The Hobcast Book Show

The world seems ever more divided and fractured at present, with discordant voices drowning out appeals for reason and peace. Our guest this week, author Miriam Halahmy , is an ardent campaigner for peace, particularly in the Middle East. Miriam is a prolific author of middle-grade and young adult fiction tackling difficult subjects such as the Holocaust, enforced migration and drug abuse. Her mos...

As authors, it's sometimes easy to lose track of how accessible our writing actually is. We often assume that whatever we write, as long as it makes sense and is grammatically correct, it will be easy to follow and enjoy. Our guest this week, author Tim Franks , begs to differ. As a former teacher working with the phonics system of teaching children to read, he recognised that many books written f...

Since we began The Hobcast Book Show just over three years ago, we've spoken to a number of former police officers turned authors. All of them have fascinating stories to share, and valuable insights into how to mix the reality of policing with the need to tell a good story. Our interview with thriller author Roger A. Price follows that tradition. A former Detective Inspector, with a thirty-one po...

We first met our guest on this week's Hobcast Book Show at the London Book Fair in 2022, and we're delighted to have the chance to speak at length to Daniella Blechner, author and founder of Conscious Dreams Publishing . Daniella has dedicated the past few years to enabling a huge range of authors to bring their stories and ideas to print. For instance, there's 7 year-old Tiana-Rose-Akoy-Arrey , w...

The appeal of the works of Jane Austen never diminishes. As each new TV or film adaptation comes out, so a new generation discovers the enduring magic of Austen's world, even two centuries after her death. Austen wrote six novels, with Pride and Prejudice her most celebrated. Our guest this week, Linda O'Byrne , has written six novels that take Austen's world twenty years into the future, each foc...

In a departure this week, Rebecca and Adrian discuss a recent article from Written Word Media predicting the 10 trends for publishing in 2024. It's set to be the year that generative AI takes a firm grip on the industry, creating fresh opportunities and challenges for everyone involved in the creative industries. Will reader tastes change as a result? Will the market become further saturated as AI...

It's tempting to approach every new year with refreshed focus and aspirations, and we're no different here at The Hobcast Book Show . But let's be realistic. 2023 was a year of major upheaval in the creative industries with the growing impact of generative AI, combined with a cost of living crisis, and rising production costs. So can we look forward to a year of positive changes in 2024? Our guest...

Happy New Year from The Hobcast Book Show team. This week we pool the collective talents of three Hobeck Books authors to look in depth at police procedurals. Why do they remain enduringly popular? What are the challenges of remaining on top of the latest investigatory techniques and science? How do you ensure your writing remains credible but also engaging for the reader? To answer those question...

To mark Christmas, we've brought together three wonderful Hobeck authors for a special festive edition of The Hobcast Book Show to discuss how humour and crime fiction can work together. Joining us are A B Morgan , Sue Shepherd , and Jennie Ensor , who've all wrestled with the conundrum of how to marry humour and murder together. What line do you have to dance as an author? Are there subjects that...

Among all the noise in the media and politics about the impact of mass migration, it's perhaps easy to lose sight of the human aspects of the situation. Our guest this week, Helen Matthews , writes psychological suspense novels which deal with the darker side of human nature. Her first novel, recently republished as Girl Out of Sight , explores the issues and themes of modern slavery and exploitat...

On this week's show, we meet Natalie Chandler , the author of two bestselling psychological thrillers, Believe Me Not and What We Did for Headline Accent. Natalie shares with us her author journey, from re-writing Roald Dahl stories as a child through to using the opportunity of lockdown to finally finish and polish her first novel. Natalie credits the input of her tutors on a Curtis Brown creativ...

Last week, Hobeck Books had the honour of publishing the fifth novel in the George Zammit series, The Last Bird of Paradise by A J Aberford . Set in Malta and the wider Mediterranean area, the books have built a strong following for the adventures of the humble Maltese police officer who finds himself at the centre of epic adventures and intrigue through little fault of his own. We felt it was a g...

It's fair to say that the COVID crisis and the attendant lock downs had one unexpected silver lining for many people - the space and opportunity to finally fulfil a life-long dream to write a book. That's certainly the case for our guest this week, Stephen Ronson , whose debut novel The Last Line was recently published by Hodder and Stoughton. Set in 1940, Stephen's novel is set in his native Suss...

