The September Competition [closed]
As the nights draw in we have four titles for your reading pleasure, courtesy of Faber and Faber, Canongate, Simon & Schuster, and Bloomsbury…
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Everybody Loves Our Town, by Mark Yarm
Twenty years after the release of Nirvana’s landmark Nevermind album, Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge offers the definitive overview of a musical time and place.
Grunge, also known as the ‘Seattle sound’, is the sludgy fusion of punk rock and heavy metal that emerged from the Pacific Northwest in the early part of the 1980s. But it was the unexpected, seemingly overnight success of Nirvana’s single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ in the fall of 1991, that made grunge a household word and launched an American music movement on a par with punk and hip-hop.
Twenty years later, Mark Yarm captures that era in the words of those at the forefront of the movement and its lesser-known champions. Everybody Loves Our Town will tell the whole story: the founding of originators like Soundgarden and the Melvins, the early successes of Seattle’s Sub Pop record label, the rise of powerhouses Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the insane media hype surrounding the grunge explosion, the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and finally, the genre’s mid-to-late-nineties decline.
Drawn from extensive interviews and featuring many rare and unseen photographs, Everybody Loves Our Town is at once a moving, lurid, funny and hugely insightful portrait of this extraordinary musical era.
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A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, by Magnus Mills
Far away, in the ancient empire of Greater Fallowfields, things are falling apart. The imperial orchestra is presided over by a conductor who has never played a note, the clocks are changed constantly to ensure that the sun always sets at five o’ clock, and the Astronomer Royal is only able to use the observatory telescope when he can find a sixpence to put in its slot. But while the kingdom drifts, awaiting the return of the young emperor, who has gone abroad and communicates only by penny post, a sinister and unfamiliar enemy is getting closer and closer…
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is Magnus Mills’s most ambitious work to date. A surreal portrait of a world that, although strange and distant, contains rather too many similarities to our own for the alien not to become brilliantly familiar and disturbingly close to home. It is comic writing at its best – and it is Magnus Mills’s most ambitious, enjoyable and rewarding novel to date.
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Left Neglected, by Lisa Genova
One typical morning, Sarah Nickerson, a woman in her mid-thirties, is late for work, racing in her car after dropping her kids off at school and daycare. She tries to phone in to a meeting she should already be at when she takes her eye off the road for a second too long. In that blink of an eye, all the rapidly moving parts of her over-scheduled life come to a screeching halt. Sarah suffers a traumatic head injury. Her memory and intellect are intact, but she has lost all interest in, and the ability to perceive, information coming from the left side of space. The left side of her world has gone. Sarah only eats the food from the right side of her plate. She can’t see her watch, or her engagement diamond or her wedding ring. She tries to use a wheel chair but can only spin in circles as her left arm dangles by her side.
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Jamrach’s Menagerie, by Carol Birch
‘I was born twice. First in wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.’
1857. Jaffy Brown is running along a street in London’s East End when he comes face to face with an escaped circus animal. Plucked from the jaws of death by Mr Jamrach – explorer, entrepreneur and collector of the world’s strangest creatures – the two strike up a friendship. Before he knows it, Jaffy finds himself on board a ship bound for the Dutch East Indies, on an unusual commission for Mr Jamrach. His journey – if he survives it – will push faith, love and friendship to their utmost limits. Brilliantly written and utterly spellbinding, Carol Birch’s epic novel brings alive the smells, sights and flavours of the nineteenth century, from the docks of London to the storms of the Indian Ocean. This great salty historical adventure is a gripping exploration of our relationship to the natural world and the wildness it contains.
The Question:
To win, answer one simple question, the answer to which can be found in a recent Bookdiva article…
- Question 1: In Left Neglected, what time does Sarah Nickerson have the alarm set for?
Terms and conditions
- Closing date for entries: 5th October 2011.
- Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
- Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
- The winners will be selected from those correct entries received before the closing date. Our decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
- Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
- The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
- The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.
September 24th, 2011 at 4:48 pm
The Author grabs your attention immediately
I’ve read the first chapter must buy the book
October 5th, 2011 at 7:14 pm
I love books – They feed my mind!
October 5th, 2011 at 7:58 pm
it stimulates,aggravates,but captivates