Mani – Grimly Darkwood

Mani’s Favorite Books of 2020…

Great to see my book, Stranger Days on Peculiar Hill, listed as one of review blogger Mani’s favorite books among those she has read this year – especially as it appears amongst other such prestigious titles. You may remember that Mani reviewed the book when it first came out.

Although it’s the second book in the Vale of Strange series, I wrote Stranger Days so you can pick it up and enjoy it without having read the previous volume. It tells of Peter’s return to the vale, along with Amanda and his new friend Mala, this time to rescue Mala’s father, the hapless explorer Augustus Flipper, but it soon becomes clear that the very balance of the weirdosphere is at stake…

This is also an excellent time to get both books however. The earlier volume, The Shop on Peculiar Hill and Stranger Days on Peculiar Hill are both available on Kindle for just 77p each (or 99c US) till the end of the year (so there’s just a few days left to go…)

UK link

US link

I notice that Mani has also listed another middlegrade children’s adventure, Amari and the Night Brothers, among her favourite books of the year. This happens to be a book I’d already earmarked to read myself. I’ll let you know more about it here – along with some other books which you might enjoy – in the New Year…

(So keep safe – and don’t forget your hat!)

Five Heart Review from Mani!

“Another fab book. If you’re looking for a quick read with lots of strange adventures I highly recommend this one, and it really doesn’t matter what age you are.”

Many thanks to Mani of the ‘Mani Reads and Reviews’ blog for her very enthusiastic review of ‘Stranger Days on Peculiar Hill’! I’m really pleased that she enjoyed this second book as much as she did the first. You can read the whole review on her website here.

I’m especially pleased to hear that Mani’s five year old nephew ‘loved all the silliness and the strange creatures’ too. The age range of our readers seems to be expanding all the time. At this rate we’ll soon be hitting a hundred between the oldest and the youngest. Either that or my calculator needs a new battery… (If any 105-year-olds are reading this, please get in touch.)

The Reading Realm Cover Competition

I’m delighted to be sharing the front cover of my new book ‘Stranger Days on Peculiar Hill‘ here on the Grimly blog today. Thanks again to Mani of Mani’s Book Corner for revealing it to the public gaze for the first time a few days ago. I’m going to be telling you a bit more about the picture (created by the brilliant Pete Lyon) and how it fits in with the new book very soon, but for today we’re asking you to let your own imagination run wild and think of your own (very) short story inspired by the picture. So this doesn’t have to be anything to do with Peter and Amanda and the Vale of Strange (unless you want it to be). It can be anything you want to write about that is inspired by the picture. You’ll have to keep it short though, because it has to fit in a tweet!

This competition is being run by The Reading Realm, some very nice people who have created an app for the iPad to encourage children to read. It has excerpts from over 200 pieces of prose and poetry including – would you believe it? – The Shop on Peculiar Hill! There are questions to answer about what you read and all sorts of other games. It’s great fun and it can be downloaded now from the Apple store. An android version is expected later this year.

Anyway, the Reading Realm (who created the app) are running this competition over on their Twitter feed, so if you are on Twitter, get over there and take a look at it now. You can find them here: @reading_realm The prize for the best (very) short story inspired by Pete’s picture and which fits in a tweet will win a valuable signed copy (by me, Grimly) of ‘Stranger Days on Peculiar Hill’. So get over there now and get your imagination racing. Good luck with it!

Oh yes, and don’t forget your hat…

(The competition is UK only (Sorry!) and closes 24 November.)

Revealed At Last!

Well it’s been tense and time got a little bit tight for a while, but I’m pleased to announce that we now have a definite publication date for ‘Stranger Days on Peculiar Hill’, the eagerly awaited second book in the ‘Vale of Strange’ series and sequel to ‘The Shop on Peculiar Hill’. It’s going to be released in good time for Christmas: on 1st December. Not only that, but copies of the eBook can be ordered right now. They will then be auto-downloaded to your Kindle device or app on 1st December.

You can order here if you are in the UK and here for the US. The paperback version can’t be pre-ordered but it can be purchased at Amazon from 1st December. The book will also be available in both formats from Amazon sites worldwide.

To add to the excitement, we can now announce that the book’s splendid cover by Pete Lyon, which we enthused about in a previous post, is being revealed right now at Mani’s Book Corner. You may remember that Mani was the first blogger to review The Shop on Peculiar Hill and she has always been very enthusiastic and supportive so we decided that she was the ideal person to do the Cover Reveal, especially as her blog has a lot more regular readers than ours does! So I strongly suggest you get over there right now and take a look at the cover. Prepare to have your breath taken away by this remarkably detailed imagining of a scene from ‘Stranger Days on Peculiar Hill’.

One more thing before you go: if you don’t already follow this blog, we suggest you sign up now. You’ll then be assured of getting all the latest news on the new book and all other Vale of Strange-related matters. Just pop your email in the box you will find in the sidebar. Or if you have a WordPress account, you can sign up to follow through WP. You will also find us on Facebook and Twitter of course.

A very important reason for signing up is that you’ll be informed as soon as the free sample chapters become available online. That will be very shortly, well before publication date. So don’t miss out on your chance to take an advance peek into this latest mind-boggling adventure…

Oh yes, in all the excitement. I almost forgot to remind you of the most important thing: One! – Two! – Three! – Don’t forget your hat!

The Excitement is Building!

We still don’t have a definite publication date for ‘Stranger Days on Peculiar Hill’, Book Two of the ‘Vale of Strange’ series. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear, but in the meantime the excitement is building. Here’s a great tweet from Ian Eagleton who has developed the wonderful ‘The Reading Realm’ app to encourage children to read using extracts of text with games and quizzes. The updated app, which features an extract from ‘The Shop on Peculiar Hill’, has just been released today! It’s really great to have Ian’s support for the book, which he describes as ‘one of my fav books this year for children 10+. What a hidden gem!’

As you’ll see from the tweet, Ian is also looking forward to the new book and is going to run a competition to give away a signed copy. Ahead of that, Mani of ‘Mani’s Book Corner’ will be doing a Cover Reveal of Pete Lyon’s wonderful cover for ‘Stranger Days’ on her ‘Mani’s Book Corner’ blog. You may remember she featured a great review of ‘The Shop on Peculiar Hill’ earlier this year. We’ll let you know when Mani’s Cover Reveal will be – along with the publication date – as soon as we know!