Thursday 8 October 2009

Eastern European Blockbuster Auction

Herta Muller has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eastern Europe is now HOT. Especially quality literary fiction about Eastern Europe.





So for one week only I am officially selling out and offering publishers the chance to bid for the hottest literary novel set in Eastern Europe that's currently unsigned, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall.

If you wish to check the quality of the novel, you may download it in full from here.

TO PUBLISHERS: e-mail me BY 12 NOON GMT THURSDAY OCTOBER 15 2009 at songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com with the subject title "interest in Songs", and state your interest or your offer. I will open all e-mails with that title only when the auction has closed.

TO EVERYONE: If you would like to see Songs from the Other Side of the Wall cash in on the new craze for all literature anout Eastern Europe, leave a comment here; tweet this page to publishers; stumble this page; digg this page, and otherwise bring this opportunity to publishers' attention.



ABOUT THE BOOK:

The day the Berlin Wall came down, Jennifer returned to England, abandoning her week-old daughter, Szandi, to grow up on a Hungarian vineyard with 300 years of history. Now 18, Szandi is part of Budapest’s cosmopolitan art scene, sharing a flat and a bohemian lifestyle with her lover and fellow sculptress, Yang. She has finally found her place in the world. Then a letter arrives that threatens everything, and forces her to choose once and for all: between the past and the present; between East and West; between her family and her lover.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall was a number 1 book in 2008 on both Authonomy and Youwriteon.

Scott Pack of The Friday Project said last weekend "Some moments of genuine promise in this debut novel suggest that Holloway could have a future outside of the world of peer review sites and print on demand"

US blogger DJ Young said two days ago: "Like Sputnik Sweetheart, Holloway’s prose gives shape to his characters and delivers us to a time and place, from the end of the Cold War in east Europe to the dead-end enclosures of modern Oxford, the world inside and out, the interior mechanisms and escapements that tick and tock, leading to the next hour or the next half-empty station. Songs, in a sense, reads like the inner life of 21st century bloggers and artists piecing together whatever has been left behind by the last generation.

"Like K in Sputnik, Sandrine is searching for something frustratingly vague and all the clues left behind only bring her to a kind of self-knowledge, though not the kind she was seeking. Interconnectedness is another theme of Songs, so, unlike Sputnik, we are given a narrative resolve to Sandrine’s journey, one that takes up the loose ends of these relationships – parent and child, lover and other and the wanting nature of love – and sets them adrift, free."

Random House, critiquing the book for Youwriteon, said: “Your voice is very fresh and original…Sandrine is an engaging, intriguing narrator…Your writing is extremely good, very lyrical but always with the aim of moving the story on.”

Harper Collins, critiquing the book for Authonomy, said: “An artful style, with some very striking moments…The parallelism of a person and a country coming of age; the past’s haunting of the present in both; the hopes and fears of different generations: all these are rich veins that you exploit well, and provide a fascinating core to the book”

SO WHAT NEXT?
I am a self-publisher. I am a happy self-publisher. But for one week I will, with respect to my own work, but whilst carrying on blowing the trumpet for my fellow Year Zero Writers, forget that. FOR ONE WEEK. And then it will be too late. Any cashing in to be done on Mueller's success will be done by me, and by Year Zero, and us alone.

THE AUCTION STARTS NOW

1 comment:

  1. way to go. i am glad my neighborhood is finally making it beyond communist-related memories.

    ReplyDelete