We are delighted to announce the publication of Angelmaker, the new novel from the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway. Featuring a cast of heroes and villains, men and women of high virtue and low morals (sometimes both simultaneously), Angelmaker is the story of a mobster’s son and a retired secret agent, teaming up to save the world.

To find out more and read the first chapter, visit http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/angelmaker/9780434020942

Praise for Angelmaker:

‘Harkaway has created a wonderfully entertaining, unguessable kaleidoscope of a novel. And e-book readers will miss the additional pleasure of a hardback that looks as gorgeously ornate as its contents.’ - The Times

‘It’s a wonderfully strange, rich piece of work - extremely entertaining and exciting - and has a wonderfully comic aspect to it as well.’  - William Gibson, New York Times

‘Distinctive, creative and blessed with the kind of imagination that leaves his novels bursting with invention, Nick Harkaway certainly isn’t an everyday author.’ - SFX

‘A very British bastardisation of Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Adams and China Miéville.’ - SciFiNow

Prepare to be amazed by this fantastic novel by the acclaimed author Marina Endicott. Scheduled to be published as a Windmill paperback in September, but if you can’t wait until then, the beautiful hardback edition is available now.

Little Women meets Water for Elephants - The Little Shadows tells the story of three sisters making their way in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. Setting off to make their fortune as a singing act after the untimely death of their father, the girls, Aurora, Clover and Bella, are overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama.

The sisters begin with little in their favour besides youth and hope, but each one slowly and steadily evolves into a unique and accomplished artist while navigating her way to adulthood among a cast of extraordinary charmers, charlatans, eccentrics, impresarios - and once in a rare while, a bright star with transcendent gifts.
With gorgeous prose and keen insight, Endicott lures us onto the brightly lit stage and then into the little shadows that lurk behind the curtain, and reveals how the art of vaudeville - in all its variety, madness, melodrama, and sorrow - echoes the art of life itself.

Praise for The Little Shadows:

The Little Shadows is my book of the year. Think of your favourite stories about sisters - the gravity, levity and subtlety with which the lives of siblings are woven together; Endicott puts her own spin on that.’ Helen Oyeyemi, author of Mr Fox

‘A vivid coming of age tale about the beautiful Avery sisters, thrust on the vaudeville stage after their father’s death. Set in early 20^th-century Canada, it catapults the reader into the beating heart of the travelling theatrical world - the smell of the greasepaint, heat of the spotlights, and high-wire adrenaline are near-tangible. Thrilling and moving this is a glittering jewel of a novel.’ Easy Living

The Little Shadows is a novel about art and women, and personal fulfilment and the thrill of performing… She has written an entertaining, moving and original work. - The National Post

The Little Shadows has Endicott’s wry sensibility, her pithy lyricism and her skill at pulling the rug out from under the reader’s feet. Like the previous novel, this one also concerns itself with big ideas: the point of art, sisterly and familial love and, as the war’s shadow extends and darkens, the meaning of life itself. - The Globe and Mail

It’s been chosen by STYLIST as one of their cult books for 2012, therefore it’s definately one not to be missed!

To find out more or to buy The Little Shadows, click here.

To find out more about Marina and her books, visit her website.

Windmill is delighted to be publishing The Sugar Barons by Matthew Parker, available from 2 February 2012.  

For 200 years after 1650 the West Indies were the most fought-over colonies in the world, as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar - a commodity so lucrative that it was known as white gold.

Young men, beset by death and disease, an ocean away from the moral anchors of life in Britain created immense dynastic wealth but produced a society poisoned by war, sickness, cruelty and corruption.

The Sugar Barons explores the lives and experiences of those whose fortunes rose and fell with the West Indian empire. From the ambitious and brilliant entrepreneurs, to the grandees wielding power across the Atlantic, to the inheritors often consumed by decadence, disgrace and madness, this is a compelling story of how a few small islands and a handful of families decisively shaped the British Empire.

Praise for The Sugar Barons:

‘A shocking tale of corruption and brutality…an admirable and gripping history’ Sunday Times

‘Very impressive - a meticulously researched piece of work and so engagingly written. It taught me so much that I didn’t know about British Caribbean history’ Andrea Levy

‘The Sugar Barons is an exemplary book; history as it should be written’ Independent

‘Gripping…a compendium of greed, horrible ingenuity and wickedness, but also a fascinating and thoughtful history.’ William Dalrymple

GET YOUR HANDS ON A SIGNED COPY

Great news! We have 8 signed copies to give away. To be in with a chance of receiving one, all you need to do is ‘Like’ us on Facebook and check the Facebook page to find out more. Good luck!

Nick Harkaway, acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World, brings us another propulsively entertaining literary thriller, featuring an octogenarian spy, a mobster’s son with a heart of gold, and an extremely ugly dog.

Angelmaker is published in February 2012, but we are giving Windmill Books followers a chance to win exclusive proof copies. All you have to do is answer the following question:

What is the name of the pipe that is on fire in The Gone-Away World?

a) The Hakote Pipe

b) The Apprehension Pipe

c) The Jorgmund Pipe

Email windmill@randomhouse.co.uk by 5pm, Monday 12th December with the answer, your name and address to be in with a chance of winning. Good luck!

Helen Rappaport will talk about her new book, Magnificent Obsession, at Blackwell Bookshop in Oxford.

