The Emperor of Lies

Faber and Faber 2011, Paperback, 672 pages, £14.99

The Emperor of Lies, by Steve Sem Sandberg

In February 1940 the Nazis established what would become the second largest Jewish ghetto in Poland, in the city of Lodz. A wire fence was built around the Old City, completely separating Jewish families, some quarter of a million people, from the rest of the population. The fence was patrolled by police ordered to shoot on sight should anyone attempt to escape.

The ghetto’s chosen leader was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman. Mysterious, ambiguous, monarchical, ‘King Chaim’ was motivated by a titanic ambition. Realising that his survival rested upon his ability to make the ghetto indispensable, he sought to transform it into a productive industrial complex, forcing adults and children alike to work punishing hours in workshops to provide supplies for the German military.

Was Rumkowksi a ruthless opportunist – an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who managed to save Jewish lives through collaboration? Steve Sem-Sandberg’s extraordinary novel draws on genuine chronicles of life in the Lodz ghetto to ask the most difficult questions about survival and oppression.

Now published in over twenty languages, The Emperor of Lies is one of the great Holocaust novels of the twenty-first century by one of Scandinavia’s most admired authors.

• Read the extract

Tideline

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2012, Hardcover, 352 pages, £12.99

Tideline, by Penny Hancock

One winter’s afternoon, voice coach Sonia opens the door of her beautiful riverside home to fifteen-year-old Jez, the nephew of a family friend. He’s come to borrow some music. Sonia invites him in and soon decides that she isn’t going to let him leave.

As Sonia’s desire to keep Jez hidden and protected from the outside world becomes all the more overpowering, she is haunted by memories of an intense teenage relationship, which gradually reveal a terrifying truth. The River House, Sonia’s home since childhood, holds secrets within its walls. And outside, on the shores of the Thames, new ones are coming in on the tide…

• Listen to the podcast

Cairo

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2012, Hardcover, £14.99

 Cairo, by Ahdaf Soueif

Over the past few months I have delivered lectures, presentations and interviews on the Egyptian Revolution. I have had overflowing houses everywhere, been stopped by old ladies in the street and had my hand shaken by numerous taxi drivers and shopkeepers. And all because I’m Egyptian and the glitter of Tahrir is upon me.

They wanted me to talk to them, to tell them stories about it, to tell them how, on the 28th of January when we took the Square and The People torched the headquarters of the hated ruling National Democratic Party, The (same) People formed a human chain to protect the Antiquities Museum and demanded an official handover to the military; to tell them how, on Wednesday, February 2nd, as The People defended themselves against the invading thug militias and fought pitched battles at the entrance to the Square in the shadow of the Antiquities Museum, The (same) People at the centre of the square debated political structures and laughed at stand-up comics and distributed sandwiches and water; to tell them of the chants and the poetry and the songs, of how we danced and waved at the F16s that our President flew over us. People everywhere want to make this Revolution their own, and we in Egypt want to share it.

Ahdaf Soueif – novelist, commentator, activist – navigates her history of Cairo and her journey through the Revolution that’s redrawing its future. Through a map of stories drawn from private history and public record Soueif charts a story of the Revolution that is both intimately hers and publicly Egyptian.

Ahdaf Soueif was born and brought up in Cairo. When the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 erupted on January 25^th, she, along with thousands of others, called Tahrir Square home for eighteen days. She reported for the world’s media and did – like everyone else – whatever she could.

• Read the extract

The Flying Man

Headline Review 2012, Hardcover, 352 pages, £16.99

The Flying Man, by Roopa Farooki

Meet Maqil – also known as Mike, Mehmet, Mikhail and Miguel – a chancer and charlatan.

