Mark Barry is Back...

...with two new novels, coming in the next fortnight.

The first is The Waiter.

Written as a 75th birthday present to my father, who is interested in politics and history, themes that permeate the book, I first started writing it in 2012 during the launch of my publishing business, Green Wizard. 

For one reason or another, I never finished it, though certain themes were used in my award winning 2014 novel The Night Porter. 

I finally finished it six weeks ago.  It's a black comedy set in an expensive restaurant in Nottingham.

Here's the cover.

and the Paperback cover

It's the blackest of comedies (my favourite type) which has the capacity to offend just about everyone. 

Here's the blurb.

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Portia’s House of Strawberries, the City’s favourite gourmet restaurant, is hanging on for dear life…

Portia’s is broke. Brassic Lint. Gone at the game. Skint. On its uppers. The balance sheet is a laughing stock and the management simply won’t face the truth.

The way it stands, Portia’s won’t make Christmas – and the old girl has been around since the thirties.

The world has changed: Instead of glamorous stars of stage and screen, Saturday night sees crazed footballers, reality stars, tattooed models, MMA fighters, hen parties, vicious gangsters, toupee’d car dealers, tribes of nose-ringed emos, councillors on secret expenses, mad scientists and militant vegan lecturers from two of the world’s richest universities.

Life simply isn’t the same.

It doesn’t help that stalking the restaurant is Jim Reynolds – the most successful restauranteur in New York State - with a lot of money to spend. Vast amounts of money. And he’s eager to expand into gourmet dining.

Worse, for everyone involved, he has ideas: New ideas on how to run things in a restaurant that hasn’t changed its ethos since the Queen’s Coronation.

Only Hugo Love, emerging TV celebrity and epicurean genius, a unique pianist, and a Parisian-standard Waiting group eager to protect tradition – and their jobs - stand in his way.

And they have just one week to stop him…

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I like the book. It's real, funny, nasty, offensive, heart-warming, witty and full of twists and surprises - just like books ought to be. I'll put an extract up early next week.

It will be launched in early April, though I hope to get the ebook online by Friday 24th March.

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The second novel I'm releasing has been described by my proofreader, Karenne Griffin, has possibly my best.

I think it IS my best book and I am a hopeless self-critic. It's called

A Shiny Coin For Carol Prentice 

and it is a loose sequel to my most popular novel, Carla. 

Here's the e-book cover:

Narrated in first person by a young goth/emo girl, the story concludes themes I began discussing five years ago about relationships - and small, insular, prosperous English towns, like the one in which I live a largely bitter and frustrating existence.

It's sombre, romantic, violent and extraordinarily sad, in the tradition of the great novels of the sixties and seventies, which influenced me back in the day.

Fans of Mark Barry will enjoy unlocking the puzzles drawn from all sorts of other books. 

And Carla readers will be well catered for.

Here's the blurb:

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“I swore that I would never go home,

but in the end, I had no choice.

I had to confront what happened.

And them too.

It was going be icky. And totally scary.”

Carol Prentice left Wheatley Fields to attend university in Manchester and not once did she return in four years.
Her beloved father visited her whenever he could, but then he passed away and it was up to her to sort his affairs.

She could have done this from a distance, but a woman can run to the far corners of the earth, but, in the end, she can never escape herself

She had to come home: There was no other choice.

Taking a job at a bookshop for the duration, she befriends Steve – an older man who looks like a wizard and who knows everything in the world.

Carol quickly encounters the demons that forced her to leave in the first place - including Toby, the raffish local villain, with whom she shares the most horrifying of secrets and whose very existence means evil and mayhem for everyone around.
Especially the lovable Steve.

Carol finds herself in the middle of a war between the two men:

 A war which can only have one victor.

Soon, she wishes she had never come home.

But by then it was too late.

Much too late.

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With the direction my life is going, it could very well be my last fiction book and if it were, it would be a fine legacy to leave behind. I'm really proud of it, but be warned: It's as dark as a winter's night.

It's released in two weeks.

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Friends know I planned to relaunch the entire business with four novels, but that simply isn't going to happen as too much is happening in my life outside independent literature. 

I will definitely release the other two (both are part written, one substantially), in a year or so. 

Free Stuff!

I will have a budget for forty free paperbacks in two weeks. Drop a comment in the box below if you want a copy - one of each per  person, please. 

Please review me in exchange. Ta! xxx

I am also sending out Mobis to anyone who wishes to review the books (bloggers etc).

Thanks, Mark

For those of you who wish to read Carla before Shiny Coin, it's currently on offer at 99p/$1.19

Carla UK - Buy Here

Carla US and ROW - Buy Here!