Saturday 6 February 2016

Book Launch of Thomas Brown's Featherbones

One of the greater pleasures of running a bookshop is to receive the honour of hosting a book launch. It doesn't happen very often, which makes the times when it does happen all the sweeter. 
    Launching a book is a little bit like the baptism of a baby. I wouldn't call it a birth - it would take away from the labour of love, pain, frustration, elation, white heat frenzy followed by staring helplessly at a blank screen, unable to form a single sentence, until suddenly that sentence is ready to be born and bursts out of you, and this happens about a million times where you take all these images and moments and scenes and weave them into a tapestry of narration, in which the aim is to never let the reader see your technique but to create the illusion of an alternate reality so seamlessly that characters become alive and sceneries burst with a life of their own. 

Most writers can quite possibly relate to that type of birth - it can take months, even years. But all the pains will be forgotten as soon as you hold your baby in your arms. Letting go of a book is often like letting your kid go out into the world, perhaps never completely happy or comfortable with it, but there it goes. 

Hosting a book launch is like having a party: to welcome the kid, to celebrate the efforts of its parent, to appreciate the beauty of the finished work and marvel at the complexity of its creation. 

So we at Waterstones Witney are delighted to invite everyone to the baptism of Featherbones, the wonderful brain child of Witney author Thomas Brown.


Please join us on Saturday, 13th February, from 1-3 pm, for a reading, a Q&A session, signing and general merriment with snacks, cake and drinks.


If you ever wanted to chat to an author about writing, his inspiration and his way to getting published, now is the opportunity. 
Plus, a party at a bookshop? Come on! It doesn't get better than this! 

Some of you may remember the launch of Mr Brown's first book Lynnwood, back in June 2013, which was a wonderful experience for everyone involved. Mr Brown's dark tale of the primal appetites of a small New Forest village was since shortlisted for the People's Book Prize.

His second novel again deals with the darker side of the human soul. It is an intricately woven tale of a young man's slow mental unravelling as he tries to come to terms with not just a traumatic incident in his childhood, but the very nature of his being. At times, the story is hard to take, as the bleakness and loneliness of the protagonist infiltrates your heart like a cold fog - unlike in other tales, his struggle is not romanticised or sentimentalised, despite the stunning beauty of the prose. 
Leaving the reader defenseless in Felix's increasingly unhinged mind, it begins to blur the lines between nightmare and waking, between reality and delusion, employing all the senses... all the while Felix's ordinary life continues.
Featherbones, with it's mythological elements and intense symbolism mixed into a bleak reality, reminded me much of Patrick Ness' A Monster Calls or Stephen King's Rose Madder - but just as if Susan Hill or Angela Carter had written it. 

We do hope you'll be able to join us. 

Lots of love, 

Patty 



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