The Word Cloud

Publisher's Description:
From the Suffolk countryside to the old Basque towns of Spain, Emma Darwin's unforgettable debut tells the astoundingly moving story of Stephen, a veteran of Waterloo, whose suffering and secret lost happiness is transformed by love. Gorgeously written, fascinating and engrossing, THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE is a sexy, heartbreaking, glorious novel by a major new literary star.

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Best First Book and Goss First Novel Awards, Longlisted for the Prince Maurice Prize and the RNA Novel of the Year Award.

Wow Emma! I think that they like it. Well done you, as soon as Christmas is over and I have some pennies, I shall be buying and reading your book. Congratulations.

Emma, I have a question as I want to make sure:p

Are these romantic novels, or historical novels with a romance angle included?

Reason being that my work has given us vouchers for Christmas so I have some book tokens to be spending and like the sound of your books, I just wanted to check that they're not girly:-)

Inktrailer, they're historical novels - or, rather, they're novels about history - which have an angle about sex and love and all the rest of it. Definitely not romance in the narrow sense of the term. I hope you enjoy it/them, if you do decide to go for it.

There are short extracts on my blog, if you want to get a bit of the flavour:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/the-mathematics-of-love.html

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/a-secret-alchemy-an-extract.html

I enjoyed the book. Does this mean 'The Mathematics of Love' will re-appear in the bookshops?

Mike, books have a very short bookshop shelf-life these days: every inch of bookshop shelf is real estate that has to earn its keep, and these days they're much sharper about what is and what isn't doing that. The other thing is that any book which was 'core stock' at Waterstones used to automatically have two copies on the shelf, and when the first sold another was ordered, so that any title they'd decided to stock almost always had a representative on the shelf. Then they decided that 'core stock' would be only one copy, which did leave room for more different titles, but also meant that there are longer gaps when there's nothing visible, even if there's one on the way.

TMOL was core stock at Waterstones for longer than I'd dared to hope, but it's now 3½yrs old, which is long in the tooth by the standards of the book trade. By comparison, titles in Tesco only get 2-4 weeks to prove that they're worth keeping on display. That doesn't mean TMOL's out of print: far from it; it's still selling steadily . (Bromley Waterstones isn't as supportive of my stuff as many are - Croydon had ASA on a table of 'historical fiction with a twist' only the other day - but one assumes that each knows their market). It's still orderable, and on Amazon, and so on and so on. It's not really a Smiths book, but they have been known to have it, too.

Inktrailer, they're historical novels - or, rather, they're novels about history - which have an angle about sex and love and all the rest of it. Definitely not romance in the narrow sense of the term. I hope you enjoy it/them, if you do decide to go for it.

There are short extracts on my blog, if you want to get a bit of the flavour:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/the-mathematics-of-love.html

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/a-secret-alchemy-an-extract.html

Thanks for those Edwina, sorry for taking so long to reply (Christmas and flu etc). I liked the extracts very much, and have added both to my Amazon list - will bother you again when I 've read them:-)

Actually, just remembered about Amazon and their payments to authors - do you know if Waterstones are likely to have these? Or do you know of a better place to buy them?

Waterstones mostly have ASA, and sometimes TMOL. Their website shows stock levels in individual branches, if you go to the page for each title.

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/

You can buy direct from the site, too, and from Foyles

http://www.foyles.co.uk/

If you want to buy online there's also The Book Depository, who I'd recommend highly - free worldwide postage, and excellent prices. Also very good delivery times on occasion: they sometimes stock new books which Amazon aren't admitting to except via the dealers in the Marketplace.

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/homepage.php

Wonderful Emma, thanks very much for that! You're a mine of information:-)

i think we're lucky to have someone qualified and published like you on the cloud, your advice is always very useful, and it's clear why. Congrats :) I hope one day I can be advertising something on this part of the forum.