UPDATES & A GIVEAWAY

Hello, hello, hello, Dear Readers! Happy Monday to all, and apologies for the long wait since the last time I blogged. This Christmas and New Year period has *kicked my ass*. Repeatedly, in fact, and for a list of reasons as long as my arm.

There are some massive changes coming in my life. Some of them are positive and exciting. Some of them are stressful and not-so-nice. I can't talk about most of them yet, mainly because final decisions (either mine or other people's) haven't been made. I'm aware this is infuriatingly cryptic by the way - but I'm afraid it's the best I can do just now - and I will give details about stuff that I think Dear Readers will be interested in as soon as I can.

There are some updates I can make, though, and I will do so below.

The main reason for the lack of blogging: my mother. She's been very ill over the last few months. At one point she was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night in an ambulance, then transferred to a hospital sixty miles away for emergency surgery - only to have that surgery cancelled at the last minute. She came home on a promise that the surgery would be rescheduled within three weeks, but that didn't happen. As a result she's been suffering a lot of pain and hasn't been able to move about much. Her operation is now on again, and by the time you're reading this I hope she will be comfortably settled into her bed and waiting to go down to the theatre. So please send kind, hopeful and healing thoughts in our direction today, if you can spare them.

Now onto something happier. Not only have I finally upated the blog with a page dedicated to my newest book (check it out for a Q&A about the book and some interesting links) but early copies of The Hand, the Eye & The Heart are here! And they are beeeeeeooootiful:

 

The colours! The internal illustrations! THE TURQUOISE FOIL! *Swoons*

I was lucky enough (well, begged loudly enough) to get two despite the limited numbers. One has winged its way off to a lucky competition winner, as promised. The other stays with me for always (my preeccccciousssss). If you're a blogger, vlogger or other bookish person and you would like one of these early copies to review, you'll need to get in touch with Walker Books as soon as possible - @WalkerBookYA on Twitter is a good bet. If and when any further copies fall into my possession, I will of course do a giveaway.

However, just because The Hand, the Eye & the Heart is as rare as hen's teeth just now that doesn't mean there can be NO giveaways. In fact I happen to have a small pile of absolutely lovely books from Walker right here:

 

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas, the follow-up to mega-hit THUG, which needs no introduction.

The Quiet at the End of the World by Lauren James. I'm so excited about this one! Lauren's last book The Lonelist Girl in the Universe was *staggeringly* good, and so unique. No one else is writing this kind of imaginative, grounded, hard-science fiction in UKYA right now. You want this.

Nothing but the Truth by Dick Lehr, a book about racial intolerance in the US written by a former Boston Globe reporter who used his experiences to inform his fiction.

These are some of the most sought after books coming out this spring, and personally I prefer this spiffy yellow ARC cover to the official one, for Angie Thomas's book. I'm going to make these available to one lucky winner, ALONG WITH:

• Gorgeous THTE&TH postcards (see below!)
• The first chapter of THTE&TH, printed out and signed by yours truly, to keep you going until its release on the 4th of April.
• A signed and personalised bookplate to stick in THTE&TH (or any of my other books, I guess) when you get your hands on it

All you have to do is comment here on the blog, then share the giveaway somewhere on Twitter, or follow me on Twitter, sometime in the next two weeks. You can get extra chances to win by sharing more than once - and the giveaway is open to readers in Britain and the EU, because that's the postage I can afford just now (sorry international peeps!).

Here's the Rafflecopter. Good luck, muffins!a Rafflecopter giveaway