Helen McClory has a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Glasgow. Her debut story collection On the Edges of Vision won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award. She lives in Edinburgh. Helen is represented at Jenny Brown Associates by Jenny. For all enquiries contact jenny@jennybrownassociates.com
The Flesh of the Peach ‘McClory’s is a lepidopterist’s language that skewers with playful, painful precision.’ Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo
‘Bold and unflinching… a brutal, clear-eyed study of a failing artist that shatters our expectations of what a woman should be.’ Kirsty Logan author of The Gracekeepers
In New York, the ending of 28 year old artist Sarah Brown’s recent relationship with a married woman has coincided with the death of her estranged, aristocratic mother, leaving her a substantial amount of money and an unrecognised burden of toxic grief. Rather than return home to England, she decides to travel by Greyhound to her mother’s cabin in New Mexico. There she’s drawn into a passionate relationship with Theo, a man whose quiet stability seems to complement her mercurial character.
But as Sarah’s emotional turmoil grows, there are warning signs that tragedy could ensue. In Flesh of the Peach Saltire First Book of the Year winner, Helen McClory, paints a beautiful and painful portrait of a woman’s unravelling, combining exquisite, and at times experimental, prose with a powerful understanding of the effects of unresolved loss.
Karl Whitney is a writer from Dublin, who specialises in non-fiction work. He’s interested in writing about real life – either stories from the present that he can reconstruct through interviews or experience first-hand as a reporter, or stories from the past that can be gleaned from the historical record. He’s also fascinated by cities and urban form, and landscape more generally. His first book, Hidden City: Adventures and Explorations in Dublin, was published by Penguin Ireland in September 2014 and was a Guardian book of the week. His work has appeared in the Dublin Review, the White Review, and the London Review of Books, the Guardian and the Irish Times. In 2013 he won the John Heygate Award for travel writing. He is currently working on his second book, Hit Factories: A Journey through the Industrial Cities of British Pop, which will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in May 2019.
Nicola White grew up in Ireland and New York and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. She lived in London and Belfast before moving to Glasgow to work as a contemporary art curator, moving on to produce arts documentaries for BBC radio and television.
In 2008 she won the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writer Award, and began to publish short stories in a range of journals, anthologies and for broadcast on Radio 4. In 2012 she was Leverhulme Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.
Her novel, In the Rosary Garden, won the Dundee International Book prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 Deanston (now McIlvanny) Prize. It was selected as one of the four best debuts by Val McDermid ‘New Blood’ panel at the Harrogate crime festival and was one of the Glasgow Herald’s 2014 ‘books of the year’.
She publishes non-fiction with The Dublin Review and has contributed essays to numerous visual art publications, such as the National Galleries of Scotland’s 2014 ‘Generation Reader’.
Nicola currently splits her time between Glasgow and the Highlands, which means she lives mostly on the A9.
Books by Nicola White In the Rosary Garden Published by Cargo/Freight
Summer in Dublin, 1984. Ali Hogan is leaving school, all the possibilities of adult life glistening before her, when her discovery of a murdered newborn in a convent garden shatters her world and resurrects half-formed memories of a terrible incident from her childhood. For detective Vincent Swan, a dead newborn is a sad, but not particularly unusual, occurrence. But this baby’s resting place in the grounds of a prosperous school, in an Ireland riven by battles over God and reproduction, makes the case a media sensation even as the church moves to suppress it. Ali flees the media spotlight, seeking refuge at her uncle’s farm in remote Buleen where she starts to put together the fragments of that older tragedy, another infanticide. Meanwhile in Dublin, Swan’s investigation is stalling, forcing him to consider the scraps of evidence that point to Ali Hogan herself.
Praise for In the Rosary Garden
“In the Rosary Garden” is a moving, intelligent and courageous book – both a family story and a genuine thriller.” – AL Kennedy
“A mesmerising tale of secrets and lies rising from the past to strangle the present.” – Val McDermid
“In The Rosary Garden is as good as it gets: a debut shot through with the real, horrifying cruelty of true crime and a heart-race ending.” – Denise Mina
“A vivid thriller. Engrossing right up to its sombre resolution… an arresting debut” – Irish Independent
“An unusual but absorbingly twisting narrative is hugely enhanced by White’s creation of Detective Swan, a complex man whose own frustrated paternal instincts ensure that a highly politicised case becomes very personal indeed.” – The Irish Times
In The Rosary Garden, Nicola White’s superb, pitch-perfect debut, is a compulsive, page-turning crime novel, a haunting slab of Irish family gothic and a moving study of a young woman coming of age in a society deeply unsympathetic to women. Nicola White writes beautifully, with wit, verve, a gift for scene-setting and a compassionate eye for the foibles of her characters. – Declan Hughes, author of the Ed Loy novels.
James Witts is a Bristol-based writer whose background is in sports science. His debut book, The Science of the Tour de France, was published in June 2016 by Bloomsbury. He’s also a regular contributor to a number of magazines and newspapers including Cyclist, Cycling Plus, Guardian, Runner’s World, New Scientist, 220 Triathlon and 442. He’s also editor of bi-monthly newsstand title Urban Cyclist.
Davy Zyw was born and educated in Edinburgh. A lifelong interest in wine propelled him to become the youngest ever British sommelier at Le Gavroche, the Roux brothers world famous restaurant in London’s Mayfair. He then became a wine buyer for Tesco, at one point buying more Italian wines than any other human being on the planet. Davy currently buys wine and champagne for over one million customers worldwide a year for one on the UK’s largest online wine retailers. Davy lives in London and, in his spare time, is a passionate snowboarder.
