Hello all,
There’s so much we’re excited to update you on this week from the world of BookGo and beyond.
We have been working feverishly on all fronts, mainly on delivering our first round of paperback books and, even more excitingly, our first audiobook! The award-winning Vatican spy thriller The Glamour of Evil is out very soon in paperback and ebook, and the Kirkus-starred Come Up Big will soon launch as BookGo’s very first audiobook! We’re thrilled to be seeking ARC reviewers for these and other works by BookGo authors and affiliates this month. More on all of that below.
Also in this issue, we have a report from the London Book Fair, where Michael and Tom spent a fascinating few days among the great and the good of international publishing — talking about everything from the threat of AI to the ever expanding global market for books, which you’ll be happy to know remains as stable and thriving as ever!
We also have poetry to help you usher in Spring and, for those of you who are loving BookGo’s growing catalogue of thrillers, our Reading Round-Up focuses on classic geopolitical thrillers to read right now.
Here’s everything that’s in store.
ARC Spotlight: Read It First — Become a BookGo Reviewer
Feature: BookGoing International — The View from the London Book Fair, by Michael McKinley & Tomas Elliott
Poem of the Month: “Spring” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Reading Round-Up: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold — and Other Essential Geopolitical Thrillers
Coming Soon: Come Up Big in audio, The Glamour of Evil in paperback, Redeemed in Spanish — and more from BookGo’s international future!
If you’ve ever finished a book and thought I wish I could tell everyone about this — we have good news. BookGo is looking for ARC (Advance Review Copy) readers for four of our titles, available now or coming soon in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.
What does an ARC reviewer do? Simple: you read the book, and when you’re done, you leave an honest review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you buy your books. That’s it. In the world of independent publishing, those reviews are everything — they help new readers discover books that the big publishing machines might never have championed. You’d be doing something genuinely important.
Here are the four books we’re looking for reviewers on right now. To request a copy, it’s simple:
Subscribe to this newsletter (if you haven’t already — it’s free!)
Share this issue with a reader friend
Message us here on Substack or drop us a line at info@bookgo.pub to tell us which book you’d like to review
That’s it. We’ll take care of the rest.
Our Indie Gold Grand Prize winner is soon appearing in paperback and ebook. If you haven’t yet met Maddie Lynch, the Vatican’s accidental Jane Bond, there has never been a better time!
Travelling from New York to Dublin to Jerusalem, tangling with rogue Catholic sects, warmongering politicians, and a deadly assassin, Maddie is one of the most compelling protagonists in recent indie thriller fiction. Readers have called it fast-paced, morally complex, and utterly gripping.
Perfect for fans of: espionage fiction, Vatican history, globe-trotting mystery, strong female protagonists.
Read more & buy | Subscribe, share, and message us on Substack to request your ARC
Come Up Big follows the life of Chuck Wardell from his premature birth in New York through to Vietnam, Harvard, the White House, the State Department, and as a corporate CEO. Along the way, Chuck navigated dyslexia, combat, corporate politics, and the particular American art of reinvention. Told with warmth, humor, and remarkable candor, it is a book for anyone who has ever been counted out to find out how to count themselves in.
Perfect for fans of: American memoir, leadership writing, history from the inside, inspirational non-fiction.
Read more & buy | Subscribe, share, and message us on Substack to request your ARC
On the morning of June 9, 1982, in a bright and beautiful Miami neighbourhood, eleven-year-old twins Alain and Nella wave their mother goodbye for school. Shortly after, she is murdered in their family home.
What follows is one of the most extraordinary memoirs we have published: a journey through danger, loss, and the seductive gravity of the world their father inhabited — drugs, violence, money, and prison — toward something that can only be called redemption. Alain and Nella lose almost everyone. They find each other again. And in the end, with faith, grit, and the love of their families, they come through.
Redeemed is coming soon in a Spanish-language edition. Let us know if you’d be interested in reading in either English or Spanish.
Perfect for fans of: memoir, faith and redemption narratives, true crime, Latin American experience, inspiring non-fiction.
Read more & buy | Subscribe, share, and message us on Substack to request your ARC
BookGo is also very excited to be able to offer review copies of BookGo affiliated authors. Please get in touch for a review copy of any of the books below.
If you’re looking for reviewers of your work, then do get in touch. We may be able to help!
It is May 2025. Chinese naval and air forces are massed across the South and East China Seas. But the target isn’t the one the world expects. As Washington’s eyes are fixed on Taiwan, Beijing fixes its gaze on Japan — and on the vulnerable Ryukyu island chain.
Deep inside the American intelligence apparatus, a mole is feeding the enemy everything they need to know.
Meticulous in its research, chilling in its plausibility, In the Jaws of the Dragon is geopolitical fiction at its most urgent — a book that feels less like a novel and more like a warning. As one reader put it: “I am now awaiting — expecting even — the outbreak of war between China and Japan.”
Perfect for fans of: Tom Clancy, geopolitical thriller, military fiction, international affairs.
