In two months time, on Thursday 5th of June, my debut novel A RELUCTANT SPY will come out in paperback! To celebrate, I made a little graphic including some lines from recent reader reviews.
If you look carefully, you can also see a new cover blurb, along with the fantastic newspaper reviews we got from the Financial Times, the Sunday Times and the Sun. That review is from fellow spy thriller writer David McCloskey, an ex-CIA analyst who has written three superb novels (DAMASCUS STATION, MOSCOW X and THE SEVENTH FLOOR).
I met David at his Edinburgh event in January, after conversing over email for the last year or so since A RELUCTANT SPY was announced. He very kindly agreed to read the book and we got his very, very kind blurb just before the paperback went to press. Here's the full quote:
As I said when I revealed the initial cover design, I'm really excited for the paperback. It's my favourite physical book format and always has been, and I happen to think it's also a perfect fit for the spy thriller genre - a good paperback spy thriller is a portable bit of excitement and intrigue that fits in your pocket or bag, bringing a little frisson of the secret world to the most mundane contexts imaginable. I love that so much and I hope readers will sit down with Jamie, Nicola and Jeremy on beaches, in train carriages and on uncomfortably warm buses this summer.
Or you can do the traditional 'read in bed when you're sleepy and drop the book on your face' manoeuvre, though I've been told, not least by David above, that my book is a fairly effective sleep deterrent.