It’s the season of brochures in the land of publishing and most of them look much the same. Some of them are prettier than others, but the majority look just as you’d imagine. Whilst I’ll always enjoy pouring over them and finding books to get excited about for the future, it’s always nice when something a bit different turns up.
Enter Tinder Press.
Tinder are a new press launching in 2013 with some ace-looking titles and some fabulous publicity. Considering that they have the same team that devised Snow Day for Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, this latter point isn’t all that surprising.
When their first brochure arrived at work, I was happy to see that it was as original and pretty as I’d expected. The purple packet flips open to reveal several postcards detailing the first releases.
Rather lovely, no? There are five covers that already have (gorgeous) covers – these four and Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley which I’ll be reviewing very soon. I’m most excited about Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave and Anton DiSclafani’s The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, which are released in February and June 2013 respectively.
It’s July 1976. In London, it hasn’t rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he’s going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta’s children – two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce – back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.
1930s America, southern high society: Part love story, part coming-of-age novel, this is the moving, raw and exquisitely vivid story of an uncommon girl navigating a treacherous road to womanhood.
Thea Atwell is fifteen years old in 1930, when, following a scandal for which she has been held responsible, she is ‘exiled’ from her wealthy and isolated Florida family to a debutante boarding school in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. As Thea grapples with the truth about her role in the tragic events of 1929, she finds herself enmeshed in the world of the Yonahlossee Riding Camp, with its complex social strata ordered by money, beauty and equestrian prowess; where young women are indoctrinated in the importance of ‘female education’ yet expected to be married by twenty-one; a world so rarified as to be rendered immune (at least on the surface) to the Depression looming at the periphery, all overseen by a young headmaster who has paid a high price for abandoning his own privileged roots…
Good job, Tinder Press, on a lovely first brochure, fabulous cover designs and what sound like brilliant stories. Keep them coming!
October 18th, 2012 at 13:48
I asked them for a catalogue too, so I’m super excited to see it. The 1930′s Southern novel sounds amazing.