Heart-Shaped Box was snapped up by Hollywood royalty, including screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (who penned the recent movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code) in a pre-emptive $1.5 million deal.

Joe’s fans already include Neil Gaiman, who said, ‘Heart-Shaped Box is, quite simply, the best debut horror novel since Clive Barker’s Damnation Game, twenty years ago. It’s the kind of book that the overworked adjectives people use on book jackets – relentless, gripping, powerful, a genuine page-turner – were really meant to describe, for it’s all of those things and enormously smart besides. A genuinely scary novel filled with people you care about; the kind of book that still stays in your mind after you’ve turned over the final page. I loved it unreservedly.’

Orion’s own James Rollins, bestselling author of Map of Bones, agreed: ‘Heart-Shaped Box starts with a premise that is as simple as it is brilliant: a ghost for sale on the Internet. But here is a tale that is far from a one-trick pony. It chills with every word, surprises with every page, and twists with every chapter. Here is a debut as literate as it is horrifying . . . and the resounding introduction of a new master in the field of suspense.’

“I just dive on into writing each novel, like a bulldozer rampaging through a shopping mall, leaving a trail of chaos in my wake, and making most of it up as I go along. This entails a huge amount of rewriting, and throwing away of surplus material, but I find it preferable to working to a rigid plan. My characters need to grow organically through their interactions with other people in the story – they don't have any reality for me until I'm at least halfway into the project.”

The Prefect was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Best Novel Award. Download and extract from The Prefect

Joe Abercrombie has just been nominated as one SF site's five top science fiction/fantasy authors of 2007 and SFFWorld top author of 2007.

“Working as a freelance film editor, I found myself with time to spare between jobs. I’d read a lot of fantasy as a kid, had a few ideas in the back of my mind, and decided to have a stab at writing my own take on the genre.

I wanted to produce a fantasy trilogy with all the grit, and cruelty, and humour of real life. I tried to come up with a set of characters as selfish, as complicated, and as unpredictable as real people.

To my great amazement, the whole thing took on a life of its own, and I found I didn’t want to stop. The First Law is the result.”

“It seems every year Gollancz discovers another new writing talent. So following on from Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie comes American Robert VS Redick with the Red Wolf Conspiracy.

Firmly set in the contemporary fantasy heartland it neatly dissects Lynch and Abercrombie's work by combining both a strong protagonist narrative within the rich framework powered by the geopolitical intrigue of two warring empires... tremendously action packed. The fantasy revival continues.” EDGE MAGAZINE

ISFREVU.COM recently said of Jonathan:

“In Jonathan Barnes, Gollancz have found a wonderful and deliciously grotesque novelist. His début work, The Somnambulist is a delight. An extraordinary tale of poetry, secret societies, travelling circuses and walking dead set in a richly realised Victorian London.”

“Cut-and-paste is the best thing that happened to anyone who wants to write well, because it enables you to do more of the kind of operations that make writing good and structures interesting. Keeping a Mont Blanc or a 1930s Underwood for your important literary work is a contemporary way of announcing you're a tosser.”

“I grew up reading fantasy. When I was young my mother gave me a read-along record of The Hobbit. Soon after that I saw the animated version of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. I never looked back, and I never really understood how anyone couldn’t love fantasy.

Between the ages of twelve and eighteen, I read a novel a day, sometimes two. Almost all of it was fantasy and science fiction. But eventually I started to get disillusioned. I would pick up a book and find myself thinking, ‘Haven’t I read this before? It all seems really familiar....’

I got more dissatisfied when I started college and no longer had the same amount of leisure time available for reading. I found myself increasingly irritated when books were predictable carbon copies of the ones I’d read years before.

So I sat down to write my own novel. I wanted something that made people feel the way I used to feel as a kid when I read Dragonriders of Pern, The Hobbit, or the Chronicles of Narnia. But at the same time I wanted to avoid all the fantasy cliché and tell a story that was different and new. It took me more than a decade, but it’s finally done. I spent many of those years living poor and so I’d have the free time to write. But the feedback I’ve been getting these last months has made it all worthwhile. People tell me,‘I got bored with fantasy years ago, but I loved your book’.”

“Aged eight and dyslexic, I began writing a novel about a monkey who stole a NASA spaceship and escaped to the moon to live by himself. As the writing bit was too hard I ended up drawing everything except the first two chapters.”

Blessed with the power to heal the sick using only a hospital, and the power to return sight to the bland, Robert Rankin's reputation grew and grew. He gathered about himself a band of followers, men and women who gladly abandoned their professions and former lives to spread the word about him. They shouted his name from the rooftops, they circulated his name on Ye Internette, they posted posters in the post office, and by the turn of the century almost everyone in London had heard of this man who, they said, could perform miracles.

Taken from: His Holiness Robert Rankin, An appreciation by Michael Carroll, with permission from www.sproutlore.com

“Red Seas Under Red Skies, the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora offers a couple major new plot elements, those being high-stakes gambling and piracy.

“Locke and Jean are staging one of their usual extremely complicated con games, and are once again interrupted in mid-scheme and forced to undertake an even more desperate and suicidal venture, masquerading as hardened pirates. As Jean puts it at one point, ‘All we know about ships is getting on, getting seasick, and getting off.’ Wacky hijinks ensue, especially once we get to the real pirates. I love them dearly; they were originally meant to be more of a background cast but they just sort of completely took the place over once they were onstage. Like, um, pirates.”

“It’s a writer’s truism that characters can take on a life of their own as your write them, can warp away from what you had planned for them, can in fact end up doing things you’d really prefer they didn’t, if only because it gets in the way of your plotting.  There is a contrary school of thought, of course, which says that this is nonsense, that if your characters are out of control, it’s because you haven’t done your planning properly, that you lack writerly discipline, that these people aren’t real, for heaven’s sake, they’re imaginings that you put on the page your own self, and that belong to you wholly.  Get a grip, in other words.  Do your job.

