Mark Charan Newton

Two books—one fiction, one poetry collection.
The first is David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy Four, the first book in the Red Riding Quartet. Set in 1974, young crime correspondent, Edward Dunford, The Yorkshire Post, is on the story of the murder of a young girl. The murder is particularly brutal, with, amongst other things being done to [...]

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Artwork for The Reef has been posted in full the Pendragon blog, but here’s the front. Design by Darius Hinks.
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So this weekend I finished reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. A monster of a book. Eight hundred plus pages. There’s nothing I can really say that every major world newspaper or author has said already, I suppose. (This is the third DeLillo novel I’ve read in a row after Americana and White Noise.)
But I’ve never [...]

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Matlock.
A strange mixture of old and new. Chrome, brass and leather-trimmed bistro bars stand alongside shabby collectible shops. Old ladies prefer the company of old ladies in tea rooms with steamed up windows, and that haven’t been decorated in years. Walkers stride through traffic with a nonchalance and purpose of street kids in Delhi [...]

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I recently came across this scrapbook on Edward Hopper. I’ve been a fan of Hopper’s paintings for some time now, and there is something about his work that unlocks something within me. There’s a wonderful quality to his scenes—that which is unsaid, not painted. The missing artifact or person. I often wonder about a similar [...]

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Good to see that Pendragon Press are making great progress in the world of fantasy. Five nominations for them, or their titles, at this years BFS Awards. See the full list here.
Nice to know that The Reef is in a safe pair of hands.
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Another one taken from the Solaris blog, but I loved this book so much I had to put it up here too.
The Girl In The Glass, by Jeffrey Ford.
Being in publishing, you read all day, and so reading for pleasure becomes a little difficult—you always feel you’re reading to learn more about the industry, or [...]

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First press release:
Debut Novel Sale to Pendragon
John Jarrold has sold limited-edition rights in THE REEF, the debut novel by Mark Charan Newton, to Chris Teague at Welsh publisher Pendragon Press.
The novel, a fantastical story set mostly among the islands of an imagined world, has echoes of both Joseph Conrad and China Miéville, but is very [...]

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I’ll admit, at times, I can become quite dissatisfied with mass-market offerings. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot of wonderful stuff out there, but I was in one of those diva like moods where I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read, truly. Something different, that stands out.
So I took the plunge into [...]

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Taken from my work blog. I thought I’d fill the page with some book reviews until I think of how to use it properly.
The real world can be filled with as much wonder as any fantasy creation—you just have to know where to look. In Tim Butcher’s Blood River, we are taken to somewhere you [...]

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