You’ve Got Mail: Nicola Barker’s Burley Cross Postbox Theft – The App

Out now… An app with a difference

The new book by Nicola Barker, author of the Booker short-listed Darkmans, was published last Thursday.  Burley Cross Postbox Theft, is brilliant, startlingly witty, and only occasionally disturbing:

Reading other people’s letters is always a guilty pleasure. But for two West Yorkshire policemen – contemplating a cache of 26 undelivered missives, retrieved from a back alley behind the hairdresser’s in Skipton – it’s also a job of work. The quaint moorside village of Burley Cross has been plunged into turmoil by the theft of the contents of its postbox, and when PC Roger Topping takes over the case, which his higher-ranking schoolmate Sergeant Laurence Everill has so far failed to crack, his expectations of success are not high.

We knew that this book was something very special, and so we wanted to do something special for it. Since the book is about a series of missing letters, we thought it’d be good if we could have fun with it, and serialise the letters in some way.

Launched today, the free sampler app is available on the iPhone App store.

Initially the app will contain only the first letter from the book, audio synced to the text.

However, as the week progresses, three new letters will be delivered to the in-app postbox, accessible from the table of contents. The user need only press the post-box button when a notification icon appears to read the new letter.

At the same time, we will also be putting the audio-book recordings of these letters up as a podcast, so if you’d prefer to listen to each as they arrive, you can do this instead. Links to these recordings will be provided within the letters themselves.

At the end of the serialisation, the user will be given links to where they can purchase the full app, containing all 26 missing letters and synchronised audio, or if they’d prefer, the hardback book.

Look out for it on the App store now!