Welcome to another installment of our Past Publishers series, aiming to help you discover more fantastic titles from the publishers we worked with on our last box! As the May boxes go out this week it seemed the perfect time to remind you of some wonderful looking titles from Alma Books, publishers of our February title, The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett.
Like Seren the first publisher featured in this series, Alma Books also publish a huge diversity of genres so I urge you to have a browse around their website as they publish pretty much everything!
Purely for reasons of not making this blog post 100 books long I've stuck to their fiction and children's fiction sections and picked out some I think sound intriguing! I am a huge fan of the movie of The Hundred-Foot Journey and didn't actually realise that it was a book, but it is! It's about an Indian family who move to France after a tragedy and set up their family restaurant across the street from a super fancy, Michelin starred restaurant in this little town and the resistance and prejudice that they face along the way and if it's at all like the film (which one would hope but you never know how they'll have adapted it!) then it'll be brilliant!
Another food related book (categorised under 'Delicious Fiction' on Alma's website) is The Restaurant of Love Regained by Ito Ogawa. After Rinko's boyfriend absconds with all of her stuff, including her grandmother's pestle and mortar, she returns to her village and opens a very special restaurant. It serves food for only one table every day, according to the customer's taste, and people begin to be transformed by it... It sounds a little like Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, which is one of my favourite books.
Wabi-Sabi by Francesc Miralles sounds really intriguing. About a guy living apart from his girlfriend who's shaken out of his routine by receiving a mysterious postcard and an unexpected visit prompting him to go to Japan in an attempt to find answers... And then we have aliens! Aliens and teen pregnancy! Check out the synopsis of Spinners by Anthony McCarten on the Alma website, because I don't feel like I can do it better justice than they have. It sounds amazing.
To finish up what I think you'll agree is a pretty epic list, I allowed myself to wander over into their children's section and found some pretty brilliant looking books. Bringing up small kids myself I'm always aware of trying to read to them about other cultures as well as just the UK/US version of events, and Quest: Stories of Journeys from Around Europe from the Aarhus 39 looks as if it'll be great for that criteria. It's a collection of stories from writers around Europe, each focusing on the theme of journey and reflecting issues facing young people in contemporary Europe. It's also got beautiful illustrations!
Alistair Grim's Odditorium by Gregory Funaro has been on my radar for a little while. A flying house full of mechanical features? A perilous quest against an evil Prince? Yes please! Finally The Emergency Zoo by Miriam Halahmy caught my attention because it's about Britain in 1939, as war is about to break out. Kids have been told they're going to be evacuated but that their pets won't be able to come and that they'll be put down, and they basically hide them in a secret den in the woods. Other kids find out, and lo and behold the den becomes an emergency zoo...
Writing this post has been extremely hard for my self control, and my wishlist is now several books longer! Have you read any of these? Let us know if you love any other Alma books we've missed!