A criminally clever man who tells a good tale, trading on his charm and good looks, reinventing himself with a new identity and nationality in each successive country he makes his home, abandoning wives and children and careers in the process. He’s a compulsive gambler – driven to lose at least as much as he gains, in games of chance, and in life. A damaged man in search of himself

From the day he was delivered in Lahore, Pakistan, alongside his stillborn twin, he proved he was a born survivor. He has been a master of flying escapes, from Cairo to Paris, from London to Hong Kong, humbled by love, outliving his peers, and ending up old and alone in a budget hotel in Biarritz some eighty years later. His chequered history is catching up with him: his tracks have been uncovered and his latest wife, his children, his creditors and former business associates, all want to pin him down. But even at the end, Maqil just can’t resist trying it on; he’s still playing his game, and the game won’t be over until it’s been won.

• Read the extract

 The Questions:

To win, answer four simple questions, the answers to which can be found in recent Bookhugger book extracts…

• Question 1: In The Emperor of Lies, on 10 December 1939 how many Jews were living in the city of Łódź?
  
• Question 2: What is the name of Sonny’s mother, in The Flying Man?
• Question 3: Sonia’s story in Tideline is written in which point of view?
  
• Question 4: Where was Ahdaf Soueif staying when she realised something was happening in Cairo?

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 4th February 2012.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. 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.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.

Note the questions below, find the title and check out the extracts from the various shortlists… then return to this page to enter your answers.

• audible.co.uk Audiobook of the Year
• Specsavers Popular Fiction Book of the Year
• Crime & Thriller of the Year 
• More4 Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year
• Galaxy New Writer of the Year
• National Book Tokens Children’s Book of the Year
• Food & Drink Book of the Year
• The Daily Telegraph Biography/Autobiography of the Year
• International Author of the Year
• Waterstone’s UK Author of the Year
• WHSmith Paperback of the Year 

The Questions

• Question 1: In My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, by Louisa Young, where do Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country?
• Question 2: In A Tiny Bit Marvellous, by Dawn French, what does Oscar consider his only worthy companion?
• Question 3: Who is not to be trusted in SJ Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep?
• Question 4: Who is Caitlin Moran’s heroine?
• Question 5: In When God Was A Rabbit, where had Elly Portman’s mother been shopping just before she was born?
• Question 6: What kind of tree spooks Connor in A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness?
• Question 7: How many egg yolks are required in Simon Hopkinson’s recipe for grilled lamb cutlets with minted hollandaise?
• Question 8: What is the name of Charles Dickens’ father?
• Question 9: What is the third of Sasha’s goals, in A Visit From The Goon Squad?
• Question 10: In The Stranger’s Child, what is Daphne’s favourite Tennyson poem?
• Question 11: How many bugs did Jack count last time, in his Room?
• Question 12: Galaxy Book of the Year Winner Caitlin Moran is less Zola Budd, more…?

This competition is supposed to be a little bit harder than usual – that’s because the prize is so amazing. So please, please don’t post the answers on competition forums – it spoils the fun for everyone.

Galaxy National Book Awards Competition Terms and Conditions

1. No purchase necessary to enter the competition.
2. This competition is open to UK residents aged 18 years or over, with the exception of employees of the Promoter, their families, agents and anyone else connected with this promotion.
3. Entries must be received by midnight on Saturday 14^th January 2012. The Promoter accepts no responsibility for any entries that are incomplete, illegible, corrupted or fail to reach the Promoter by the relevant closing date for any reason. Proof of posting or sending is not proof of receipt. Entries via agents or third parties are invalid. Entries become the property of the Promoter and are not returned.
4. Only one entry per person. No entrant may win more than one prize.
5. The prize is an 32gb wifi ipad.
6. Bookhugger will judge the entries and nominate a winner.
7. The judges’ decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into.
8. The prizes are non-transferrable and no cash alternative will be offered.
9. Prizes are subject to availability. In the event of unforeseen circumstances, the Promoter reserves the right (a) to substitute alternative prizes of equivalent or greater value and (b) in exceptional circumstances to amend or foreclose the promotion without notice. No correspondence will be entered into.
10. The winner will be notified via email or post by 31^st January 2012. The winner must claim their prize within 30 days of the Promoter sending notification. If the prize is unclaimed after this time, it will lapse and the Promoter reserves the right to offer the unclaimed prize to a substitute winner selected in accordance with these rules.
11. To obtain details of the winner please email us via our Contact page stating the name of the competition in the subject heading 4 weeks after the closing date.
12. The Promoter will use any data submitted by entrants only for the purposes of running the competition, unless otherwise stated in the entry details. By entering this competition, all entrants consent to the use of their personal data by the Promoter for the purposes of the administration of this competition and any other purposes to which the entrant has consented.
13. The winners agree to take part in reasonable post event publicity and to the use of their names and photographs in such publicity.
14. By entering the competition each entrant agrees to be bound by these terms and conditions.
15. These terms and conditions are governed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales.

