15th December 2024
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Country Life magazine has named its Books Of The Year in its 316-page Christmas double issue, and we are delighted to see that among the ten novels selected is one that Brindle Books brought out – Summer At Tangents, which we published in May.
The magazine writes that “Summer At Tangents, hopefully the first of many P. G. Wodehouse-esque tales of golf and village life from Roderick Easdale, is effervescently amusing.”
This is Roderick’s first novel, but his is not the only debut novel to make its way into the long-standing weekly magazine’s Books Of The Year. It is joined by Miranda Pountney’s “wow of a debut novel” How To Be Somebody, which is published by Vintage.
These take their place among works by more established writers such as Robert Harris’ Precipice, and Armistead Maupin’s Mona of the Manor, which is the tenth novel in his Tales of the City series.
Roderick’s novel is not the only one of Country Life’s selection to be set against a sporting background, as Charles Blanning’s 1920s-set thriller Electric Rabbit is about the first Greyhound racing activities in the country.
Crime and detective works feature heavily, with Peter James’s One Of Us Is Dead; the “witty, perceptive” Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook, and John Banville’s The Drowned, “a darkly compelling procedural that is unnervingly astute about human foibles.”
David Nicholls’ “tenderly funny” love story You Are Here and Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road round out the 10 novels selected.
Country Life’s Books Of The Year also includes their extensive selection of non-fiction works as well as Rupert Everett’s “witty collection of short-stories, The American No, which shows he is as magnetic a writer as an actor.”
Summer At Tangents is available from Amazon by clicking HERE
and from Blackwell's by clicking HERE