Reviving the old practice of weekly serials, dive into this wonderful page-turner following the adventures of feisty heroine Ms Temple, says Julia Rebaudo
With the summer coming to a close, our thoughts are turning to curling up with a good book, warm cosy socks firmly on and a steaming cup of hot chocolate. The difficult bit is finding a good book. How many books have you started only to give up a few pages in?
What you need is a page-turner right from the start, a heroine you love, and a fictitious world of escapism you can lose yourself in for a heavenly half hour. And if your novel was to arrive in weekly instalments in your postbox, each book individually designed with period style advertisements, wouldn’t that make your reading time even more special?
We’re suckers for that kind of thing. Enter The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, the first novel to be published in ten separate weekly instalments for over 100 years. In its heyday the Victorian serial saw 100,000 people following the fate of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, and instalments of Great Expectations outselling The Times newspaper.
So here we have feisty heroine Ms Temple recently arrived from abroad in a fictitious Victorian city. When her fiancé, Roger Bascombe, inexplicably breaks off their engagement, Ms Temple, wearing her finest green boots, sets off in hot pursuit, boarding a train full of masked passengers bound for a mystery destination. Within pages she is embroiled in gothic mystery and intrigue. Cruelly but wonderfully leaving you on tenterhooks at the end of each chapter you'll be pacing the floorboards as you wait for the next instalment.
The first instalment will be released on 2 October with the following parts released weekly throughout the rest of the year. The full novel will be published January 2007.
To subscribe visit www.penguin.co.uk or www.glassbooks.co.uk
