PENGUIN FIRST!
Sales of books on websites like Amazon have been very successful but accommodating the format of books to the world of the Internet has been more difficult. You can get e-books but they seem a pale shadow of 'real' books. This attempt by Penguin to merge on-line serialisation with an actual book sounds intriguing and the book itself is a grand tribute to the Victorian Age of romance and technology.
2006’s most exclusive and unique reading experience. A sumptuous Victorian adventure fit for the digital age.
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
G W. DAHLQUIST
Published in weekly instalments (limited edition) from 4th September –
6th October 2006 at:
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Ecommerce/ShoppingCartChange?item=0140912223
The adventure to end all adventures begins and ends with a book...
Be part of 2006’s most exclusive and unique reading experience. A sumptuous Victorian adventure fit for the digital age.
Ten instalments sent direct from Penguin straight to your home over ten weeks. Ten thrilling chapters in handsome perfect bound editions limited to just 5,000 individual subscribers.
THE GLASS BOOKS OF THE DREAMEATERS is an utterly compulsive gothic adventure story, set in a fictitious Victorian city, and featuring a host of wicked and outlandish characters, including Miss Celestial Temple, a feisty heiress; Cardinal Chang, a deadly assassin and Dr Svenson, guardian to a louche and syphilitic prince.
When Miss Temple – recently arrived in the city from distant shores – suddenly finds her engagement broken off without suitable explanation by her fianc? Roger Bascombe, she is given a choice: turn away from polite society or turn adventuress and discover the reason for her rejection.
Deciding to secretly follow her former lover, Miss Temple finds herself a trespasser at a masked ball. There, strange and unspeakable acts involving electricity and books of blue glass (not to mention a murder) take place and Miss Temple almost loses both her virtue and her life.
Horrified that the man to whom she was betrothed could be mixed up in such diabolical affairs, Miss Temple is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. She is joined in this endeavour by a foreign surgeon and a disfigured assassin known as Cardinal Chang – both with their own reasons to make trouble for those in league with Roger Bascombe.
Together, Miss Temple and her accomplices unearth a dastardly plot to take over the world. They discover corruption, murder, bribery and blackmail at the highest levels, and thwart the plans of a beautiful but deadly Contessa. And at the heart of an adventure encompassing airship flights, rooftop battles, carriage abductions and murder most foul are the sinister glass books of the title – books offering up visions of fantasy and horror that engulf the reader’s mind.
The cliff-hanger chapter endings of The Glass Books are reminiscent of the great adventure novels of Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson, and led Penguin to the decision to revive the lost art of the weekly serial. Viking will offer the novel in weekly instalments pre-publication to a strictly limited number of subscribers.
Purchase will be soley via http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Ecommerce/ShoppingCartChange?item=0140912223 or the dedicated website www.glassbooks.co.uk. The instalments, in a beautifully designed and collectible magazine format, will be sent to subscribers on a weekly basis prior to the publication of the book in hardback on 25th January 2007. A limited number of these instalments are available to reviewers.
The Victorian heyday of the serial saw 100,000 people following the fate of Little Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, and instalments of Great Expectations outsold the Times newspaper. We hope that publishing this remarkable book in a time-honoured way will lead twenty-first century readers to follow the exploits of Miss Temple and her allies as breathlessly as Dickens’ Victorian fans did his novels.
THE AUTHOR:
GW Dahlquist fell asleep when trapped by a snowstorm, and The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters came to him in his dreams. This is his first novel. We intend to celebrate publication of the hardback in January with a lavish masked ball. We hope that G W Dahlquist will attend, but strangely, he has not been seen for some time...
