As his publishers, we wanted to use the opportunities for interaction and edutainment integral to Marcus’ writing and so, to celebrate Marcus du Sautoy’s book The Number Mysteries, we’re publishing an educational app, which includes extracts from the ‘game strategy’ chapter of the book,  fun videos and an interactive game, Moley.

Watch the video:

More about the app:

★ About Marcus du Sautoy’s Num8er My5teries ★

Want to know how to use math to ‘read your friends’ minds’? Or how math can help you always win at chocolate chilli roulette? Want to know who invented Sudoku or where is the best place to bet in a casino? Or just how to win at rock, paper, scissors?

Based on Marcus du Sautoy’s new book, The Num8er My5teries, this app focuses on the game strategy chapter, and how math can help you win. Jam-packed full of educational, entertaining information, the app contains three videos and four extracts of Marcus’ writing. It also includes a fun game, ‘Moley’, based on the famous ‘impossible’ math problem, ‘The Bridges of Königsberg.’

Race against the clock to help Marcus the Mole escape from his underground tunnels, using all the math, logic and strategy you have learnt from the rest of the app. You can even tweet your high score to friends from within the app.

More about Marcus:

• Rebooting Britain: Teach kids to see in four dimensions (Wired.co.uk)
• How will Marcus du Sautoy make maths fun? (The Independent)
• Without the big maths stories our numbers are plummeting (Guardian)
• How do you spark off an interest in maths when the curriculum seems dreary? (Guardian)
• Marcus du Sautoy to replace Richard Dawkins as chief evangelist for science (Guardian)

On Friday morning HarperCollins HQ was descended upon by a bunch of eager political bloggers who had been invited to a very special breakfast.

As well as getting to hear Lord Mandelson speak for near enough 90 minutes, the bloggers were also given copies of source material from 1987 – 1997 that was used in the process of writing the book.

The source material includes:

• A note from the General Secretary of the Labour Party to Mandelson regarding the 1987 election campaign
• A note to Blair following New Labour’s victory

(these uploads courtesy of Political Scrapbook.) Find links to the full set over at Political Scrapbook.

Anthony Painter provided a good overview of the discussion at his blog, and quotes Lord Mandelson as imploring people in Labour to ‘rock the f**king boat.’

Meanwhile, Brand Republic covered the event with the headline: Mandelson releases political papers to bloggers ahead of press . It went on to say:

The decision to release papers exclusively to bloggers is an emerging trend and a nod to the growing power of the world of blogs. The Times briefed bloggers ahead of press and before it launched its paywall last month.

Watch the T.V. advert for The Third Man:

Go to Amazon, to buy The Third Man, or buy the ebook from Apple’s iBooks.

Well, today is publication day for Marcus’ very exciting own enhanced book project The Number Mysteries.

‘Mind-bending, fascinating and useful too. Maths didn’t used to be this much fun.’
- Alan Davies

We are all taught how fundamental maths is to the world we live in. But did you know that Wayne Rooney solves a quadratic equation every time he connects with a cross to put the ball in the back of the net? That we use prime numbers when we shop on the Internet? Or that you can win $1 million just by solving one of the five puzzles in The Num8er My5teries?

As well as containing great writing from the holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, the book is sprinkled with QR codes that will send you to various online web pages chosen by the author, and references to downloadable additional material to further your understanding of the maths in the book.

Click here to continue reading about the book, as well as to learn more about the iPhone app especially created to accompany it, the QR codes contained within, and the maths puzzles you can download, print out and play with…

Anjali was recently chosen as one of the Telegraph’s Top 20 novelists under 40, a great accolade for a first time novelist.

The book takes place over the course of a year and tracks the city of Bombay through the changing seasons. In this podcast she is interviewed by Fourth Estate editor Mark Richards.

Click here to listen to Anjali Joseph.

Another Fourth Estate writer on the Telegraph list is Rana Dasgupta, author of Solo and Tokyo Cancelled.

And then there was the duck house. The “Stockholm” model, which Sir Peter Viggers bought in 2006 for £1,645, was 5ft high and positioned on a floating island. This was only part of the £30,000 Sir Peter claimed towards gardening at his home, including £500 for manure. He was never actually reimbursed for the duck home, as a Commons official wrote “not allowable” beside the claim. “I paid for it myself and in fact it was never liked by the ducks,” he said. But it was the thought that counted.

Sir Peter made a statement: “I have made a ridiculous and grave error of judgment. I am ashamed and humiliated and I apologise.” He also announced that he would not be standing at the next election.

