A Sip of Claret News | Operation Ark Audiobook Out This Friday!
Hello, dear Reader! The audiobook for Operation Ark by Sunday Times bestseller Pen Farthing is out this Friday, and we're excited to welcome a new author. We also have news regarding the next submissions period, another author event and a well-deserved summer break. Read on to find out more!
(ps. This is a condensed version of the Newsletter sent to our mailing list.)
Operation Ark by Sunday Times bestseller Pen Farthing has hit the bookshelves. And if that's not enough, the audiobook is out this Friday!
The audiobook will be narrated by the superb voice actor Kerry Hutchinson who, like Pen Farthing, is an Afghanistan veteran. The introduction will be narrated by Pen himself!
The audiobook will be available on all platforms including Audible and Spotify, and can be pre-ordered now.
Operation Ark is the "mesmerising" memoir of the most controversial figure of the 2021 Afghanistan Evacuation, whose story captured global headlines. Pen Farthing was branded a villain who valued “pets over people”, blamed for deserting Afghans and accused of risking British soldiers.
As an independent inquiry later found, the government was “Missing in Action” with Pen caught in the crossfire. He had to steer his charity staff and animals through the dangers of a Taliban takeover and a political storm back home which almost cost him everything.
Part thriller, part exposé, it's the only account of the chaotic Afghanistan Evacuation that puts everything together.
Ricky Gervais has praised the story as "nothing short of heroic" and Britt Collins from The Daily Beast as “A compelling, vivid, and distressing account of what happened in those last days and a damning indictment of foreign policy failures."
The Daily Mail Online also just put out an excellent article by Rebecca Hardy about the personal costs which Pen suffered, which can be read here:
There were reports his animals were disease ridden and would have to be put down. Not true. Claims he'd abandoned his staff. Again, not true. Allegations British soldiers had been diverted from evacuating civilians, including the many brave interpreters who assisted the British Army, to deal with Nowzad's animals. Another lie.
The first chapter of Operation Ark can also be read on our website here.
For more on Pen Farthing and the publisher's thoughts on the importance of his story, read the blog post on our website here.
Operation Ark is out in paperback and ebook, and is available for order via:
The Nowzad charity store (signed editions!)
And all other good bookstores and major retailers in the UK/EU. The book is also available via Amazon for all overseas customers.
We had an absolutely delightful time at the London Book Launch for Operation Ark on Monday!
Over a hundred fans came to celebrate together with members of the Nowzad charity team. Esteemed actor Peter Egan was there to introduce Pen Farthing, and the author himself gave a phenomenal presentation which included footage from the Afghanistan Evacuation.
(See above for Peter Egan and Katie on the left, and Claret Press rights manager Ines Palmer on the right. Apologies, Pen, for the lack of photos. We were a little starstruck by Peter.)
After a hectic few months, the Claret Press team will be taking a summer break over the next few weeks. Katie Isbester, publisher at Claret Press, has a few words to share before then.
Summer Break
Last Saturday I set up my stall at the Oxford Indie Book Fair alongside 60 other exhibitors. The OXIBF promotes books and voices from outside the mainstream publishing industry (by mainstream I mean the ‘Big Five’ publishers responsible for 80% of all books published in the US and UK). It was, as always, a delight. It was, as always, bigger and better than before. And its existence is thanks to Claret Press author Sylvia Vetta and a few of her friends.
I met Sylvia after a literary agent told her that no publisher would take her novel which was inspired by Qu Leilei, the Chinese founder of the Stars Art Movement, now exiled — like so many of his compatriots. Her fictionalised telling of recent Chinese history lifts the lid on its tumultuous change including the Cultural Revolution, the Democracy Movement and the Stars Art Movement (1979).
Equally, it is a touching coming-of-age love story. Brushstrokes in Time was praised by professors at both Harvard and Oxford and the Guardian’s chief foreign correspondent for China, among others. It was translated into German. And yet, the reason why the big publishers wouldn’t take it because Sylvia is not Chinese. They didn’t think it was authentic enough despite the story being based on many, many interviews of Qu Leilei conducted by Sylvia herself.
Also at the Oxford Indie Book Fest was The Dawson and Lucy Series author Steve Sheppard, who writes page-turning thrillers full of twists and adventure with a kick-ass heroine and a lovable hero. They also happen to be laugh-aloud funny. So are they comedy thrillers? What to call this unique blending of styles? For lack of an easily marketable label, Steve couldn’t get published by the big leagues. My gain. Again Steve’s books have been praised widely by comedy writers and by his growing legion of fans.