Well, that view is true as far as it goes – what’s on the page is not real, if your characters are misbehaving, then you are the one who’s causing it.  But before we all troop on over to the puritanical side of the argument, let’s just stop a moment and wonder why a writer would allow their characters to get out of hand this way.  Because God knows it would be so much easier to map out your book, and then just type it out as envisaged. 

But what’s missing from that approach is any sense of exploration, of opening up fresh contexts and finding out en route what they might contain.  A writer who finds their characters erring from the path is a writer who’s exploring what they actually think and feel about the elements of the story being told.  A character-driven novel is a narrative being defined, in the act of telling, by human frailty.  And as such, it’s a novel that’s far more likely to tell you something interesting and unexpected about human existence than a tale conceived and executed in sterile authorial certainty that cannot and will not change.

Every single character in Black Man ended up somewhere different than I expected.  Nothing turned out the way I’d thought it would.  Writing it was a logistical nightmare.

It’s a better book as a result.  Brutal, unpredictable and scary. 

A bit like life.”

Later, it was said the man came from the north, from Ropers Gate. He came on foot, leading his laden horse by the bridle. It was late afternoon and the ropers’, saddlers’ and tanners’ stalls were already closed, the street empty. It was hot but the man had a black coat thrown over his shoulders. He drew attention to himself. He stopped in front of the Old Narakort Inn, stood there for a moment, listened to the hubbub of voices. As usual, at this hour, it was full of people.
   The stranger did not enter the Old Narakort. He pulled his horse further down the street to another tavern, a smaller one, called The Fox. Not enjoying the best of reputations, it was almost empty.
   The innkeeper raised his head above a barrel of pickled cucumbers and measured the man with his gaze. The outsider, still in his coat, stood stiffly in front of the counter, motionless and silent.
   ‘What will it be?’
   ‘Beer,’ said the stranger. His voice was unpleasant.
   The innkeeper wiped his hands on his canvas apron and filled a chipped earthenware tankard.
   The stranger was not old but his hair was almost entirely white. Beneath his coat he wore a worn leather jerkin laced up at the neck and shoulders.
   As he took off his coat those around him noticed that he carried a sword – not something unusual in itself, nearly every man in Wyzim carried a weapon – but no one carried a sword strapped to his back as if it were a bow or a quiver.
   The stranger did not sit at the table with the few other guests. He remained standing at the counter, piercing the innkeeper with his gaze. He drew from the tankard.
   ‘I’m looking for a room for the night.’
   ‘There’s none,’ grunted the innkeeper, looking at the guest’s boots, dusty and dirty. ‘Ask at the Old Narakort.’
   ‘I would rather stay here.’
   ‘Well you can’t.’ The innkeeper finally recognized the stranger’s accent. He was Rivian.
   ‘I’ll pay.’ The outsider spoke quietly, as if unsure, and the whole nasty affair began. A pock-marked beanpole of a man who, from the moment the outsider had entered had not taken his gloomy eyes from him, got up and approached the counter. Two of his companions rose behind him, no more than two paces away...

So begins The Last Wish.

Heart-Shaped Box was snapped up by Hollywood royalty, including screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (who penned the recent movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code) in a pre-emptive $1.5 million deal.

Joe’s fans already include Neil Gaiman, who said, ‘Heart-Shaped Box is, quite simply, the best debut horror novel since Clive Barker’s Damnation Game, twenty years ago. It’s the kind of book that the overworked adjectives people use on book jackets – relentless, gripping, powerful, a genuine page-turner – were really meant to describe, for it’s all of those things and enormously smart besides. A genuinely scary novel filled with people you care about; the kind of book that still stays in your mind after you’ve turned over the final page. I loved it unreservedly.’

Orion’s own James Rollins, bestselling author of Map of Bones, agreed: ‘Heart-Shaped Box starts with a premise that is as simple as it is brilliant: a ghost for sale on the Internet. But here is a tale that is far from a one-trick pony. It chills with every word, surprises with every page, and twists with every chapter. Here is a debut as literate as it is horrifying . . . and the resounding introduction of a new master in the field of suspense.’

“I am very inspired by personal or symbolic landscapes: the woods and fields and millponds behind by grandparents’ house for Mythago Wood; Avebury for Celtika. I invented a prehistoric language for Mythago Wood and Lavonyss and apparently sat up in bed one night speaking it. My partner said that the words were all nonsense, but I sounded like I knew what I was talking about!”

Writing novels was a natural progression for Rob Grant. It was what he had always wanted to do. “Even in radio there is an interface between you and the finished product. You have to go through producers and actors: everybody chisels away at your vision. It is never precisely what you imagined in the first place,” he explains, voicing the frustration of many screenwriters-turned-novelists. “In a book the actors turn up on time and are never drunk and can even pronounce the word ’phenomenon’, which a surprisingly large number of actors can’t say,” he adds joking.

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.”

“The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.”

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

Christopher Priest's award-winning novel The Prestige is released as a film later this month. The tale of two rival magicians features a star-studded cast, including Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson and David Bowie. The tie-in edition of the book is available from Orion books.

Mark Chadbourn’s career as a writer began with journalism during the 80s, first in provincial newspapers, eventually becoming a crime reporter in Birmingham where he covered the Handsworth riots and several murders. Since then his byline has appeared in every national newspaper and he also led an adventurous life as an investigative journalist. His fiction writing career began in 1990 when he published a short story which won the Best New Author Award in Fear magazine. He has gone on to publish many novels and series in the Fantasy genre.