The Gendarme

Oneworld Publications 2011, Paperback, 304 pages, £12.99

An extraordinarily haunting novel of identity and remembrance, love and forgiveness.

Emmett Conn is an old man on the verge of senility, a feisty World War 1 veteran who suffered amnesia during the war. Now at the end of his life, he suddenly finds himself beset by vivid dreams of a march across a foreign land, of appalling acts of cruelty, and the anguish of a lost love. But these are no dreams and he is no prisoner. As the memories come flooding back and his grasp on the past and present begins to break down, he sets out on one final journey to find the love of his life and beg her forgiveness.

With a multi-layered plot and deft characterisation, Mustian explores how love can transcend nationalities and politics, how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, and how the human spirit fights to survive even in the face of hopelessness.

• Read the extract

The Question:

• Question 1: In what year did Mr. Conn receive a head injury?

 Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 19th December 2011.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. 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.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.

For a chance to win this amazing personal collector’s piece, just watch Mark Forsyth’s video about the word video and answer two simple questions…

The Questions:

• Question 1: What is the word video Latin for?
  
• Question 2: When was the Proto-Indo-European language written?

A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language…

What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces?

The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language, taking in monks and monkeys, film buffs and buffaloes, and explaining precisely what the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening.

• Buy this book at Amazon
• Buy this book at Waterstones

 Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 9th December 2011.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. 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.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.

Only Fools and Horses

Canongate Books Ltd 2011, Hardcover, 344 pages, £20.00

Only Fools and Horses, by Graham McCann

In September 1981, BBC One screened the pilot episode of a British sitcom set in a high-rise block of council flats in Peckham, south London – 9 million people tuned in. 15 years, seven series and over 60 episodes later, 24.3 million people watched the final instalment of Only Fools and Horses – over a third of the British population, and the largest audience for a sitcom ever recorded. In the 30 years since viewers first visited Nelson Mandela House, Only Fools and Horses has won countless awards and is still Britain’s most-watched and best-loved sitcom. Del Boy’s overwhelming popularity has even inspired the Oxford English Dictionary to include a selection of his most famous words and phrases – lovely jubblyA” and twonkA” are now found within its pages. In this fascinating, entertaining and meticulously researched book, acclaimed biographer Graham McCann goes behind the scenes to tell the inside story of Britain’s most enduring comedy. With major contributions from the people who wrote, produced and starred in the programme and material drawn from the BBC archives, it’s time to take one last trip down Hooky Street …

Death of a Polaroid – A Manics Family Album

Faber and Faber 2011, Hardcover, 304 pages, £30.00

Death of a Polaroid, by Nicky Wire

The first of two titles by the Manic Street Preachers’ bassist and lyricist, Nicky Wire. For more than twenty years and from Blackwood, Wales to Tokyo, Japan, Nicky Wire has kept a personal visual history of the band in their various stages from Generation Terrorists through Holy Bible and right up to last year’s remarkable album, Postcards from a Young Man. Edited down from over 1,000 of Wire’s personal polaroids and with accompanying text by the man himself, Death of The Polaroid promises to be a rich, visual biography of one of the most loved and iconoclastic British bands of the past two decades.

Dear Me

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2011, Hardcover, 160 pages, £12.99

Dear Me: More Letters to my Sixteen Year Old Self, edited by Joseph Galliano

If you were to write a letter to your 16-year-old self, what would it say?

In Dear Me, some of the world’s most famous and best loved celebrities, from actors to chefs, directors to musicians, have written just such a letter.