The shockwaves crashed through Westminster. It was the detail that inflicted the lasting damage, as much as the sums involved. The Daily Telegraph reported that Hazel Blears, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, had been claiming the maximum allowable expenses for three properties, £4,874 on furniture, £899 on a new bed and £913 on a new TV, the second such television in under a year. She volunteered to pay the £13,332 capital gains tax she had avoided on the sale of her second home, and stood down in June.

All parties moved to try to limit the fallout: Mr Brown publicly apologised “on behalf of all politicians”. Mr Cameron described some of the claims as “unethical and wrong” and announced that Shadow Cabinet members would repay all questionable claims. A panel, under the former civil servant Sir Thomas Legg, was established to begin the detailed accounting. Eventually each MP involved would be informed whether they would have to repay any expenses. Three Labour MPs and one Conservative peer would finally face criminal prosecution for “false accounting”.

Even more damaging than the accusations, in some cases, was the reaction of MPs to the charges. Some wriggled: Douglas Hogg insisted that the moat in question was more a “broad dyke”. Some dug themselves in deeper: “I have done nothing criminal, that is the most awful thing,” insisted the Tory MP Anthony Steen. “And do you know what it’s about? Jealousy. I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral.” Some seemed bizarrely sorry for themselves: Nadine Dorries, a conservative MP, described the detailed media coverage of MPs’ expenses as a sort of torture.

Never has the cultural chasm between voters and their representatives seemed so vast. While most of Britain reeled from rising unemployment and fretted over mortgage payments, here was a world of moated second homes and ride-on lawnmowers, where the ducks were pampered in special houses, and people bragged of living in their own Balmoral. The gulf between the MPs’ sense of entitlement, and public outrage at the perceived pettiness and greed, could not have been wider. Publicly there was much handwringing, by those implicated and those in charge; privately, there was intense fury that the scandal had erupted, and then been left to swirl around unchecked. Many MPs felt hard done by, some with good reason, but there was no doubting the level of public anger over a system that was clearly seen, by far too many politicians, as an adjunct to their salaries, the trappings

of an upper-middle-class lifestyle that they believed they deserved. Most seemed more angry than genuinely contrite.

At a time of deep financial uncertainty, the spectacle of MPs feathering their own nests, or duck houses, ignited a firestorm of public fury: two days after the scandal broke, the BBC programme Question Time attracted a viewership of nearly four million, the highest in its 30-year history.

The tale of sackings, de-selections, public apologies, repayment, retirement and, eventually, prosecutions, rumbling on for months, marked a low point in British political history. Some of the abuses were flagrant; some venial and some, frankly, irrelevant or unfair. Many decent, honourable and entirely honest MPs found themselves tarred by the overwhelming public perception that Westminster was rotten to the core. Some got their comeuppance; some watched, with horror, as the disillusionment that had marked the early stages of this Parliament turned to outright condemnation and calls for wholesale political reform.

The most high-profile casualty of all was the Speaker, Michael Martin. A Glasgow-born, hard-grained politician of the old-style Labour school, Mr Martin’s election in 2000 was controversial from the start. Some suspected him of bias.

Mr Martin’s own expenses had long been the subject of scrutiny: he used public money to employ a law firm to fight negative media stories, while his wife spent £4,000 on taxis. Refurbishing the Speaker’s official residence within the Palace of Westminster cost the taxpayer an estimated £1.7 million over seven years. There was more than a hint of tribalism in Mr Martin’s resistance to the investigation of MPs expenses. His response to the exploding scandal appeared to be more concerned with the way the information had leaked out, than apologising, explaining or making amends.

To an increasing number, both inside and outside Parliament, Mr Martin was a symptom of the disease, a symbol of all that had gone wrong. Mr Clegg spoke for many when he declared that the Speaker had become an obstacle to reform. To his dwindling band of supporters, he was a scapegoat.

No Speaker had been forced out of office since Sir John Trevor was expelled for accepting bribes more than 300 years earlier. On May 19, 2009 the Conservative MP Douglas Carswell tabled a motion of no confidence, which was signed by 22 MPs. Later that day Mr Martin announced that he would resign from his position as Speaker of the House of Commons.

He took ermine in the Lords, becoming Lord Martin of Springburn. His throne in the House was occupied by John Bercow, elected on a promise to clean up Parliament. It subsequently emerged that the new Speaker had spent an additional £20,000 on refurbishing the grace-and-favour flat in the palace, again.

