He Sells SANCTUARY – Aye, But When? And Where?

Anybody out there know what’s happening with Ken Bruen’s SANCTUARY? I’ve been getting emails asking me if / when the latest (and rumoured last) Jack Taylor story hits the shelves in the US / UK in hardback / paperback, and I haven’t the proverbial baldy. If anyone can help, you know what to do …
  One man who did get his grubby mitts on a copy is Tony Black, he of PAYING FOR IT fame. He has a review of SANCTUARY up at the inimitable Sons of Spade, with the gist running thusly:

“The beauty of the prose can only be described as that of a genius. Bruen applies a finesse to his slickly-crafted sentences that’s unmatched. It’s a Salinger-esque trip told with the kind of insight you’d expect from an author with his own unique, cultural X-ray vision. And, in SANCTUARY, the new Ireland, in all its complexities, is never far from his field of view.”

  Nice. Meanwhile, one book that is definitely published in the US this week is Brian McGilloway’s BORDERLANDS, and we know this because his fellow scribe David Isaak has the pics to prove it over at the Macmillan New Writers blog. Quoth David:

“This is more than a selfless interest in seeing Brian’s book reach a wider audience; this is also an historic, but little-noted occasion. This is the first time a Macmillan New Writing book has jumped the Atlantic and been printed in an American edition …
  “McGilloway’s prose is flawless, his characters pop off the page, the plot is engrossing, and the setting unique. The book received deservedly great reviews in Ireland and the UK, and sold enough copies to turn most writers Elphaba-coloured with envy.”

  Erm, David? What the blummin’ hell is Elphaba when it’s at home?

Bruen Up A Storm

God bless The Rap Sheet, which does all the heavy lifting by interrogating Reed Farrel Coleman (Jim Winter on thumbscrew duties) and discovering that he has a new novel coming out next year called TOWER, a collaboration with (dum-dum-DUM!) Sir Kenneth of Bruen. That makes it, by my reckoning, at least four novels Ken Bruen was writing at some point in the last twelve months – TOWER, ONCE WERE COPS, SANCTUARY and THE MAX, his latest Hard Case Crime collab with Jason Starr.
  Meanwhile, Brandon Books are issuing AMERICAN SKIN in hardback on this side of the pond, with the very handsome tome hitting a shelf near you on September 9th. Paula Murphy of the Mater Dei Institute of Education at Dublin University is on the case, with an extended essay entitled ‘Ken Bruen’s AMERICAN SKIN and Postmodern Media Culture’, which kicks off thusly:

Analyzing Ken Bruen’s novel AMERICAN SKIN, this essay argues that his crime novel illustrates the necessary tension of postmodern identity in the Western world; a tension between individual national and cultural identities and the universalizing force of globalization. The novel is set in Ireland and America and has characters from each country. However, rather than resolve the tension between native and acquired identities that the novel sets up, Bruen chooses to set his novel in the larger socio-cultural scene of the globalized, postmodern world. Consequently, the novel uproots identity from its national context and situates it in the heterogeneous flux of postmodern culture …

  For lots more in a similar vein, jump on over here …

“It’s Writing, Jim, But Not As We Know It.”

How time flies, eh? It seems like it was only last week when we were letting you know that Ken Bruen’s latest, SANCTUARY, is due in June from Transworld and that – woah, that was last week. And now the Edgar-nominated Sir Kenneth of Bruen gets in touch to let us know that ONCE WERE COPS (funkadelic new cover, right) will be St Martins’ lead title come September, and that “it’s darker than AMERICAN SKIN”. Crumbs! Has Bruen cracked the whole ‘multiple universe’ malarkey at the heart of quantum physics, and marshalled all his theoretical selves to write novels at virtually the speed of light? And can we get a (theoretically infinite) Star Trek episode out of it? Hmmmm. Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

He Sells Sanctuary

The one-man publishing industry that is Ken Bruen has another offering for your delectation – SANCTUARY, the latest in the Jack Taylor PI series, is due from Transworld on June 2. Quoth the blurb elves:

Two guards, one nun, one judge. When a letter containing a list of victims arrives in the post, PI Jack Taylor is sickened, but tells himself the list has nothing to do with him. He has enough to do just staying sane. His close friend Ridge is recovering from surgery, and alcohol’s siren song is calling to him ever more insistently. A guard and then a judge die in mysterious circumstances. But it is not until a child is added to the list that Taylor determines to find the identity of the killer, and stop them at any cost. What he doesn’t know is that his relationship with the killer is far closer than he thinks. And that it’s about to become deeply personal. Spiked with dark humour, seasoned with acute insights about the perils of urbanization, and fuelled by rage at man's inhumanity to man, this is crime-writing at its darkest and most original.

Don’t know about you, but we’re backing SANCTUARY each-way for Crimespree Magazine’s annual ‘Best Novel By Ken Bruen Award’ …