It's fair to say that as presenters of The Hobcast Book Sho w we often hark back to our childhood experiences of reading adventure fiction and being inspired by those books to seek adventures of our own. That's certainly the spirit that our guest this week, Jacqueline King , evokes in her children's book, Cake for the Gestapo . Set in occupied Jersey during the Second World War, Jackie draws on bo...

What is it about The Hobcast Book Show and Brighton? Or more accurately, what is it about Brighton that lends itself as a setting for murder mysteries? Our guest this week, Jamie West , transports his readers back to the Palace Pier Theatre in 1933 and introduces them to his hero, playwright-come-amateur-sleuth Bertie Caroll. Jamie's debut novel, Death on the Pier is a love-letter to golden age cr...

On this week's episode we ask - how healthy is British crime fiction? Who better to ask than prolific reviewer and crime festival organiser, Donna Morfett , who returns to The Hobcast Book Show for a second time. A week after hosting her event, The Dark Side of Brighton , which featured some of the biggest names in UK crime fiction, Donna explains that whilst the genre remains hugely popular, new...

This week's show is a departure for The Hobcast Book Show, as we're joined by one of Adrian's old BBC colleagues, Sanjeev Shetty . Sanj was a BBC Sport producer and presenter for many years, before taking a job as a speech-writer for the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. He's also the author of five books - two fiction and three non-fiction, with his latest novel, Who Is Jeff Walker , published in 2022...

This week we have a first on The Hobcast Book Show . Our guest, Geoff Major , is our first to have trekked to the North Pole. Not only that, but he's walked in the Sahara too, and over the years has raised thousands of pounds for charity. But our focus in this interview is on a more recent challenge for Geoff - writing crime fiction. His first novel Deadline was published in 2020, and his second,...

We love historical thrillers on The Hobcast Book Show . There's something beguiling about asking the question - "what if...?" - and applying it to a famous historical setting and story. That's certainly the approach taken by our guest this week, the brilliant J.G. Kelly , whose latest novel The White Lie asks if the fabled heroic failure of Captain Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole i...

We're joined this week by British author Stephen J. Golds from his home in Nagoya, Japan. Regular listeners to the show will know that we are big fans of Japanese culture, so it was a real pleasure to speak to Stephen about his experiences of living and working in Japan for the past 17 years. Originally from London, Stephen is the author a series of hard-boiled noir novels , which until recently w...

Our guest this week, Kate Wiseman , had a late start to her author career. Attending university at 38 gave her the confidence to pursue writing, and she's now established herself as an accomplished author of Middle-Grade and Young Adult fiction. For her most recent series , Kate has drawn on her passion for mudlarking - exploring the foreshore of the River Thames to find forgotten objects in the m...

This week, Rebecca attended the Independent Publisher's Guild Autumn conference in London, where the impact of AI was the number one topic of debate among delegates. It's also where she bumped into our guest this week, Elaine Bousfield MBE, who runs Zuntold , a small independent publisher based in Manchester. Zuntold publish fiction to support mental health and well-being, working with established...

We admit, at The Hobcast Book Show, that we can be a little obsessed with the modern phenomenon of "cancel culture" - and how rumour, innuendo and group think has the potential to destroy lives. It has echoes of another period of English history, the Civil War, where witch-finding became an obsession for a society riven along political and religious lines. It's the era in which our guest this week...

We're delighted to be publishing Chasing the Dragon by Mark Wightman this week at Hobeck Books . It's the second instalment of the Betancourt series set in Singapore in 1940. Mark's first novel, Waking the Tiger was hugely successful, securing shortlistings for four major prizes. It's been two years between the publication of the two books, and Mark explains how that's in part down to the level of...

We're all familiar with the concept of pen names. There are dozens of reasons why an author might adopt one, and some of our own Hobeck authors write under aliases. But what if you want to take that concept a stage further, and create a complete alter-ego to go with that name, and write from a completely different perspective to your own? That's the challenge celebrated Basque author Luisa Etxenik...