Fantastic news today that Zaiba Malik’s We Are a Muslim, Please has been longlisted for The Orwell Prize, Britain’s most pretigious award for political writing. Click here to read the full announcement.

‘[We Are A Muslim, Please] vividly conveys the secure by stifling atmosphere Malik left behind when she went to college…but it is to thoughtful people like Malik that the future belongs’ - Joan Smith, Independent

‘Award-winning journalist Zaiba Malik has made a name for herself with uncompromising investigations of corruption, prejudice and extremism.  Her autobiography, We Are A Muslim, Please takes us from her childhood in 1970s Bradford to her experience in a Bangladeshi interrogation chamber.  Few people are better placed to explore the issues facing Muslim women in Britain and the softness of the title …belies the hard-hitting nature of Malik’s work.  The final part of the book, a letter to one of the 7/7 suicide bombers, is particularly heartfelt and thought-provoking’ - Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

It’s here people, that moment you’ve all been waiting for (right?) - the Windmill Friday Feeling! *fireworks* *parades* *champagne*

Alot of these links come from that bastion of interesting things and faff, Twitter, and this one from @DaveGorman is gold: “Whatever today brings you’ll be happier if you spend a minute looking at pictures of Basset Hounds running: http://bzfd.it/gGuHOc I promise.”

The eagle eyed among you will notice I spelled ‘a lot’ like an absolute tool in that last paragraph, which this time is because I’m looking for an excuse to share this wonderful comic from Hyperbole and a Half, ‘The Alot’. Read it, then read everything else on there, then come back here for more links.

Back? Hello? Anyone? Ah, there you are. Now, it is common knowledge that publishing types are generally fond of a drink or two. This is not true. We are also fond of three, four, and numbers upwards of four drinks as well. This brilliant essay on the art of writing about drinking shows the long and (mostly) honourable tradition of books and booze, “Drink what you know.”

Photos inside writer’s rooms: do they offer a window into the novelist’s soul? Hmm, maybe not, but what I do know is that if Will Self was to keel over today then the Post-It note industry would suffer a major hit. Wow.

And finally, this is a lovely post about writing that pushes blogging into an artform: “100 Things About a Novel”.

David Dow is a leading death row attorney in Texas, where 99% of appeals are rejected. He knows his clients are guilty, but he defends them because he believes state-sanctioned murder is wrong.

Then he meets Henry Quaker. Henry is a quiet man, mentally unstable, charged with murdering his childhood sweetheart and their two children. All the evidence is against him, yet as David painstakingly pieces his case together, he becomes convinced that Henry is innocent.

What begins is a non-stop race against time, in this searing memoir and shocking indictment of a criminal justice system gone wrong.

Click the cover to read an extract. If you would like a copy of Killing Time for review, please contact windmill@randomhouse.co.uk.

 ‘A riveting and compelling account of a Texas execution written and narrated by a lawyer in the thick of the last minute chaos’ - John Grisham

‘David Dow’s extraordinary memoir lifts the veil on the real world of representing defendants on death row.  It will stay with me a long time’ - Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine

‘David Dow’s work fills me with admiration for his courage and commitment’ - Richard North Patterson

‘A book of uncompromising honesty and moral beauty’ - Kirkus

‘The most arresting of warnings to any decent person flirting with supporting the death penalty … It also warns us to remember family and sanity when drowning in work’ - Shami Chakrabarti, Liberty

To mark the publication in paperback of Tim Pears’ Landed, he has written a moving article over on A Common Reader about the inspiration behind the book.

“[F]or for every feckless man who’d abandoned his responsibilities there’d be another bewildered father, guilty at the failure of his family, denied access to his children; often poverty stricken into the bargain.”

Read the full post here.

(Unless you’ve read The Day the Falls Stood Still.)

1. The Day the Falls Stood Still’s inspiration, legendary riverman William “Red” Hill (1888-1942), hauled 177 bodies from the Niagara River, rescued 29 people, and assisted a handful of daredevils.  He also shot the lower rapids in a barrel three times.

William “Red” Hill (right) - Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library

2. The amount of water flowing over Niagara Falls is usually only twenty-five percent of the natural flow. Up to seventy-five percent of the water is diverted for hydroelectricity.

The Queenston powerhouse, built over the course of The Day the Falls Stood Still, was the largest hydroelectric development in the world when it opened in 1922.

3. Captain Matthew Webb, the first recorded person to swim the English Channel, lost his life attempting to swim the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls in 1883.