The letters range from the compassionate to the shocking via hilarity and heartbreak, but they all have one thing in common: they offer a unique insight into the teenager who would grow up to be… J.K. Rowling, Hugh Jackman, Kathleen Turner, Stan Lee, James Belushi, Moon Zappa, Seth Green, Piers Morgan, Jodi Picoult, Stephen King, Phil Ramone, Michael Winner, Alan Cumming, Jerry Springer, Armistead Maupin, E from The Eels, Ferran AdriÀ, Rose McGowan, James Woods or Gillian Anderson.

It is the perfect gift for your mum or dad, sister or brother, gran or granddad, or someone who is a teenager, even turning 16.

• Read the extract

The Coward’s Tale

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2011, Hardcover, 384 pages, £16.99

The Coward’s Tale, by Vanessa Gebbie

The boy Laddy Merridew, sent to live with his grandmother, stumbles off the bus into a small Welsh mining community, where he begins an unlikely friendship with Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar-storyteller.

Ianto is watchman over the legacy of the collapse many years ago of Kindly Light Pit, a disaster whose echoes reverberate down the generations of the town. Through Ianto’s stories Laddy is drawn into both the town’s history and the conundrums of the present.

Why has woodwork teacher Icarus Evans striven most of his life to carve wooden feathers that will float on an updraft? Why is the undertaker Tutt Bevan trying to find a straight path through the town? Why does James Little, the old gas-meter emptier, dig his allotment by moonlight? And why does window cleaner Judah Jones take autumn leaves into a disused chapel?

These and other men of the town, and the women who mothered them, married them and mourned them, are bound together by the echoes of the Kindly Light tragedy and by the mysterious figure of Ianto Jenkins, whose stories of loyalty and betrayal, loss and love, form an unforgettable, spellbinding tapestry.

The Coward’s Tale is a powerfully imagined, poetic and haunting novel, spiked with humour. It is a story of kinship and kindness, guilt and atonement, and the ways in which we carve the present out of an unforgiving past.

• Read the extract

The Questions:

To win, answer two simple questions, the answers to which can be found in recent Bookhugger book extracts…

• Question 1: In Dear Me, what is Jodi Picoult absolutely sure you will never need?
  
• Question 2: What does Icarus Evans cover his rowing boat with, in The Coward’s Tale?

 Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 4th December 2011.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. 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.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.

Out of Oz (Wicked 4)

Headline Review 2011, Hardcover, 608 pages, £18.99

Out of Oz

The marvellous land of Oz is knotted with social unrest: The Emerald City is mounting an invasion of Munchkinland, Glinda is under house arrest, and the Cowardly Lion is on the run from the law. And look who’s knocking at the door. It’s none other than Dorothy. Yes, that Dorothy.

Amid all this chaos, Elphaba’s granddaughter, the tiny green baby born at the close of Son of a Witch, has come of age. Now, Rain will take up her broom in an Oz wracked by war.

Out of Oz is a magical journey rife with revelations and reversals, reprisals and surprises – the hallmarks of the brilliant and unique imagination of Gregory Maguire.

• Read the extract

Wicked (Wicked Years 1)

Headline Review 2006, Paperback, 512 pages, £7.99

Wicked

An astonishingly rich re-creation of the land of Oz, this book retells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn’t so wicked after all. Taking readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world rich with imagination and allegory, Gregory Maguire just might change the reputation of one of the most sinister characters in literature.

Son of a Witch (Wicked Years 2)

Headline Review 2008, Paperback, 512 pages, £7.99

Son of a Witch

Back in the land of Oz, the adolescent boy Liir was last seen hiding in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Bruised, comatose, and left for dead, Liir is tended to at the Cloister of Saint Glinda by a silent novice called Candle, who wills him back to life with her musical gifts. What dark force left Liir in this condition? Is he really Elphaba’s son? He has her broom and her cape – but what of her powers? In an Oz that, since the Wizard’s departure, is under new and dangerous management, can Liir keep his head down long enought to grow up?

