Hi All,
Thank you all for your support this year, it’s been pretty spectacular and a huge amount has changed in books for readers and publishers alike.
There are so many amazing things coming in 2012 that it’s exciting us already.
Enjoy your parties, thanks again and see you next year!
-Everyone at Quercus
Our society has gone through a weird, unremarked transition: we’ve gone from regarding the Net as something exotic to something that we take for granted as a utilitarian necessity, like mains electricity or running water.
In the process we’ve been remarkably incurious about its meaning, significance or cultural implications. Most people have no idea how the network works, nor any conception of its architecture; and few can explain why it has been – and continues to be – so uniquely disruptive in social, economic and cultural contexts.
In other words, our society has become dependent on a utility that it doesn’t really understand.
John Naughton has distilled the noisy chatter surrounding the internet’s relentless evolution into nine clear-sighted and accessible areas of understanding. In doing so he affords everyone the requisite knowledge to make better use of the technologies and networks around us, and see lucidly into their future implications.
Along the way FROM GUTENBERG TO ZUCKERBERG covers areas as diverse as the science of complexity, the economics of abundance, the appeal of disruption and the problematic nature of intellectual property.
FROM GUTENBERG TO ZUCKERBERG gives you all the basic, conceptual equipment you need to understand the Internet phenomenon.
A perfectly preserved body is recovered from a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis.
The male Caucasian corpse – marked by several horrific stab wounds – is initially believed by its finders to be over two-thousand years old. Until they spot the Elvis tattoo on his right arm. The body, it transpires, is not evidence of an ancient ritual killing, but of a murder committed during the latter half of the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, Fin Macleod has returned to the island of his birth. Having left his wife, his life in Edinburgh and his career in the police force, the former Detective Inspector is intent on repairing past relationships and restoring his parents’ derelict croft.
But when DNA tests flag a familial match between the bog body and the father of Fin’s childhood sweetheart, Marsaili Macdonald, Fin finds his homecoming more turbulent than expected. Tormod Macdonald, now an elderly man in the grip of dementia, had always claimed to be an only child without close family.
A lie, Fin will soon discover, Tormod has had very good reason to hide behind.
Cass is building a new life for herself and her young son Ben after the death of her soldier husband Pete, returning to the village where she lived as a child. But their idyllic new home is not what she expected: the other flats are all empty, there’s strange graffiti on the walls, and the villagers are a bit odd.
And when an unexpectedly heavy snowstorm maroons the village, things get even harder. Ben is changing, he’s surly and aggressive and Cass’s only confidant is the smooth, charming Theodore Remick, the stand-in headmaster.
Not everyone approves of Cass’s growing closeness to Mr Remick, and it soon becomes obvious he’s not all he appears to be either. If she is to protect her beloved son, Cass is going to have to fight back.
Cass realises this is not the first time her family have been targeted by Theodore Remick. But this time, the stakes are immeasurably higher…
Video preview available here:
Wonderful video by Christie Watson on her Costa nominated novel Tiny Sunbirds Far Away:
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