CORNERSTONE AUTUMN CATALOGUE 2021 1 2 CONTENTS Contacts | 4 Hutchinson Heinemann | 5 #Merky Books | 12 Random House Business | 14 Century | 19 Del Rey | 31 3 CORNERSTONE CONTACTS Charlotte Bush – Director of Publicity and Media Relations [email protected] | 020 7840 8613 Najma Finlay – Publicity Director [email protected] | 020 7840 8614 Laura Brooke – Publicity Director [email protected] | 020 7840 8695 Anna Gibson – Publicity Director [email protected] | 020 7840 8548 Etty Eastwood – Publicity Director [email protected] | 020 7840 8293 Rachel Kennedy – Senior Publicity Manager [email protected] | 020 7840 8893 Isabelle Ralphs – Senior Press Officer [email protected] | 020 7840 8388 Alice Spencer – Senior Press Officer [email protected] | 020 7840 8624 Anna Hibberd – Senior Campaigns Executive [email protected] | 020 7840 8772 General Enquiries: Georgia Williams – Publicity Assistant [email protected] | 020 7840 7323 Lydia Spooner – Publicity Assistant [email protected] | 020 7840 8673 4 HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN 5 James Ellroy Douglas Kennedy Widespread Panic Afraid of the Light Freddy Otash Confesses A return to the sleazy underbelly of Ellroy's 1950's Los A gripping new thriller from the Sunday Times Angeles bestselling author of The Pursuit of Happiness and The Moment July 2021 July 2021 Hardback Trade Paperback £20.00 £13.99 Royal Octavo Royal Octavo 336 pages 352 pages 9781785152573 9780091953751 From The Modern Master of Noir comes a novel about the Brendan has always lived a careful, constrained life. A salesman who never malevolent monarch of the 1950s Hollywood underground - a tale liked the work, he's a man who has stayed in his marriage and his faith of pervasive paranoia teeming with communist conspiracies, FBI because it was what was expected of him. But now, having lost his job after finks, celebrity smut films and strange bedfellows. corporate downsizing and on the cusp of sixty, he finds himself scrambling to somehow stay afloat in the only Los Angeles work on offer to a man his Freddy Otash is the man in the know and the man to know in '50s L.A. He age - driving for Uber. operates with two simple rules - he'll do anything but commit murder and he'll never work with the commies. When one of his rides, a retired professor named Elise, asks to be dropped off outside an abortion clinic where she now volunteers, Brendan finds Freddy is an ex-L.A. cop on the skids. He snuffed a cop killer in cold blood - himself literally driving right into the virulent epicentre of one of the major and it got to him bad. So Chief William H. Parker canned him. Now he's a issues of our time, engulfing his life in the process. sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp - and, most notably, the head strongarm goon for Confidential magazine. Confidential presaged the A novel of high suspense and considerable moral complexity, Afraid of the idiot internet - and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink and the Light is a tough, affecting social thriller that speaks volumes about the scurrilous skank on the feckless foibles of misanthropic movie stars, sex- corrosive divisions of our troubled times. soiled socialites and potzo politicians. Freaky Freddy outs them all! 'Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns In Widespread Panic, we traverse the depths of '50s L.A. and dig on the created by global inner workings of Confidential. You'll go to Burt Lancaster's lushly appointed affairs' OBSERVER torture den; you'll groove overhyped legend James Dean as Freddy's chief stooge; you'll be there for Freddy's ring-a-ding rendezvous with Liz Taylor; Douglas Kennedy's previous twelve novels include the critically acclaimed you'll be front and centre as Freddy anoints himself the 'Tattle Tyrant Who bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship Held Hollywood Hostage'. and The Moment. He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books. The Big Picture was filmed with Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve; The James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Woman in the Fifth with Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas. acclaimed 'LA Quartet': The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz. His novel Blood's A Rover completes the magisterial His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2007 he was 'Underworld USA Trilogy' - the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times bestsellers. His Lettres, and in 2009 the inaugural