks stunning. Check out those endpapers…

The Dollmaker – revealed!

June 19, 2018 /

As announced in The Bookseller today, I’m thrilled to finally reveal that my third novel, The Dollmaker, will be published by riverrun/Quercus in March of next year.

To say I’m delighted would be a massive understatement. My editor Jon Riley has been championing the book from the moment he read the manuscript, and the entire team at riverrun have been fantastically supportive right through the editorial process. I feel very lucky indeed to have landed among such enthusiastic and knowledgeable people. Their love for books has been evident in every meeting I’ve had with them. As I said in my statement for The Bookseller, I honestly cannot think of a better home for The Dollmaker than riverrun.

I’ll have more – much more – to tell you about the novel as we get closer to publication, but for the moment I just want to say that The Dollmaker is particularly close to my heart, perhaps because it’s been with me for such a long time. The dollmaker himself (well, one of them…) first appeared in my mind more than ten years ago, while I was still living and working in Exeter. I wrote an outline for what was always and immediately ‘his’ novel. Other things happened, other stories intervened – but I never forgot Andrew Garvie, and when I finally came back to work on the manuscript properly towards the end of 2016 I found his character and his story more compelling than ever. The Dollmaker has always been a book I needed to write, and here it is. I hope readers will fall for Andrew, just as I did.

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