The day a new book is published is a proud moment for any author. It’s like a child being born into the world. A child you have worried over, cared for, guided, grown frustrated at, and eventually, after months of labour, set free to stand on its own two feet, to be judged, loved, puzzled over, and hopefully not passed on to friends because you, ‘Couldn’t get on with it.’
The compulsion to create is similar to the need to procreate. Both often end with a satisfying cigarette and a sense that you couldn’t do that again in a hurry.
But now we’re serious writers, we see a double meaning in ‘Pub Day’ that might have been hidden from us when we were mere bloggers. Who are we kidding? Any sentence with the word ‘pub’ in it is an invitation to say ‘Let’s go!’ We can, we should, we will go to the pub on Pub Day. Right after we have wrapped up our appearance at Chener Books, as part of the South East London Bookfest, where we will talk about Deserter Stories; what it is, how it came about and what lovely things people have been saying about our collection of short stories.
The Bookfest heralds the start of our World Tour (of South London) that sees us take in six more venues to proudly show off our baby, meet our readers and hopefully flog a few books so that we don’t find it still hanging around the house in 30 years’ time, as so many parents do now.
Many of you who have pre-ordered will have received yours by now as, in a most uncharacteristic display of competence, we managed to get the thing done and dusted on time. It looks beautiful, thanks to Emily Power’s artwork. You can read it, thanks to Ian Buck’s typesetting and advice. And you can find it pretty much anywhere, thanks to Chris Towndrow (of Valericain Press) and his kind offer to help with distribution.
Buy the book online here, and you can also find Deserter Stories in the following bookshops, among others:
- Beckenham Bookshop
- Blackheath Bookshop
- The Bookseller Crow
- Chener Books
- Herne Hill Books
- London Review Bookshop
- Review
- Rye Books
- The Riverside Bookshop
- Waterstones – Greenwich
The soon-to-open Greenwich Gallery will also stock the book, as will The Shirker’s Rest.
It will also be available online at Bookshop, Waterstones, The Guardian Bookshop, Brown’s Books, The Mail Bookshop, Hive, TGJones and, we suppose, Amazon.
We hope you enjoy our baby as much as we will enjoy Pub Day!
Follow Deserter on Instagram
We’re also on Bluesky
Like our Facebook page to get Deserter in your timeline
Join our mailing list to receive our highly irregular email update