A Lion Among Men (Wicked Years 3)

Headline Review 2009, Paperback, 448 pages, £8.99

A Lion Among Men

The third extraordinary novel in Gregory Maguire’s bestselling Wicked series, featuring the beloved Cowardly Lion.

As civil war looms in Oz, an ancient and tetchy oracle named Yackle prepares for death. Before she can return to dust, however, the Cowardly Lion, an enigmatic figure named Brrr, arrives seeking knowledge about Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West – the woman who defended him when he was a cub. But Yackle, too, demands answers of her own.

The Questions:

To win, answer two simple questions…

• Question 1: What is the real name of the Wicked Witch of the West?
  
• Question 2: According to the conductor, how long will it take Dorothy Gale and her relatives to reach the mountains by train from Kansas?

 Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 3rdDecember 2011.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. 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.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.

Ian Fleming’s Commandos

Faber and Faber 2011, Hardcover, 416 pages, £20.00

Ian Fleming’s Commandos, by Nicholas Rankin

In 1942, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming was personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence – the dynamic figure behind James Bond’s fictional chief, ‘M’. Here, Fleming had a brilliant idea: why not set up a unit of authorised looters, men who would go in hard with the front-line troops and steal enemy intelligence? Known as ’30 Assault Unit’, they took part in the major campaigns of the Second World War, landing on the Normandy beaches and helping to liberate Paris. 30AU’s final amazing coup was to seize the entire archives of the German Navy – thirty tons of documents. Ian Fleming flew out in person to get the loot back to Britain, where it was combed for evidence to use in the Nuremburg trials. In this gripping and highly enjoyable book, Nicholas Rankin, author of the best-selling Churchill’s Wizards, puts 30 Assault Unit’s fascinating story in a strategic and intelligence context. He also argues that Ian Fleming’s Second World War service was one of the most significant periods of his life – without this, the most popular spy fiction of the twentieth century would not have been written.

• A Q&A with Nicholas Rankin

Middlesex

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2011, Paperback, 544 pages, £8.99

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Callie has inherited a rare genetic mutation. The biological trace of a guilty secret, this gene has followed her grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Detroit and has outlasted the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family’s second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene’s epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.

• Read the extract

The Virgin Suicides

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2002, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides

For some time the Lisbon sisters have intrigued the neighbourhood’s teenage boys. They watch the girls from a house across the street, longing to catch their most intimate moments. When the most daring finds a way into their house he discovers thirteen-year-old Cecilia in the bath, her wrist slit. Although Cecilia’s first suicide attempt fails her second, a gruesome plunge on to a fence below her bedroom window, succeeds.

Already confined by their mother’s draconian strictness, the girls find themselves under lock and key after the adventurous Lux returns late from Homecoming after taking off with Trip Fontaine, the school heartthrob. The boys dedicate themselves to observing the sisters, searching out and savouring evidence of their lives, from scraps of their hair to their discarded underwear. As time wears on Lux is seen making love on the roof, Bonnie comes to the door most mornings clutching her pillow, Mr Lisbon loses his high school teaching job and the house begins to fall down around their ears. Under the boys’ watchful eyes, the girls seem to fade into shadows of themselves.

When the sisters eventually contact them in a bid to escape, the boys, eager to help, are ready. But the girls have another sort of escape in mind and soon the ambulance is at the door again leaving the boys endlessly speculating, quizzing anyone who will speak of the suicides, still asking why twenty years later.

The Dovekeepers

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2011, Hardcover, 512 pages, £16.99

The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman

The lives of four sensuous, bold and remarkable women intersect in the year 70AD, in the desperate days of the siege of Masada, when supplies are dwindling and the Romans are drawing near. All are dovekeepers, and all are keepers of secrets – about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love. There is Yael, the assassin’s daughter whose heartbreak leads to her true path in the ruins of the desert; Revka, the baker’s wife who loses her dearest treasure on earth and yet finds the strength to protect her family; Aziza, the warrior’s beloved who leads a secret life not even those closest to her could imagine; and Marit, beautiful witch of Moab, a woman as loyal as she is dangerous.

