WebConnect

8 November 2010

 Bobbie says: ‘My books, Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones and Truth Games, are published by independent presses who don’t have big marketing budgets, so it’s up to me to make readers aware of them. In my travels from Dorchester in the west to Tunbridge Wells in the east, from Bedford north of London to Eastbourne on the south coast, I’ve met wonderful people who love books. I’m so delighted that they show interest in my novels and want to buy them.’ 

Waterstone’s PR & Events Manager, Jon Howells, says: ‘Bobbie is clearly a bit of a phenomenon. To reach a thousand copies in personal sales is a real achievement. Her success shows how Waterstone’s can help launch an unknown writer who has good books to sell as well as promoting well-known names.’ 

Bobbie Darbyshire won the 2008 fiction prize at the National Academy of Writing and was published in their anthology Finding a Voice. Her piece Beads on a String won the New Delta Review Creative Nonfiction Prize 2010. Bobbie has worked as barmaid, mushroom picker, film extra, maths coach, cabinet minister’s private secretary, and as a care assistant, as well as in social research and policy. She hosts a writers’ group and is a volunteer adult literacy teacher. She lives in Clapham, London. 

Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones was published by Sandstone Press in 2010. In a fast-paced comedy of errors, three people rush off to the Scottish Highlands and find their destinies mysteriously entwined around a reading group in the Inverness Public Library. Full of twists and surprises and very funny, it also has some quite dark and serious threads, and it keeps you guessing – a real page-turner. 

Truth Games was published by Cinnamon Press in 2009. It’s set in London in the 1970s, the really hot summers of 75 and 76, and it’s about a group of friends getting way out of their depth in infidelity.