And so the Parliament – the “Rotten Parliament” as some were now calling it – wound down accompanied by a litany of recriminations, the familiar sound of plotting, and one last dollop of scandal.

In the autumn of 2008, Siobhain McDonagh, a junior government whip, who during her time in office had never voted against the Government, spoke of the need to discuss Mr Brown’s position as party leader. She was swiftly sacked.

Then, in the month that Mr Martin stepped down, James Purnell, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, delivered another blow to Mr Brown’s authority by announcing his resignation. This was not a statement of ambition but, far more threateningly, of principle. “I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less, likely . . . that would be disastrous for our country. I am therefore calling on you to stand aside to give our party a fighting chance of winning.”

As speculation about Mr Brown’s future swirled, his ministers backed him, with potential rivals such as Harriet Harman and David Miliband denying that they were preparing leadership bids. But with each plot, and each denial, his chances of clinging to power in the coming election seemed to recede. The final attempt to unseat him came in January 2010, when the former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and former Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon jointly called for a secret ballot on the future of Mr Brown’s leadership. The plot fizzled. Mr Brown later called the abortive mini-coup “a form of silliness”.

Perhaps the final symbolic motif for this grim Parliament came just before the election was announced, when Mr Hoon, Ms Hewitt and the former minister Stephen Byers were each caught out by undercover journalists posing as lobbyists. The former ministers appeared to be cashing in on their influence. Ms Hewitt explained that, for a fee of £3,000 a day, she could help “a client who needs a particular regulation removed, then we can often package that up”. Mr Hoon was heard saying that he was “looking forward to . . . something that, frankly, makes money”.

Above all, the crass remarks made by Mr Byers seemed to sum up the previous five years. “I am a bit like a sort of cab for hire,” he explained to the fake lobbyist. “I still get a lot of confidential information because I am still linked to No 10.” His trump card came close to self-parody: “We could have a word with Tony”. Mr Blair was long gone from No 10, but his potential earning power lingered on.

At the start of the 54th Parliament, public confidence in politicians was already crumbling; by the end it was radically eroded. The perception that MPs lined their own pockets at taxpayer expense was widespread in 2005; by 2010 it was universal conventional wisdom. Unfairly, but understandably, Parliament had come to be seen as one large rank of cabs for hire. The tumult, sleaze and political skulduggery left the public jaundiced and angry, and many MPs traumatised and exhausted.

Contemplating her own retirement, Ann Widdecombe spoke for many when she remarked: “I find that my uppermost sentiment is one of profound relief.”

Like Oliver Cromwell, surveying the Rump Parliament, the public’s patience had run out: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately . . . Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” And they went: in addition to the 149 MPs who stood down before the 2010 election, 76 were voted out of office in May of that year. In some ways, both the level of interest in the election, and a result giving no party an overall majority, were also an accurate reflection of the rancour and uncertainty of the five years that preceded it.

The unhappy 54th Parliament was, perhaps, a necessary trauma. Wholesale political reform became inevitable. Closer scrutiny of parliamentary expenses began. The gravy train hit the buffers, making a fantastic mess that will take many years to clear up.

Britain has a new Parliament, a new form of government and a large new crop of MPs. They will make their own mistakes and commit their own sins, but only this can be predicted with absolute certainty: no MP in the 55th Parliament will ever buy a duck house.

Ben Macintyre was parliamentary sketch writer for The Times from 2002-04.

This piece was extracted from The Times Guide to the House of Commons out next Thursday, July 8th.

There was the Rump Parliament (1649) and the Long Parliament (1640), the Mad Parliament (1258) and, quite simply, the Bad Parliament (1377). But what to call the 54th parliament, which seemed so very long, so mad and, in many ways, so very bad? This will be, for ever, the Duck House Parliament. Little did Sir Peter Viggers imagine, when he ordered an obscure and expensive item of furniture for his pond, that he would be creating a grim leitmotif for an era of scandal that inflicted such damage on the institution he had served for 36 years. In a cruel twist, the wretched ducks did not even like their new house, which Sir Peter tried to include in his parliamentary expenses. They refused to live in it.

The Parliament ushered into being by the 2005 election and put out of its misery in April 2010, was one of astonishing turbulence, buffeted by scandal, economic meltdown and political acrimony. All the major parties changed leader: the Liberal Democrats twice. The Speaker was forced out of office for the first time since 1695. At the end of the Parliament, a remarkable 149 MPs stood down, including 100 Labour members and 35 Tories.

