Friday, November 20, 2009
Down among the book stacks
Friday, October 23, 2009
Musical makeover
Take a look!
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Between the covers
The cover artwork for the Vintage (B format) edition of The Einstein Girl has been finalised. Originally the design on the left was chosen - a decidedly noir reworking of the original artwork. When I was first shown it, some months ago, I rather liked it: in particular the bold colour and the faintly Georg Grosz lettering. However a number of the big retail buyers were less happy. They felt that this design conveyed too little of the period, while the mood said only crime. They were right. As a friend of mine later commented, it looked like the cover for a Raymond Chandler novel.
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Tuesday, August 25, 2009
From Dresden to Glasgow

The second half of last week was spent in Saxony, and in particular in the impressive city of
I returned to the
The guardian review can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/22/einstein-girl-philip-sington

Tuesday, August 18, 2009
A bookless place (almost)
I had another meeting with a film company yesterday in which various preliminary plans were hatched and options discussed - mostly in connection with my last book, Zoia's Gold and a long short story I wrote a couple of years ago, called The Temporary Witness. They are very nice people with a lot of impressive credits to their name, but their lives are not being made easier by the banks, which now demand their creditor's private homes as collateral as well as up to 18% interest on working capital. All this while the banks themselves pay depositors and the Bank of England (a.k.a. the taxpayer) anywhere between nothing and 3% (at best). No wonder banking is suddenly hugely profitable again. But all those profits are coming straight out of the pockets of the enterprises, large and small, upon which the wider economic recovery depends - making that recovery weaker and slower. No wonder people are angry.After the meeting I headed over to Oxford Street, with a view to signing some stock in a few book shops. Not so long ago, there were a number of major outlets there: a huge Borders, a very large Waterstones and even (this is going back a few years) a sizeable Dillons. But they have all gone now, driven away, no doubt, by vast rents and a lack of custom. What remains, at the western end, is one small Waterstones - which used to be a Books Etc. There at last I found three copies of The Einstein Girl tucked away on the shelves.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
The Times they are reviewing
Another short but sweet review appeared yesterday in The Times. It seems now that The Einstein Girl is now officially a thriller, which was not really my intention when I wrote it. But still, if that's how some people see it, then that's fine by me. Labels, shlaybells, I say (that's 'sleigh bells' after too many vodkas). "A young girl is found, naked and close to death, in the woods outside Berlin. When she wakes up she remembers nothing. But she had a piece of paper advertising a lecture by the great Albert Einstein, and that is the first clue in this stylish thriller. This is Germany in the months before Hitler’s seizure of power. Martin Kirsch is a psychiatrist who is already seeing signs of the way the Third Reich intends to treat its mentally ill, and the unknown "Einstein girl” will turn out to be his last case. I’m giving nothing away; the novel opens with the fact of his disappearance. Strands of history and imagination are beautifully woven together."
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Video trailer redux

After ten days of torture at the hands of the world's video editing software designers, I have finally managed to get the edited version of the book trailer for The Einstein Girl up on YouTube.