Captain Matthew Webb - Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library

4. Niagara Falls has long been a source of inspiration:

“I have seen the falls and I am all rapture and amazement.” - Henry James

“Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty.” - Charles Dickens

“Oh, it is lovelier than it is great; it is like the Mind that made it: great, but so veiled in beauty that we gaze without terror.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe

5. The term “the day the falls stood still” was coined back in 1848 to describe the day the Niagara River became jammed up with ice at its mouth and ceased to flow over the falls.  With the falls standing still, the local people woke to quiet rather than the thunder of the river plummeting from the brink. With the cliff face of their falls and the riverbed suddenly dry, some ducked into churches, praying for their salvation with Armageddon so close at hand, and others headed out onto the riverbed, salvaging lost timbers and collecting relics from the War of 1812.

6. Created in 1885, Niagara Falls State Park is America’s oldest state park.  The park was the result of a sixteen-year, hard-fought battle by a group of prominent men led by Frederick Law Olmsted, most widely known for designing New York City’s Central Park.

7. A barge with two men aboard became lodged in the rapids just above the falls in 1918.  A barge dredging the entrance of a hydroelectric canal on the American side of the river had broken free of its tug and drifted toward the Horseshoe Falls. After becoming snagged on a rock shoal, William “Red” Hill rescued the two deckhands. The scow still remains at the same spot where it became stuck in 1918.

8. Despite the warnings of William “Red” Hill, Charles Stephens of Bristol, England, attempted to conquer the falls in a barrel in 1920. 

Having strapped his arms to the sides of the barrel and tied his feet to the anvil that served as ballast, he plunged to his death.  All that was recovered of Charles Stephens was a severed, tattooed arm reading, “Forget me not Annie.”

9. A trolley route, described as the most scenic trolley ride in the world, used to run along the rim of the Niagara Gorge on the Canadian side of the river and then along the teeming rapids at the base of the gorge on the American side if the river.  The Great Gorge Route ceased operation in 1935 after decades of accidents and landslides made the route too deadly and too costly to operate.

Great Gorge Route - Niagara, copyright 1902 by A. Wittemann, Brooklyn, N.Y.

10. Niagara Falls was once felt to be at least as terrifying as it was beautiful.  In the mid-1800s many people believed Niagara Falls possessed the power to lure those who gazed at it too long into throwing themselves from the brink. Phrases like “awful grandeur” and “frightful beauty” were commonly used to describe the falls. In the oration delivered at the opening on the Niagara Falls State Park in 1885, the words “awful symbol of Infinite Power, in whose dread presence we stand” was used to invoke Niagara Falls.

A variation of this post originally appeared at Booking Mama.

The Day the Falls Stood Still is out now in Amazon, Play, Waterstone’s, and all good book shops.

This World Book Day brings not just one but two new books from the remarkable Tim Pears: Landed, out in paperback, and his brilliant new novel Disputed Land. See below for the incredible reviews he has been recieving, and click on the covers to read an extract.

If you would like a copy of either Disputed Land or Landed for review, please contact Harvey at windmill@randomhouse.co.uk.

‘A family novel, and a very sympathetic, intelligent and moving one…effected with uncommon skill…What gives the novel its unusual distinction is the author’s awareness of the inter-connectedness of things, of the significance of seemingly unimportant moments, of the way in which the past persists in the present…Pears is so adept at the illuminating detail, writes so beautifully of the pleasures of life - the enjoyment of landscape, the feel of the house, the meals, the walks with Leonard’s two English setters, an awareness of history - that it is a warm and affirmative novel, one which offers incidental joys on every page. It is perhaps the finest book he has written yet’ Scotsman

‘Pears is a remarkable prose stylist … Landed offers rich pickings’ - The Times

‘Pears is back on top form in this beautifully crafted story … Thrillingly well-observed … If one of the tasks of a novelist is to open our eyes to the world around us, Pears has executed that task with rare aplomb’ - Sunday Telegraph

‘Beautifully and evocatively written’ - Scotsman

‘Powerful: it shows the grief that overwhelms a parent at the death of a child and … the darkness that lies beneath the surface of a superficially happy family…There is no denying Pears’ achievement in the character of Owen, a raw, desperate man even before he is filled with grief, and his deeply poetic descriptions of an old-fashioned life on the land’ - Daily Telegraph

‘A story of love and fatherhood that almost seems Hardyesque…set against the bucolic splendour of flashback scenes … Landed draws us painfully into Owen’s predicament, his teetering between salvation and disaster’ - Times Literary Supplement

‘This novel really sang to me … artfully sculpted, more layered, more powerfully elegiac. This is a really beautiful novel’ - Barbara Trapido