Far more important than the changing faces was the transformed relationship between the electors and the elected. Faith in politicians plummeted. After the expenses scandal of 2009, John Bercow, the new Speaker of the House of Commons, declared: “Let me be brutally honest about the scale of what has occurred. I cannot think of a single year in the recent history of Parliament when more damage has been done to it than this year, with the possible exception of when Nazi bombs fell on the chamber in 1941.”

The bomb of the expenses scandal fell from a sky that was already overcast and stormy. The election of 2005 brought some notable newcomers to the House, including Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. When Tony Blair won his third consecutive victory in 2005, with a reduced overall majority of 66, the Afghan war was already four years old and the war in Iraq had been under way for two years. The Parliament started in a truculent mood, which got steadily worse. Mr Blair was accused of misleading Parliament over the war and of ruling in presidential style. Mounting war casualties, the bitter grinding rivalry between Blair and Brown and the Prime Minister’s growing unpopularity gave a sour, fin de siècle flavour of intrigue to the first two years of the Parliament, as it became ever clearer that Mr Blair would not fulfil a promise to serve a full third term.

David Cameron became leader of the Tories in October 2005 after a late surge of support. Sir Menzies Campbell took over leadership of the Liberal Democrats after Charles Kennedy resigned, citing a drink problem. Sir Menzies resigned after 19 months, paving the way for Mr Clegg to win the leadership by a waferthin margin. While the opposition parties forged new leaderships, the Blairites and Brownites traded blows and snide spin. The first attempted coup came in September 2006, when the Brownite parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Tom Watson, signed a letter to Mr Blair asking that he resign to end the uncertainty over his succession. He was told to withdraw the letter or resign his ministerial position. He quit, with another broadside at Mr Blair: “I no longer believe that your remaining in office is in the interest of either the party or the country . . . the only way the party and the Government can renew itself in office is urgently to renew its leadership.”

Mr Blair described Mr Watson’s actions as “disloyal, discourteous and wrong”. The plot thickened when it appeared that Mr Watson had visited Mr Brown’s home in Scotland the day before the memo was sent. Mr Watson claimed that he had merely been dropping off a gift for the Browns’ new baby son, Fraser.

The uncertainty, the rumours, the whiff of conspiracy and allegations of treachery set the tone for the rest of the Parliament: a poisonous legacy that Mr Blair would bequeath to Mr Brown, along with the premiership, in June 2007. Mr Brown’s uncertainty over whether to call an election four months later, and his final decision to wait, compounded the impression, in some quarters, of a vacillating prime minister, untested at the polls and unwilling to throw the dice, holding on to office and motivated by expediency.

In April 2009, it emerged that Damian McBride, Mr Brown’s special adviser and former head of communications at the Treasury, had discussed with the former Labour Party official Derek Draper the setting up of a website to post false and scurrilous rumours about the private lives of senior Tories and their spouses. Mr Mc- Bride resigned. Mr Brown was publicly apologetic and privately apoplectic. “Smeargate” left another stain.

This, then, was the unsettled backdrop for the great expenses explosion: creeping political disillusionment and war-weariness, a sense that after coming to power amid widespread euphoria Blair had done little to change parliamentary culture, a souring economy and the looming spectre of recession, and the peculiarly nasty aftertaste of Mr McBride’s Smeargate. A series of smaller scandals paved the way, most notably when it emerged that the Conservative MP Derek Conway had employed his son, a full-time student at the time.

Under the old rules, MPs could claim expenses, including the cost of accommodation, “wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred for the performance of a Member’s parliamentary duties”. A Freedom of Information Act request filed early in 2008, aimed at finding out exactly what MPs were claiming, was challenged by the House of Commons authorities as “unlawfully intrusive”. When, after much legal wrangling, the House agreed to release the details, it did so with obvious reluctance, insisting that “sensitive” information be removed. Even before the touch-paper was lit, the House of Commons adhered firmly to the belief that how MPs chose to spend our money was their business, not ours.

On May 8, 2009 The Daily Telegraph obtained a full, uncensored copy of MPs’ expenses claims dating back to 2004 and began publishing details: first those of the Labour Party, then the Tories, then the Liberal Democrats and finally the smaller parties. The scandal touched every corner of Westminster: ministers, Shadow Cabinet members, backbenchers, MPs and peers. It was, as The Times observed, “a full-blown political crisis”. The ensuing outrage was focused on the abuse of parliamentary expenses relating to second homes: numerous MPs were accused of “flipping”, the term for switching the designation of a second home between a constituency and London property, to ensure maximum expenses. Some MPs were renting out properties while simultaneously claiming for second homes. Home improvements in some cases went far beyond “making good dilapidations”, suggesting that the expenses system was simply being milked as a way to increase property values, and turn a profit.

