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PIG IRON by Benjamin Myers short listed for the GORDON BURN Prize

PIG IRON by Benjamin Myers, published by Independent publisher BLUEMOOSE BOOKS, has been short listed for the inaugural GORDON BURN BOOK PRIZE 2013.

The short list, announced by award winning author and Judge DAVID PEACE was made at Durham Castle Wednesday 7th August. Along with fellow judges Guardian columnist Deborah Orr and BBC arts presenter Mark Lawson, the winning book will announced on 19th October as part of the Durham Literature festival PIG IRON is the story of a traveller who hasn’t travelled; a young man fighting for his surname and his very survival.

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. He is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction including the bestselling novel RICHARD which was a Sunday Times book of the year.

Bluemoose pop-up bookshop

Check out these lovely pics of the Bluemoose pop-up bookshop at Hebden Bridge train station…

A (toy) blue moose sitting in front of the 'Hebden Bridge' sign at the town's station.

A blue moose holding a copy of A Modern Family at Hebden Bridge station.


A (toy) blue moose sitting on a book shelve amongst Bluemoose books.

A blue moose selling copies of A Modern Family.


Kevin Duffy posing with a copy of 'A Modern Family'.

Kevin Duffy looking pleased that someone's taking a photo of him.

Q&A with Socrates Adams

Socrates Adams talks to Bluemoose about his brilliantly, painfully funny new novel, A MODERN FAMILY.




Q: In your own words, what is A Modern Family about, and what inspired you to write it?

SA: A Modern Family is a story about four members of a family, set in the months leading up to the royal wedding between Kate and Wills. I was inspired to write it by my time growing up in a family, and living through the months leading up to the royal wedding between Kate and Wills. The father of the family is a long-haired, male TV presenter. I was inspired to write about a long-haired, male TV presenter by seeing a long-haired man in a car, listening to loud hair metal, nodding his head to the beat. He looked like a television presenter.

Q: The humour in A Modern Family is amazing. The novelist, Ben Myers, described you as the “master of nervous unease.” The story brims with moments where the reader is cringingly embarrassed for a character; which is probably where the novel’s compassion comes from, too. It reminds me of The Office and similar strands of comedy. Has comedy been a source of inspiration for your fiction writing?

SA: Thank you for saying that the humour is amazing. I really like laughing. I certainly didn’t think of any particular comedy while writing the novel, but it’s definitely possible that TV shows like The Office have shaped the way I write. I’m sure that The Office helped to shape my sense of humour.

Q: Other writers who’ve had a sneak peek at A Modern Family have been full of praise for the writing. Jenn Ashworth described it as “filled with wry observations, ruthless satire and, underneath it all, a real warmth. It is scathing, truthful and hilariously, painfully funny.” Why do you think fellow novelists have been so excited about A Modern Family?

SA: I don’t know what to say other than I’m glad that Jenn liked the novel. Sorry, I don’t mean to be short / weird, just find it odd to think about someone being excited about my book. Well, someone other than me, I guess.

Q: Today’s publishing industry is a very conservative place, and very fearful of taking risks with new writers and their respective writing styles. The tone and voice make A Modern Family a wonderfully refreshing read. Do you think a mainstream publisher would have published it?

SA: Well, again, my answer will have to be that I don’t know. I didn’t submit the novel to any mainstream publishers. I guess that probably no, they wouldn’t have published it. Having said that, I don’t know whether a big publisher would have been right for it. The care and attention it’s been given by Bluemoose has been fantastic. Even though I’m a bookseller, I feel like I don’t really know much about publishing. I’m sure that there are lots of people working at big publishers who want to, and believe that they are publishing a wide variety of interesting stuff. And I’m sure that there are some people working in mainstream publishing who secretly feel pretty ashamed about the sort of books they put out.

Q: You’re clearly multi-talented, having recently had success on the big screen. Tell us about that.

SA: With two very good friends of mine, Chris Killen and Joe Stretch (both really excellent and interesting novelists, published by mainstream publishers, funnily enough) I made a feature film. It’s called Wizard’s Way, and we decided to make it to see how far we’d get with just a good idea and a couple of hundred pounds. We got very very far, amazingly. We will have exciting news to share about Wizard’s Way in the coming months. It should be really, really exciting (fingers crossed).

Q: A Modern Family is a humorous attack on the shallowness of celebrity culture. How will you square this stance when you become a world-famous novelist, actor, film-maker, and champion bookseller?

SA: My plan, if I do become successful in some way, is to become a hermit, basically. I’m sure I’ll never be famous, but the idea terrifies me. I just want to write and make films, in my own way, surrounded by people I love, going on lots of holidays. I want to be Larry David.