• Read the extract

 The Questions:

To win, answer three simple questions, the answers to which can be found in recent Bookhugger book extracts…

• Question 1: According to Nicholas Rankin, what was the crowning achievement of 30 Assault Unit?
  
• Question 2: In Middlesex, how many strokes does Cal’s grandfather have in total?
  
• Question 3: In The Dovekeepers, what lives until morning?

 Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 9th November 2011.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. 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.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.

These fascinating insights are taken from programmes such as Woman’s Hour, Parkinson, Desert Island Discs, Front Row, Today, Start the Week, Late Night Line-Up, Kaleidoscope and many others, in which the subjects talk about aspects of their professional and private lives.

Many of these interviews have not been heard since their original transmission, and almost none of them have previously been made available for purchase. They represent a window into the past, a chance for us to hear the voices of those who contributed to the richness of our political and cultural heritage.

Produced by AudioGO, the BBC Archive Voices range is available to download from www.audiogo.co.uk and iTunes from 27th September – just search BBC Archive Voices to see the whole range.Eight titles will be released in October:  Shirley Bassey, Paul McCartney, Roald Dahl, Noel Coward, Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Margaret Thatcher and Brian Clough; with new releases every month thereafter.

• Listen to interviews withNoel Coward and Bette Davis
• Listen to interviews withShirley Bassey and Paul McCartney
• Listen to interviews withMargaret Thatcher and Brian Clough
• Listen to interviews with Roald Dahl and Alfred Hitchcock

The Questions:

To win, answer four simple questions, the answers to which can be found in recent Bookhugger articles…

• Question 1: What film subjects could Alfred Hitchock ‘not handle’?
  
• Question 2: According to Brian Clough, which job would he want?
• Question 3: How long did Shirley Bassey live in Tiger Bay?
• Question 4: Who does Betty Davis think she is the reincarnation of?

Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 3rd November 2011.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. 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.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.

Little Hands Clapping

Canongate Books Ltd 2011, Paperback, 320 pages, £7.99

Little Hands Clapping, by Dan Rhodes

Once upon a time, in a room above a German museum, there lived an old man…

A caretaker by day, by night he enjoys the sound of silence, broken only by the occasional crunch of a spider between his teeth.

However, the old man’s solitude is disturbed as unusual activities at the museum start to attract attention. A pair of young and outrageously beautiful lovers, a baker’s son with a passion for the euphonium, and a dog called Hans are just some of the innocents pulled into Rhodes’s mesmerising world.

• Read an extract

The Radleys

Canongate Books Ltd 2011, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

The Radleys, by Matt Haig

The Last Werewolf

Canongate Books Ltd 2011, Paperback, £7.99

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan

The Women of the Cousins’ War

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2011, Hardcover, 352 pages, £18.99

Elizabeth Woodville, The White Queen (2009), Margaret Beaufort, The Red Queen (2010), and Jacquetta, Lady Rivers, The Lady of the Rivers (2011) are the subjects of the first three novels in Philippa Gregory’s Cousins’ War series, and of the three biographical essays in this book. Philippa Gregory and two historians, leading experts in their field who helped Philippa to research the novels, tell the extraordinary ‘true’ stories of the life of these women who until now have been largely forgotten by history, their background and times, highlighting questions which are raised in the fiction and illuminating the novels.

With a foreword by Philippa Gregory – in which Philippa writes revealingly about the differences between history and fiction and examines the gaps in the historical record – and beautifully illustrated with rare portraits, The Women of the Cousins’ War is an exciting new addition to the Philippa Gregory oeuvre.

• Read the extract
• Read an extract from The Lady of  the Rivers

Watch Philippa Gregory discuss the three titles in the Cousin’s War series.

The Questions:

To win, answer three simple questions, the answers to which can be found in recent Bookhugger articles…

• Question 1: In Philippa Gregory’s introduction to The Women of the Cousins’ War what does the very act of selection of the [historical] subject introduce?
• Question 2: In The Lady of the Rivers, according to Aunt Jehanne, what is parole not?
  
• Question 3: How many books might the series expand to?
  

Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 20th October 2011.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. 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.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.