Grand Prix de Figaro. Born in Manhattan previous novel, This Storm, is the second instalment in Ellroy's second 'L.A. in 1955, he has two children and currently divides his time between London, Quartet'. Paris, Berlin, Maine and New York. 6 Neil Blackmore Georgette Heyer The Dangerous Kingdom of Love The Black Moth The author of THE INTOXICATING MR LAVELLE returns The first novel by the greatest author of historical with more scandal, sex and intrigue, but set in the romance in the world - a wonderful tale of love and court of King James I - with added philosophers, adventure set in Heyer's Regency England. July 2021 August 2021 Hardback Hardback £16.99 £12.99 Demy Octavo Demy Octavo 352 pages 320 pages 9781786332677 9781785152399 The kingdom of love is a frightening place. A dangerous place. What GEORGETTE HEYER'S REMARKABLE FIRST NOVEL kind of fool wants to live there? ‘One of my perennial comfort authors. Heyer’s books are as How have I, Francis Bacon, well-known as the cleverest man in England, incisively witty and quietly subversive as any of Jane Austen’s’ been caught in this trap? For years I survived the brutal games of the Joanne Harris English court, driven by the whims of the idiot King James I - and finally, I was winning. Forget what my friends Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare 'Absolutely delicious tales of Regency heroes . Utter, immersive say about love. I had that which men truly crave above all else: power. escapism' SOPHIE KINSELLA But now, at the moment of my greatest success, a deadly alliance of my ______________________________ enemies has begun closing in on me. Led by the King's beautiful and poisonous lover Carr, this new alliance threatens to turn our foolish King Diana Beauleigh is caught between two men. against me, so that I may rot in the Tower. Seven long years ago, Jack Carstares, the Earl of Wyncham, sacrificed his I refuse to go down without a fight. I have concocted a brilliant new plan: I honour for his brother and has been in exile ever since. will find my own beguiling young man and supplant Carr in the King's bed, and take power for myself. All I need to do is find him, my beautiful and Returning to England, Jack pretends to be a gentleman named Sir Anthony mysterious creature, my perfect chess move. Ferndale but makes his living in a most ungentlemanly fashion, as a highwayman and a gambler. In the dangerous kingdom of love, those who understand desire win. And I intend to win, at all costs. When Jack encounters his nemesis, the Duke of Andover, in the midst of kidnapping Diana Beauleigh, the two old enemies come to blows. Neil Blackmore never had any intention of becoming a writer. He wrote his first novel at work to fill time at a boring job. He published his first novel in Can Jack save the beautiful Diana from rakes, kidnap and ruin…? his twenties but then spent most of his thirties travelling the world. THE ______________________________ INTOXICATING MR LAVELLE is his third novel. He lives in London. ‘Georgette Heyer is second to none’ Sunday Times ‘Fabulously witty’ Stephen Fry Author of over fifty books, Georgette Heyer is the best-known and best- loved of all historical novelists, who made the Regency period her own. Her first novel, The Black Moth, published in 1921, was written at the age of seventeen to amuse her convalescent brother; her last was My Lord John. Although most famous for her historical novels, she also wrote eleven detective stories. Georgette Heyer died in 1974 at the age of seventy-one. 7 Sebastian Faulks Chips Channon Snow Country Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 2) The epic new love story from master storyteller 'The greatest British diarist of the 20th century . Sebastian Faulks, and his best novel since BIRDSONG finally, we are getting the full text, in all its bitchy, scintillating detail' Ben Macintyre September 2021 September 2021 Hardback Hardback £20.00 £35.00 Royal Octavo Royal Octavo 352 pages 1,120 pages 9781786330185 9781786331823 'Overpowering and beautiful ... Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, The second volume of the remarkable, Sunday Times bestselling sleep-disturbing' Simon Schama on Birdsong diaries of Chips Channon. 1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name This second volume of the bestselling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the Prime Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and country declares war on hers. on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War.