Q: So, what next for Socrates?

SA: I’m writing a new book, called Inanimate Objects, that I’m pretty excited about. I’m also working on more (two more) film projects with Chris and Joe, for our new production company, Metal Man. I feel really good about all this stuff.


You can read an extract from A Modern Family here.

Bluemoose novelist bumps into lots of, erm, blue moose

Bluemoose author Adrian Barnes posing in front of a Blue Moose sign in America.

Since publishing his debut novel with Bluemoose Books, Adrian Barnes has developed an uncanny knack of bumping into blue moose. He nearly ran one over as well, but unfortunately didn’t have his camera to hand when driving.

NB: Very disappointed that the plural of ‘moose’ is, erm, ‘moose’. Doesn’t work. ‘Mooses’, or even, ‘meese’ work better.

A modern family is hard to find

A Modern Family is spending some quality time in the sun. The characters in Socrates Adams’s brilliantly funny new novel wouldn’t know how to do anything as mundane or as normal as this without a script or medicinal help – so we sent the book instead.

The following photos were all taken in the same place. But where? The first person to correctly identify the large village / town will win a copy of this hilarious new novel. Email your answer to kevin [at] bluemoosebooks [dot] com.

A Modern Family (Socrates Adams's book!) in a park.

A Modern Family in the park.


A Modern Family at a children's playground.

A Modern Family at the playground.


A Modern Family in from of a lake, with trees in the background.

A Modern Family at the pond.


A Modern Family overlooking an indoors swimming pool.

A Modern Family at the swimming pool.

An excerpt from A MODERN FAMILY by Socrates Adams

The following is an excerpt from the brilliant new novel, A MODERN FAMILY, by Socrates Adams.


A television presenter drives around a town in England. He stops at red lights, beeps at inconsiderate drivers, correctly applies his brakes, accelerates efficiently, observes the highway code, considers suicide, steers, checks all three mirrors, starts, stops, moves. The television presenter imagines a handsome man driving a high-performance car down a road by an ocean in the sun. He doesn’t care about whether or not he is that man.

He imagines an ordinary man, driving a low-performance car down a road by a supermarket in bawling, growling rain. He doesn’t care about whether or not he is that man.

He drives past a Tesco’s. He drives past another supermarket. A small, sweet smelling cardboard pine tree dangles from his rearview mirror.

I need to get some shopping, he thinks. If he doesn’t get shopping from a supermarket, his children will die of starvation. He doesn’t want that to happen. He imagines his children playfully eating from steaming plates of food. He introduces his children to the audience of thirteen million, viewing at home. Time to shop, he thinks, happily.

He parks in a supermarket car park. Rain tracks down the windscreen. He grips the steering wheel a few times, happy that it yields slightly to the pressure. The dashboard of his car is a smiling face, helping him to express his emotions. He laughs to himself and feels fine. He takes the key out of the ignition.

A customer walks past the television presenter as he lopes through the shop entrance. The customer thinks, I recognise that man from the television. He looks worse in real life. He looks really awful in real life. The customer thinks briefly about asking for an autograph, but decides against it. A thick spray of water flies from the presenter’s head as he shakes his long, grey, locks. His scalp is visible through the hair, soaked to the skull. The customer goes about his business, getting into his car, driving home, and living the life of a customer.

Everything in the supermarket is covered in plastic. The presenter looks at the products on the shelves and thinks, I know what that is, or, what is that? He occasionally reaches out and touches something. Touching items in the supermarket provokes a melancholic surge which he cannot understand. He thinks, I am nothing, and goes on with his shopping. The aisles in the supermarket are badly organised. There’s an aisle of cheap children’s toys wedged between the meat and the dairy. The customers of the supermarket often think as they wander around, where is the item I’m looking for? The television presenter doesn’t think this. His brain simply engages ‘supermarket mode’. He walks up and down the aisles, basket in hand, feigning deep, passionate interest in products he sees; picking them up and setting them down at random with a sage look on his face, the look of a master chef, selecting the ingredients for a prize-winning banquet.

I Am Nothing, is the television presenter’s default setting. He is so good at thinking it, there’s nearly no effort whatsoever. He sometimes just feels that I Am Nothing is a kind of background radiation, an after effect of the big bang, like white noise on a television set. He thinks that without I Am Nothing there would be nothing. And that is major-league bull-shit, he thinks.