And then there’s Pen Farthing. We launched his book in London this Monday. He was a Sunday Times bestseller who fell out of favour with his publisher because of the uproar over the Afghanistan Evacuation. You’d think that would mean that he’d be even more of a hot ticket. But no. He got blackballed and lost not just his publisher but also his literary agent. Again, his book, Operation Ark, about escaping from Afghanistan during the disastrous evacuation in the summer of 2021, has been highly praised.
These three authors (indeed all Claret Press authors) highlight the inconvenient truth that the production of books is dominated by the big guns of publishing. Mainstream publishing is now over-mechanised by the marketing department and data mining engineers who determine what exact trend will make them the most profit. It operates for its shareholders. I’m not saying all books published by the Big Five are bad, intellectually lazy or literarily deficient – that would be absurd – but something is getting lost in the process. A risk-averse publishing environment shuts the door on those authors who may not be the most marketable or neatly labelled, but still have something worthwhile to share.
The biggest losers are the readers. Readers are not getting the page-turning stories about things they care about. Readers are not getting original voices telling stories that are fresh and meaningful.
Claret Press, like other indie publishers, is trying to fill that void in our own small way. I don’t think that what we’re doing is particularly radical or even that unusual. We’re just trying to share great stories about things we care about. We publish voices which can’t other be heard. We’re changing the perception of ‘politics’ from something dirty and boring to something important and thrilling – because we truly do believe that everything is political.
As we shut up shop for a well-deserved summer break, we’d like to say thank you to all of you who have supported Claret Press by buying our books, following our authors and sharing our news. We publish for you.
See you in the autumn when we’ll have more great books to share and more stories to tell and more authors for you to meet.
Looking ahead, we're delighted to announce that we've signed on S. C. Gordon as Claret Press' latest author! We were immediately captivated by her historical fiction thriller set in 1946 London, inspired by the real-life clashes between Oswald Mosley-led fascists and anti-fascist forces in the immediate aftermath of World War 2.
Born in the northwest of England, S. C. Gordon is a Liverpool-based author, poet, and journalist. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in anthologies such as Eunoia Review, Junoesq, Unshod Quills, and the May Anthologies 10th Anniversary edition. Her first poetry collection, Peckham Blue, was published in London by Penned in the Margins in 2006, and her second collection, Harbouring, came out in November 2015 through Math Paper Press in Singapore.
In the decade she spent living and working in Shanghai, she wrote and edited for English-language magazines such as Shanghai Business Review, China Economic Review, City Weekend and SH Magazine, covering business, lifestyle, travel, and culture, and entertainment. She has also written for Virgin Media, Condé Nast, Executive Travel and the BBC.
She was part of the Royal Court Theatre’s new writers’ programme from 2007 until 2008, and was a finalist and runner-up in British Vogue’s young writers’ competition in 2004 and 2005. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature.
We look forward to sharing more about her novel in due course. In the meantime, we encourage you to check out her website here.
A little short notice this one, but if you happen to be around Bracknell then it would be a shame to miss the Bracknell Book Fair on 20th July 2024.
Claret Press author Mark Blackburn will be there with copies of Final Approach: My Father and Other Turbulence. Half-memoir and half-travelogue, it's been praised as a "beautiful and tender work" that explores the turbulent flightpath between a jetsetting father and a planespotting son.
For more info, click on the Facebook event link here.
It's that time of the year again! Claret Press will reopen for submissions from 01st - 31st August 2024.
When preparing your submission, please refer to our submission guidelines on our website for what we're looking for.
For this round of submissions, we have no particular genre or theme in mind. If it has the slightest political slant and (most importantly) is impossible to put down, then we would love to read it. In addition, please note that we are primarily interested in authors based in the UK and Ireland.
We look forward to reading what you send us!
And that's a wrap! You won't receive any newsletters from us until September, but we will still be posting the odd thing here and there on our social media.
Please note that the Claret Press shop will be temporarily out of stock (i.e. closed) until we're back - so if you want to make any purchases to support the press, make sure to do so before August 01st!
That's all from us for now. We hope you all have a lovely summer filled with sunshine (one can dream), good cheer and, most important of all, good books.
The Claret Press Team
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