Davy is represented at Jenny Brown Associates by Jenny. For all enquiries contact jenny@jennybrownassociates.com
Books by Davy Zyw I Love Champagne Freight, forthcoming May 2017
Champagne is an emperor of wines; refined, elegant and exclusive, a universal symbol of celebration and the good life. But with the rise of online and supermarket retailers good quality champagne and has never been more accessible or affordable.
Davy Zyw, a former sommelier at Mayfair’s revered Le Gavroche and once the world’s most prolific buyer of Italian wines, takes us on an extraordinary tour of the best champagne houses of France. With none of the pretensions of traditional wine writers, Davy offers a no-nonsense but fascinating, informative and highly rewarding guide to the history and production of champagne, its most famous houses and tasting notes on his 50 favourite champagnes.
A brilliant way for the ordinary buyer and connoisseur alike to increase their knowledge and enjoyment of one of the greatest drinks in the world.
Shelley Day Sclater was born in Newcastle and lives in Edinburgh. In former lives, she has been a lawyer, an academic psychologist and a research professor, in which capacities she wrote and edited numerous articles and books on topics as diverse as surrogacy, autonomy, identity, and divorce. Shelley now mainly writes fiction and has studied Creative Writing at Newcastle and Edinburgh Universities. Shelley’s short stories have been published in newspapers, magazines, on-line and in anthologies, most recently in New Writing Scotland 31.
The Confessions of Stella Moon Contraband, July 2016
1977: A killer is released from prison and returns home to a decaying, deserted boarding house choked with weeds and foreboding. Memories of strange rituals, gruesome secrets and shame hang heavy in the air, exerting a brooding power over young Stella Moon. She is eager to restart her life, but first she must confront the ghosts of her macabre family history and her own shocking crime. Guilt, paranoia and manipulation have woven a tangled web of truth and lies. All is ambiguous. Of only one thing is she certain. Stella Moon killed her own mother.
Praise for The Confession of Stella Moon:
A truly compulsive drama of guilt, manipulation and paranoia, the narrative shifts effortlessly between otherworldly scenes, searing memories and everyday realities. Laced also with plenty of quirky humour and an irresistible 1970s ambience, this thriller is a highly original but always page-turning read. Irish Times
Shaun runs Wigtown’s The Bookshop, the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland set in its only officially designated ‘National Book Town’. When not working amongst The Bookshop’s mile of shelving, Shaun’s hobbies include eavesdropping on customers, uploading book-themed re-workings of Sugarhill Gang songs to YouTube and shooting Amazon Kindles in the wild.
Shaun Bythell, owner of Wigtown’s The Bookshop, charts the highs and lows of a year in the life of a man passionate and knowledgeable about books, struggling to make a living in rural Britain in the age of Amazon. He travels the country in search of rare books, strikes deals, tries to manage gloriously eccentric members of staff, deals with awkward tourists and loyal customers, and muses on the differences between bookselling now and in 1936 when George Orwell was writing his ‘Bookshop Memories’. It’s a glimpse into a life spent amongst shelves, negotiating his way between books, booklovers and customers asking where the café is…
Ron Butlin was born in Scotland, studied at Edinburgh University, and has an international reputation as a prize-winning novelist. Before taking up writing full-time he was, at various times, a lyricist with a pop band, a barnacle scraper on Thames barges, a footman attending embassies and country houses, and a male model. A freelance journalist for the Sunday Herald, Ron currently lives in Edinburgh with his wife and their dog.
Children’s Books by Ron Butlin
Day of the Trolls Expected publication: August 2017 by Birlinn
It’s the Day of the Trolls: Fart-Fart and all the trolls are back! Join them in the shopping mall where they go wild, causing havoc as they overrun the place. But when they follow sign saying All Trolls – This Way, things turn out very differently to what Flycatcher, Bumscratcher, SnotFace, Squeer and the rest of them expected …
Steve & FranDan Take on the World Published May 2017 by Birlinn
Steve has had enough – enough of cyber-bullies, enough of adults messing up the world. Sharp-witted Fran and her brother worry-wart Dan feel exactly the same. And so, along with his dog Nessie, Steve and the FranDan twins leave town in the dead of night to start on the biggest adventure of their lives …
But if things were bad before, they soon get worse. Much, much worse. Some seriously bad men show up. Why have Steve and Dan been overpowered and led away as prisoners? Why are they kept tied up in the barn of a disused farm?
Having managed to escape, and with no way to call for help, Fran knows it’s up to her to mount a one-woman rescue.
A riotous adventure story aimed at readers aged 10+.
Here Come the Trolls! What happens when your house is invaded by trolls – mischievous creatures who do nothing but cause havoc and mayhem? Published by Birlinn Ltd, 2015
Mick Manning and Brita Granström have been collaborating on both illustration and text for twenty two years. Their first book together, ‘The World Is Full of Babies’, won the Smarties Silver Prize in 1996. Since then they have won the Times Education Supplement Award, received five Royal Society Junior Science Book prizes, and have won the English Association Award for the fifth time with ‘Charlie’s War Illustrated’ in 2014.
Recent publications include: Books Books Books, The Brontes; Children of the Moors, The Story of Britain, William Shakespeare, and Wild Adventures.
‘Mick Manning and Brita Granström’s approach to non-fiction for younger children has revolutionised our bookshelves.‘ Lindsey Fraser, The Scotsman
Laura Darling is a freelance illustrator and artist-educator based in Dundee. Her work has been shortlisted for the Kelpies Design and Illustration Award three times and she has been Highly Commended for the Writing for Children Award and Macmillan Prize for Children’s Picture Books.
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