The television presenter first started thinking about things in terms of a type of league and some kind of shit a few years ago. One of his co-presenters had said ‘that is major-league bull-crap’ and he had found it very funny. He sometimes says, ‘minorleague horse-crap,’ or ‘ultra-league crab-crap.’ He just loves it.

What to make, what to make, what to make.

The great thing about food is that it is tasty, if you prepare it properly and make it from ingredients that you love to taste, says the presenter, to an audience of twelve and a half million at home. The presenter’s hands finally alight on some pickled whelks and Irish soda bread. He cannot decide whether or not the children will like this for dinner. He thinks about buying more pickled things to match up with the whelks.

Once, the television presenter had presented a television programme from the sea-side. He remembers the smell of the sea very vividly. He thinks that whelks, and other pickled fish are like the sea-in-a-tin. He takes his purchases to a counter. The cashier swipes his choices across the bar-code reader. The presenter is waiting for the cashier to mention something about his left-field choices. Maybe he’ll say something about how refreshing whelks are. Something about how the sour, complex notes of soda bread make it more interesting than standard, yeast-risen loaves. The cashier aggressively clears his throat, coughs painfully, wipes sweat from his forehead, hits his chest with a fist, and then whispers, almost imperceptibly, three pounds forty three.

It takes the presenter four minutes to start his car. The rain has stopped. He turns on an uplifting CD of music from his youth.

On his drive home the presenter stops at some traffic lights. There is a lady at the traffic lights. He looks at the lady’s buttocks. He turns up the music from his youth. He looks very hard at the lady’s buttocks. He turns up the music so that it is very loud. He loves looking at the lady’s buttocks. The lady’s buttocks are his best friend. He looks at the lady’s face. She is not looking at him. He turns the music up so that it is very, very loud. He opens the window of the car. The lady still looks away from him. He starts screaming along to the lyrics of the music. He screams and screams and finally the lady looks at him.

She sees an old man, beating his head in time to the music, screaming incoherently, opening and closing his window, being beeped at by other motorists. His eyes are wide open. He has long matted hair. She looks away.


A Modern Family will be published on July 25th.

Ben Myers wins top award

Ben Myers, author of PIG IRON, which we published May 2012, has been awarded the top award for fiction from New Writing North. The judge for the fiction prize, award winning author and recently seen on The Granta best of British young writers, Sarah Hall says Ben’s new novel, THE BAIRN is:

Quite simply. Excellent.

This is thoroughly deserved, as Ben is one of the best writers in the UK and highlights how great new writing just doesn’t have to come from the Sarf, or Oxbridge and that you don’t need to own a linen suit, wear comfortable brogues and swan around literary festivals talking about how much of the literary canon you read before you were eight.

Click on the links and see Ben in a tie. When he’s not collecting award he’s either writing or swimming in reservoirs on top of the Pennines.

Bluemoose author wins Young Bookseller of the Year Award

Socrates Adams, author of 'A Modern Family'.

Bluemoose author, Socrates Adams, has been named Young Bookseller of the Year at The Bookseller Industry Awards, which took place at the Hilton, Park Lane, London, on Monday.

The award acknowledges the talents of the rising stars of the bookselling world. Its criteria focuses on an ability to create imaginative displays, to engage with customers via social media, using the internet as a tool to promote the printed book, as well as customer service and an in-depth knowledge of books.

On receiving the award, Adams, said: ‘I feel totally shocked and utterly delighted to win the award. I sincerely wish I could share it with everyone at Blackwell’s Manchester.’

Adams is based at Blackwell’s University Bookshop in Manchester, where he began work as a temporary bookseller. He has gone on to manage the Business Centre, which works closely with university departments, the NHS, and many other institutions and businesses.

Sue Chapman, the accounts manager at Blackwell’s Manchester, is full of praise for their star bookseller: ‘Socrates is prepared to tackle anything. He’s popular with both staff and customers, and although he may sometimes have a dodgy taste in music, [he] is a pleasure to work alongside.’

The Bookseller described Adams as a ‘passionate bookseller and target-driven salesman – and he is a published author and award-winning filmmaker to boot.’

Adams’s next novel, A Modern Family, will be published in July by Bluemoose Books. Award-winning novelist, Jenn Ashworth, said: ‘A Modern Family is filled with wry observation, ruthless satire and, underneath it all, a real warmth. It is scathing, truthful and hilariously, painfully funny.’

The multi-talented Adams has also co-written, and starred in, an award-winning film, called Wizard’s Way. The film won Best Comedy Feature at the 2012 London Independent Film Festival, and is the 2013 winner of the Discovery Award at the London Comedy Film Festival. You can watch the trailer for the film below.

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