London Book Fair and other stuff

I'll be off to the LBF on Monday for the first time, courtesy of a free ticket from The Society of Authors. I have no idea what it'll be like but I hope to come back having met a few people face to face that I've been in contact with for what feels like ages by e-mail. I'll also be looking out for loads of freebies and generally mooching about. I do it in bookshops a lot, mooch about and see what's being published by whom, what the latest trends are etc. Today I bought one book and one CD.

I'm a big Del Amitri fan. For some reason they've always been considered too 'middle of the road' by many music critics. More fool them. I've never been disappointed by any of their albums and the Del Amitri gig I saw at Shepherds Bush Empire about four years ago remains one of the best live gigs I've ever been to...

This is Justin Currie's debut solo album, released last year.

I came across an extract from this novel at a recent A Level Literature Lecture. The passage I read was intriguing enough for me to want to buy the book but on recent visits to bookshops I could only find a single copy of Adam Thorpe's recent short story collection and no novels of his at all...so Amazon it is. 1921 tells the story of Joseph Monrow, a young writer holed up in the Chiltern's, trying to write the first great novel about WWI.