Edinburgh-based ThunderPoint Publishing is one of the youngest independent publishers out there and, with its line-up, an ideal partner for us during New Talent November. ThunderPoint’s first title was launched in April 2013, quickly followed by four more. The company’s mission statement is to publish exciting and challenging new literature from first-time and established writers alike: books radical in ideas, concepts and message. Although ThunderPoint has not dedicated itself exclusively to the crime fiction genre, each of the titles published to date has a mystery at its core and more than a tinge of noir-ish style.
ThunderPoint was founded by Seonaid Francis who has a BA(Hons) in Literature from Strathclyde University and an M.Litt. from the University of the Highlands and Islands. She taught International Literature, Creative Writing and English Language for many years before launching ThunderPoint Publishing. Although four of the five authors published to date have strong links to Scotland, the company is keen to encourage submissions from all over the UK and overseas and, in terms of topics and styles, it fosters both an international and a Scottish outlook and readership. More information can be found on the company’s website.
Let’s look in a little more detail at the books themselves.
Mule Train by Huw Francis
The author was born and raised in Swansea, and currently resides off the West Coast of Scotland. In between those two moments in time, however, he travelled the world, living and working across Asia and Europe, and incorporated these experiences into this debut novel set in the remote and spectacular mountainous borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Foreign backpackers have been disappearing in this region and border policeman Ishmael Khan is trying to find out what has happened to them. Four people, four lives, come together in a deadly cocktail of drug trafficking, betrayal and violence.
Buy now on Amazon
The Birds That Never Flew by Margot McCuaig
This debut novel by scriptwriter and TV production company director Margot McCuaig was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012 and longlisted for the Polari First Book Award in 2014. Battered and bruised, Elizabeth has taken her daughter and left her abusive husband Patrick. In the bleak and impersonal Glasgow housing office she meets the provocative drug addict Sadie, who is desperate to get her own life back on track. The two women forge a fierce and interdependent relationship as they try to rebuild their shattered lives, but despite their bold and sometimes illegal attempts, the past catches up with them with tragic consequences.
Buy now on Amazon
A Good Death by Helen Davis
Four Cambridge undergraduates set out to climb a peak in the Andes back in 1983. Thirty years later, the bitterness, recriminations and dark secrets from that expedition resurface when the friends are reunited for a girls’ weekend in a lonely Fenland farmhouse. Sharply observant and darkly comic, Helen Davis’s debut novel is an elegant tale of murder, seduction, vengeance, and the value of a good friendship. Davis’s short story A Kind of Justice was shortlisted for the 2012 Crime Writing Competition at the OrkCrime Festival in Orkney.
Buy now on Amazon
In the Shadow of the Hill by Helen Forbes
Helen Forbes is an award-winning short story writer and civil litigation solicitor. In the Shadow of the Hill is her first published novel and perfectly captures the eerie beauty and loneliness of the Outer Hebrides, as well as the contrast with the urban anonymity of Inverness. An elderly woman is found battered to death in the stairwell of an Inverness block of flats. DS Joe Galbraith embarks on what seems to be a routine investigation of a poor unfortunate who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, the investigation becomes more complex as it spreads to the religiously conservative Hebridean island of Harris and becomes linked to long-buried, far more sinister events.
Buy now on Amazon
Over Here by Jane Taylor
A nine-year-old boy steps off a passenger liner in a new country and wonders where to go next. His temporary minder on board seems to have mysteriously vanished and he is facing a new life in a new place all on his own. The tragic life story of this unwilling young emigrant is described in deeply evocative prose, and the narrative moves effortlessly between Liverpool and Canada. Former journalist Jane Taylor obtained a doctorate in creative and critical writing from the University of East Anglia. In her writing, she explores themes of loss, memory and the blurring of genre boundaries. The novel will be published on the 27 November 2014.
Pre-order now on Amazon
Read our review of Toxic by Jackie McLean, published by ThunderPoint, here.
