Happy Friday Scribblers,
Lovely to meet new faces and catch up with friendly familiar ones at Seesaw, Manchester, over the weekend! We also got to film the below podcast with internationally best-selling author John Ironmonger - we cover his career as a zoologist and how he broke out into fiction in the GERMAN market (despite not speaking German himself), BEFORE he became such a much-loved UK author. ‘The Angel of St Piran’ is the first trade hardback for Fly on the Wall Press and with a characteristic chimp-inspired cover!
This week we got the news that John will be interviewed - and photographed! - for The Observer shortly, so we’re really excited to be able to bring this tale of a gymnnast taking on a group of Billionaire trophy hunters to a wide audience!
Listen to the podcast…
And read more and pre-order ‘The Angel of St Piran’ here…
And today we have a juicy announcement for you!! The first in a series of 2027 new author signings…
Fly on the Wall Press has acquired ‘A Handful of Nutmeg’, a powerful novel by award-winning, Birmingham-based writer, Maeve Clarke
The novel follows best friends Esther and Mercy, whose dreams of leaving Lagombo, Africa, to travel the world together, are curtailed when they, and their classmates, are kidnapped by boy soldiers. With the country engulfed in political unrest, and terrorist organisation Boko Haram gaining power, the girls are swept into a violent chain of events that forces them to flee in search of refuge in the UK. A story of survival, resilience and the abuse of male power, it is also a testament to the strength of female friendship in the face of overwhelming odds.
Maeve Clarke said: “As a publisher with a political and social conscience, Fly on the Wall Press feels like the natural home for my novel. I am beyond delighted that they are championing a book that looks at the story behind the headlines and about girls whose voices are rarely heard and then quickly forgotten.”
Isabelle Kenyon, Managing Director of Fly on the Wall Press, said: “No one leaves this journey unscathed – let alone the reader. This novel honours the stories of captured girls – their childhoods stolen. But there is nuance and sensitivity here – perhaps the boys are victims, too. A haunting and evocative story that ultimately is about sisterhood that sustains beyond blood. This is a novel that will create empathy for refugees – Esther and Mercy, the bookish and the beautiful, will stay with you forever.”
‘A Handful of Nutmeg’ is expected to publish in June 2027. This title won the 2024 SI Leeds Prize, taking both the Judges’ Award and the Readers’ Award — the first time this has been achieved since the prize’s establishment. Maeve Clarke was the writer for the Opening Ceremony of the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games.
Maeve Clarke is a teacher and writer based in Birmingham, and is Writer in Residence for the Royal Literary Fund at the University of Worcester. She holds an MA in Novel Writing from the University of Manchester.
Her short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the award-winning Whispers in the Walls, in which she wrote the opening story, “Letters a Yard.” Her debut novel, What Goes Round, was published by Tindal Street Press, and she won the Creative Futures Award for Flash Fiction with “Sewing Flowers.”
Clarke also adapts contemporary novels for speakers of English as a Second Language for Penguin Random House and Oxford University Press, with adaptations of work by Malorie Blackman, Priscilla Mante and Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Her adaptation of Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry won the LLL Award 2023.
She also writes for theatre, and was a Jerwood Mentee for Playwriting, mentored by Tim Crouch. She was shortlisted for Write Now with an early version of Between Two Worlds, and has been longlisted for the Mslexia and Bath Novel Awards.
We hope you will join us in welcoming Maeve to the family!!
Until next week,
Isabelle x
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