The February Competition [closed]
Three readers will win a wonderful mix of titles from our lovely publishers this month: Snow Child, by by Eowyn Ivey; The Bellwether Revivals, by Benjamin Wood; The Revelations, by Alex Preston, and Waiting for Sunrise, by William Boyd.
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Snow Child, by by Eowyn Ivey
Jack and Mabel have staked everything on making a fresh start for themselves in a homestead ‘at the world’s edge’ in the raw Alaskan wilderness. But as the days grow shorter, Jack is losing his battle to clear the land, and Mabel can no longer contain her grief for the baby she lost many years before.
The evening the first snow falls, their mood unaccountably changes. In a moment of tenderness, the pair are surprised to find themselves building a snowman – or rather a snow girl – together. The next morning, all trace of her has disappeared, and Jack can’t quite shake the notion that he glimpsed a small figure – a child? – running through the spruce trees in the dawn light. And how to explain the little but very human tracks Mabel finds at the edge of their property?
Written with the clarity and vividness of the Russian fairytale from which it takes its inspiration, The Snow Child is an instant classic – the story of a couple who take a child into their hearts, all the while knowing they can never truly call her their own.
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The Bellwether Revivals, by Benjamin Wood
Bright, bookish Oscar Lowe has escaped the urban estate where he was raised and made a new life for himself amid the colleges and spires of Cambridge. He has grown to love the quiet routine of his life as a care assistant at a local nursing home, where he has forged a close friendship with the home’s most ill-tempered resident, Dr. Paulsen. But when he meets and falls in love with Iris Bellwether, a beautiful and enigmatic medical student at King’s College, Oscar is drawn into her world of scholarship and privilege, and soon becomes embroiled in the strange machinations of her brilliant but troubled brother, Eden, who believes he can adapt the theories of a forgotten Baroque composer to heal people with music. Eden’s self-belief knows no bounds, and as he draws his sister and closed circle of friends into a series of disturbing experiments to prove himself right, Oscar realises the extent of the danger facing them all…
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The Revelations, by Alex Preston
A group of young people are searching for meaning in a dark and directionless world. The Course, a religious movement led by a charismatic priest, seems at first to offer everything the friends have been looking for: a community of bright, thoughtful, beautiful people. But as they are drawn deeper into the Course, money, sex and God collide, threatening to rip them apart.
This gripping novel of ideas lays bare a world where the advancement of a movement becomes more important than the lives of its followers.
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Waiting for Sunrise, by William Boyd
Vienna, 1913. It is a fine day in August when Lysander Rief, a young English actor, walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist Dr Bensimon. Sitting in the waiting room he is anxiously pondering the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis when a young woman enters. She is clearly in distress, but Lysander is immediately drawn to her strange, hazel eyes and her unusual, intense beauty. Her name is Hettie Bull. They begin a passionate love affair and life in Vienna becomes tinged with a powerful frisson of excitement for Lysander. He meets Sigmund Freud in a cafe, begins to write a journal, enjoys secret trysts with Hettie and appears – miraculously – to have been cured.
Back in London, 1914. War is imminent, and events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander in the most damaging way. Unable to live an ordinary life, he is plunged into the dangerous theatre of wartime intelligence – a world of sex, scandal and spies, where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day. Lysander must now discover the key to a secret code which is threatening Britain’s safety, and use all his skills to keep the murky world of suspicion and betrayal from invading every corner of his life. Moving from Vienna to London’s West End, from the battlefields of France to hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a feverish and mesmerising journey into the human psyche, a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe, a plot-twisting thriller and a literary tour de force from the bestselling author of Any Human Heart, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms.
The Questions:
To win, answer three simple questions, the answers to which can be found in recent Bookhugger book extracts…
- Question 1: In The Bellwether Revivals, which instrument does Iris Bellwether play?
- Question 2: Which place does Mabel visit on her own to contemplate something terrible, in The Snow Child?
- Question 3: In Waiting for Sunrise, what is Vienna ‘a city of…’?
Terms and conditions
- Closing date for entries: 5th March 2012.
- 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.
February 20th, 2012 at 6:07 pm
looking foward to reading the rest of the books