More info

To celebrate the release of Douglas Coupland and Graham Roumieu's fantastically twisted Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People, Windmill Books, in association with Waterstone's, are giving you the chance to win an exclusive sampler of the first two chapters! All you have to do is answer the following question:

What is the name of the undead substitute teacher in Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People?

Click here for a clue, and to see some of the wicked and malicious characters from the book. Send your answer to windmill@randomhouse.co.uk with your name and address, and you will be entered for the draw. Winners announced 1st November at 5pm. Good luck!

‘The Prix Goncourt committee took a record hour and a half to elect The Map and the Territory the winner of France’s highest literary honour … Readers … are unlikely to quibble with the decision.  Houellebecq’s fifth book is not only his best for years but very likely his best ever, a serious novel about ageing and death which employs its author’s trademark wit towards some delicious exercises in satire and self parody… a challenging, mature and highly intelligent book’ Daily Telegraph

”[Houellebecq] has shown that the novel can still shock and disturb, still be the subject of passionate debate. We’re not talking about a reality television show or a film or a video game or a rap artist - these are cleverly constructed literary novels. All novelists everywhere have benefited from his audacity‘ William Boyd, Sunday Times

‘If the French had a prize for literary provocation, Michel Houellebecq would win in a walk…The Map and the Territory is a delight to read … vigorously, enjoyably un-French … [it] skewers the art world’s pretentious jargon and galloping mercantilism … The late novelist John Updike once summed up the conventional view of Houellebecq by deploring the French writer’s “thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity”. The Map and the Territory may force a revision of that judgment.’ Financial Times

‘A great read … Houellebecq, as both his writing and his infrequent forays into public life suggest, doesn’t seem like someone who takes much notice of what people tell him to do. Thank goodness’ Guardian

‘A dark master of invention…From the very first paragraph of this brilliant, often preposterous, Prix Goncourt winning novel, the reader can be in no doubt that they’re in the blistering bleak, darkly inventive grand massif that is Houellebecq land’ Evening Standard

‘The outlaw of French letters returns with an acerbic riff on art and celebrity … A very interesting writer - witty, wildly erudite, with a scattergun approach to the inanities that he sees all around him’ Douglas Kennedy, The Times

‘Houellebecq is an astonishing writer … The Map And The Territory is funny, shocking, brutal and unbearably poignant. It is, in the sense that the 18^th century philosopher Edmund Burke meant it, sublime’ Scotland on Sunday

‘What on Earth is a French existentialist and winner of France’s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, doing being reviewed here? He’s not commercial, doesn’t pander to any market, his prose is not always accessible, and certainly doesn’t always zip along. Turned off already? Well don’t be. If ever there was a novelist for our globally dysfunctional times it’s Michel Houellebecq …‘ Henry Sutton, The Mirror (4-star Book of the Week)

We’re delighted that The Submission by Amy Waldman has been longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2011.

Lisa Allardice, editor of Guardian Review is joined on the judging panel by the authors David Nicholls and Antonia Fraser, the critic Sarah Churchwell, Waterstone’s Stuart Broom and Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner.

Supported by Waterstone’s, the award is open to all first-time authors writing in or translated into English, across all genres. A series of regional reading groups, run in partnership with Waterstone’s bookshops, will now assist the judging panel with choosing a shortlist. The shortlist will be announced in early November.

See the full longlist here

‘The grief surrounding 9/11 is central to this exceptional debut about a changing America … The novel centres on Khan and the three family members. Through their stories and interactions Waldman builds a tale of complexity and tension…Waldman’s prose is almost always pitch-perfect, whether describing a Bangladeshi woman’s relationship with her landlady or the political manoeuvring within a jury. The characters are wholly realised and believable as individuals, but they also stand in for stories and conflicts that go beyond their own lives.’

Guardian Review

‘A decade after 9/11, Amy Waldman’s nervy and absorbing new novel, “The Submission,” tackles the aftermath of such a terrorist attack head-on. The result reads as if the author had embraced Tom Wolfe’s famous call for a new social realism … and in doing so, has come up with a story that has more verisimilitude, more political resonance and way more heart than Mr. Wolfe’s own 1987 best seller, The Bonfire of the Vanities’

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

‘The Submission is a searching, cerebral novel with the pitch and pace of a thriller’

Daily Mail

‘Sweeping novels of this sort tend to risk clumsiness by pushing their characters around in service of a message but The Submission tells a clever story very well’
4 stars Metro

‘A wonderful novel which challenges your beliefs’

The Sun

‘Waldman’s narrative is confident and her writing has a clever freshness … sensitively exploring complex issues. Waldman’s is a fine achievement’

Jewish Chronicle

‘Waldman, a former New York Times reporter, excels at involving the reader in vibrant dialogues in which the level of the debate is high and the consequences significant’

Washington Post

‘Amy Waldman’s emotionally and politically rich novel … raises wrenching post-9/11 questions about what it means to be an American’

USA Today

‘A wrenching panoramic novel about the politics of grief in the wake of 9/11

Richard Price

‘With a keen and expert eye of an excellent journalist, Waldman provides telling portraits of all the drama’s major players, deftly exposing their foibles and mutual; manipulations.’

Claire Messud, New York Times Book Review

‘Amy Waldman writes like a possessed angel’

Lorraine Adams

‘The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time’

Booklist, starred review

‘Waldman addresses with a refreshing frankness thorny moral questions and ethical ironies without resorting to breathless hyperbole’

Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

‘This is a remarkably assured portrait of how a populace grows maddened and confused when ideology trumps empathy. A stellar debut’ 

Kirkus Review, starred review