[Mrs H says that although the above jacket is very pretty, for practical reasons I ought to have the stuff about public appearances up here, but I'm not going to because I don't wanna. Nyah. However, if you were looking for public appearances by the extremely grown-up author, they're at the bottom of this post.]

The German edition of The Gone-Away World will come out on August 26th – very exciting!

(I’m going to write a blogpost in German to say hello to my Germanophone readers… as soon as I get my language skills back up to speed… er…)

Once again, I really like the jacket design – I’m lucky with my publishers and their teams, it seems… My take on this one is that the tendrils are the Man-o-war stingers, and the more machinic stuff is, well, machinic… I could be wrong. Mrs H thinks it’s Stuff looking for information to template on.

I’ll be blogging – in English – on the Piper website later this month. You’ll know more when I do.

(Wow. The translation is 800 pages long. Count ‘em…)

The Italian edition should be along in November, but I haven’t seen anything for that yet except the title:

Il Mondo Dopo Le Fine Del Mondo

which means

The World After World’s End.

US publication has moved up – or I misunderstood! In any case, that shiny paperback edition will be out on August 11th!

Because it is made from awesome, let’s just see the jacket again…

(Clicking the link will take you to Indiebound so that you can buy from a local store. It’s not that I don’t love Amazon. It’s just that I do love real bookshops.)

The French and Russian editions will come later… more news when I have it. In the mean time…

PUBLIC APPEARANCES:

I’ve agreed to take part in a Literary Death Match.

Yes, I must be out of my mind. Me, a dignified, retiring person, taking part in some deranged, drunken literary occasion where I will no doubt end up wearing a wig made of carrots and singing bad karaoke in an attempt to win some sort of recognition…

Wait, actually, that does sound like fun, apart from the karaoke part because I am musical only in the sense that if you dressed me in a costume made of bells and pushed me down a flight of glass stairs, I’d made a sort of jingly noise.

It’s on July 21st here in London – come along!

To participate in a Literary Death Match (I should emphasise that no actual authors are harmed – or at least, that’s what they told me) one has to represent a literary interest. I will be wearing on my helmet the ladylike glove of The Verb on BBC Radio 3. I was on the show a while back, and now they’ve recovered enough to have me on again in September. More news about that when I have it, but it’s likely to be HUGE fun.

Last but by no means least

And this should really have gone at the top of the page, but I don’t have a pretty picture of it – I’m going to be at the Latitude Festival next week on Thursday 16th July at 7:50 pm. If you’re going, come and say hi. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be reading yet, and the way the event works will depend on how many of you show up… but again, should be a blast!

How thrilled am I at this moment?

Is it:

a) very

b) amazinglyhugelyzomgone11!one

c) beyond the measure of human language and symbols, but within the scope of rational thought

d) running around in the carpark wearing only a beer hat shouting “squeeeee!”

e) yes, I experience a measure of satisfaction in uncovering the compleat opus within the rubble of my surging and searching mind, but the true happiness lies in the journey of self-expression and discovery. No real artist likes to gloat, of course, but I think we can safely say that [blah]

f) dude, I have totally run out of dumb ways to express my excitement, but it’s, like, totally.

The answer is g) all of the above except for the nudity.

Why?

Because the US paperback jacket design has just arrived, and it is gorgeous. Yes, it’s true, I wanted to ask all you guys to chip in and talk about it and so on, but this time around there wasn’t time and I was frankly too rubbish to sort it out, so we’ll have to save that for the next ‘un. However, I believe you will approve.

The book comes out some time in September, I’m not exactly sure when. The idea, obviously, is that I should have finished the new one by then – by which I mean finished a presentable draft – so that I can have double bragging rights and give myself superior looks in the mirror. I’ve made a small list of things I will say to myself while brushing my teeth, such as:

1) You said it couldn’t be done, you whiner!

2) Who the bookdaddy? Uh-huh uh-huh.

3) Are those your teeth? And are they the teeth of a two-time novelist? Yes, yes, I believe they are…

And so on. Sadly, I cannot yet say any of these things because I am still only about three quarters of the way in. Ten weeks to go, I hope, maybe twelve… wish me luck…

Given that maintaining a blog used to fall comfortably into my personal Room 101, I felt a certain bewildered satisfaction on discovering just now that De-icing was my hundredth post here. Almost entirely painless. Go figure.