January 2023

Without standing up, he lifted the book from a stack on a chest next to his chair. “What a coincidence. I’m sure you know that today would have been Mozart’s birthday: January 27, 1756.”

The Girl with Twenty Fingers

Hello all, and congratulations on making it through January – it wasn’t too bad, was it? We hope you’ve been eating lots of chocolate (or not, if your resolution dictates!) and treating yourselves to the steamiest baths. If there’s one thing winter’s good for it’s snuggling up with a book, and Kate Mueser’s gorgeous debut novel – The Girl with Twenty Fingers, released on Mozart’s birthday – is exactly the sort of hygge read you need 🙂 .

Check out lovely Kate talking about the book.

FYI European customers – we ship our books from the UK, which is having a bit of a meltdown with international post following a cyber attack. We can still ship orders (and have been doing so!), but for the time being it may be a little more expensive as we use a courier instead of the Royal Mail. Hopefully all resolved soon!

What else has been going on? Oh yes, we have a new member of Blackwater – Dr Luca Guariento – who hates big introductions so we won’t give him one. Luca will be taking over a lot of our typesetting and e-publishing and many other things. Welcome, Luca! We’re delighted to have you and we’ll leave it at that! That’s now one partner in West Virginia, one in Italy, and two in Glasgow – Glasgow is winning!

This month also saw The Stone Maidens author Ioulia Kolovou feature in the University of Glasgow’s Creative Conversations series with author of Hear No Evil, Sarah Smith. It was a fascinating discussion and great to see so many attendees picking up Ioulia’s book courtesy of John Smith’s Bookshop – so many I couldn’t get a picture of the table in time! Here’s one of the venue instead – not bad at all!

And since we’re on a Glasgow theme, we’ll round off by mentioning that our books are now getting stocked in Glasgow Libraries, which we’re over the moon about. Another step up for our little company, in what is shaping up to be a pretty exciting year!