Read more & buy | Subscribe, share, and message us on Substack to request your ARC
Born in wartime London in 1944 to an English mother and a father fleeing Nazi persecution, Peter Felix went on to build a career that took him from Pakistan to Hong Kong to Algeria to the United States — and along the way, crossed paths with Princess Margaret, Donald Trump, and the chaos of 9/11, when he desperately searched for his wife June in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers. (They found each other. June went on to become one of the first women of Chinese heritage to lead a top British company as CEO.)
Candid, fascinating, and generous in its spirit, Around the World in 80 Years is a life that reads like a century of history, viewed from the inside.
Perfect for fans of: travel memoir, twentieth-century history, international adventure, inspiring lives.
Read more & buy | Subscribe, share, and message us on Substack to request your ARC
ARC reviewers are the lifeblood of indie publishing. A few hours of reading and an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads can make all the difference to an author. We’d love to have you on the team.
By Michael McKinley and Tomas Elliott
We had the great pleasure of attending the London Book Fair together in March of this year, and it was an extremely productive event. Well organized, well presented and very well-attended, with the world of publishing all there. The panel sessions were great, and the range of companies and ideas that flowed through the LBF kept us fully engaged by the content in the London Olympia and not by that in some worthy saloon in Hammersmith.
One of the issues that frequently popped up in our discussions was the role of AI in publishing. Overwhelmingly, publishers saw AI as a peril — to the very integrity of the relationship between author and reader, and to that between publisher and the world. And we understand the anxiety. We spoke a lot about the value of human connection and connectivity, and that was our main takeaway over the course of several days, as we connected with so many incredible publishers, authors, distributors, marketers, and more from around the world. It really is the people that make book world the world we want to be in.
The resilience and opportunities for growth in the publishing sector also stood out to us. We attended a fascinating presentation on the London Book Fair’s International Stage by data service Circana showed that US book sales have remained incredibly stable and resilient over the past twenty years, even as the world has grappled with the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, book sales are now back above pre-pandemic levels. Adult fiction in particular continues to grow and is up nearly 50% compared to 2020.
Meanwhile, in the non-fiction space, we were excited to learn that Faith and Inspiration texts lead the way here, with books on Christian Living and Personal Growth increasing sales by 42% and 33% respectively. If you’re looking for a faith-based memoir unlike any other, Redeemed: A Journey from Darkness to Light by Alain Orozco and Bianella Orozco-DeLaHoz is “a touching and compellingly told story of a brother and sister living fractured lives” (Kirkus Reviews).
What struck us most, walking the floor of Olympia, was something that no slide could quite capture: the sheer internationalism of the place. Every language you can think of had a presence — publishers from Korea, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Spain. We are particularly excited that BookGo’s international outlook continues to grow. We are very excited that Redeemed will soon be available in Spanish translation, and we also have several more multilingual projects up our collective sleeves – more on that to come!
Overall though, from Michael and Tom, the view from the London Book Fair was one of excitement and optimism for what’s coming next. We hope to meet many more of you there and elsewhere across the world of books at some point soon!
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was a Jesuit priest and one of the most distinctive voices in all of English poetry. He invented what he called “sprung rhythm” — a way of writing that mimics the natural stresses of speech — and his poetry pulses with a almost physical intensity. "Spring" was written in 1877 but not published until after his death.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring — When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid's child, whose choice must be.
By Tomas Elliott
Last month, we celebrated the women who dominate the thriller genre — Tana French, Rachel Kushner, Holly Jackson. This month, with The Glamour of Evil available in new formats and In the Jaws of the Dragon seeking its first wave of readers, it felt like the right moment to look at two classics and one great modern example of the geopolitical thriller.
1. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold — John le Carré (1963)
The book that changed everything. Before le Carré, the spy was glamorous — martinis, gadgets, the licence to thrill. Alec Leamas, le Carré’s exhausted, morally compromised British agent, is something else entirely: a man asked to do one last dirty job by a system that will discard him the moment he’s no longer useful. Cold, bleak, and staggeringly plotted, it remains the benchmark against which all spy fiction is measured. If The Glamour of Evil gives you Maddie Lynch’s crackling moral intelligence, le Carré gives you the darkness she’s fighting against.
Perfect for fans of: psychological espionage, Cold War fiction, morally complex protagonists, literary thriller.
2. The Hunt for Red October — Tom Clancy (1984)
A Soviet submarine commander decides to defect, taking his vessel, his crew, and the most advanced nuclear technology the Cold War had yet produced. Clancy’s debut novel invented a genre: the techno-thriller, in which the hardware is as important as the human drama, and in which geopolitical chess is played out in real time across the pages. The research is staggering, the tension relentless.
Perfect for fans of: military thriller, naval fiction, Cold War geopolitics, meticulous research.
3. Red Metal — Mark Greaney & Hunter Ripley Shea (2019)
Russia moves against NATO. Multiple theatres of war erupt simultaneously across Europe and Africa. American and allied forces scramble to respond. Red Metal is the contemporary heir to Clancy — ferociously paced, technically precise, and built around the terrifying plausibility of great-power conflict in the modern era. Read it alongside In the Jaws of the Dragon and you’ll have a very vivid picture of what the world’s war planners are quietly thinking about right now.
Perfect for fans of: modern military fiction, NATO thriller, fast-paced action, geopolitical realism.
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