MPs were able to claim up to £400 a month for food, and many claimed every penny, every month, even when Parliament was not sitting. Items worth less than £250 could be claimed for without producing a receipt. A suspiciously large number of claims came in just under that mark.

Come back for Part Two, tomorrow, where Ben reveals the fallout to these revelations.

Ben Macintyre was parliamentary sketch writer for The Times from 2002-04.

This piece was extracted from The Times Guide to the House of Commons out next Thursday, July 8th.

2010 is the centenary of the birth of probably the greatest traveler, travel writer and travel photographers of the last century, Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003). Wilfred Thesiger in Africa is published to coincide with a major centenary exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, which examines his lifelong relationship with Africa for the first time.

The book contains a new essay on Thesiger’s travels in Africa by his friend and biographer Alexander Maitland, as well as several shorter pieces; on Thesiger’s influence on a younger generation of explorers (Benedict Allen); a critical approach to his photography (Edwards); his collection of artifacts (Coote), and his archive in Oxford (Jones and Morton). These essays are accompanied by around 200 of Thesiger’s African photographs, most of them published for the first time.

Probably best known for his two extraordinary journeys across the Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter, the vast arid desert of southern Arabia immortalised in Arabian Sands (1959), now considered a classic work of travel writing, Thesiger’s haunting descriptions of the shifting sands and striking accompanying photographs have stirred many readers from their armchairs in the intervening years. But Arabia, and later his experiences living among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, were interludes in a long life, the greater part of which was spent living and travelling in East and North Africa.

Born in 1910 in Addis Ababa, where his father was the British Minister in charge of the Legation, Wilfred Thesiger spent his boyhood in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and he retained a lifelong affinity with the country and continent of his birth. In 1930, while still studying at Oxford, he attended the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, the only witness of the spectacle to be sent a personal invitation; and afterwards he undertook his first significant expedition, traversing the dangerous and unexplored Sultanate of Aussa to locate the place where the Awash River ended. Administrative postings in the Sudan followed, and later journeys through the Tibesti Mountains in Chad and the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. When Mussolini’s Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, Thesiger experienced this as a personal assault, and he served under Wingate with local ‘Patriot’ fighters to liberate the country during the Second World War, being awarded the DSO for his part in the capture of Agibar fort. Following his celebrated travels in Arabia and Iraq during the late 1940s and 1950s, Thesiger returned to Ethiopia in 1959, visiting the remarkable rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and thereafter he based himself for much of each year in East Africa. By the late 1970s he had settled permanently in northern Kenya, living among a close-knit group of the pastoral Samburu whom he considered his adoptive ‘family’. Throughout this time Thesiger was taking photographs, initially with an old box-camera inherited from his father, and subsequently with his trusted Leica, which he upgraded at regular intervals but which always travelled with him.

As editors of this book and the exhibition it accompanies, we have favoured an approach other than a survey of ‘highlights’, which has in any case been done before, notably at the Pitt Rivers Museum in its first major exhibition of Thesiger’s work in 1993, and by Thesiger himself in his later books such as Desert, Marsh and Mountain and Visions of a Nomad. Instead, the book is the first to explore Thesiger’s lifelong relationship with Africa. Thesiger’s very first published photographs were taken in Africa, appearing with a series of articles about his 1933–4 Awash expedition, and his photographs accompanied his writings throughout his life. Surprisingly, however, the African pictures were never reproduced with the same zeal as his photographs of Arabia and Asia, less appealing to publishers if not to his readers. Thesiger wrote about Africa and its importance to him, notably in his autobiography The Life of My Choice (1987), but the visual evidence to a large extent remained unseen. The focus on Africa has therefore allowed us to explore a lesser-known area of his photography and for the first time to examine it in detail. The photographs have been chosen as representative of many of the themes in his work, but they are undoubtedly also some of his finest and most striking images. Drawn from over 17,000 negatives, or more than two-fifths of his entire photographic output, they span the greater part of his life and show people and places in Ethiopia, Sudan, Morocco, Tanzania and Kenya; the last picture in our selection was taken near his home in Maralal in Kenya in 1983.

‘I am certain that the first nine years of my life have influenced everything that followed,’ Wilfred Thesiger wrote in 1994, the opening line of his memoir My Kenya Days. As he saw it, Africa set his life on its course and it is therefore fitting that it should provide the focus for a centenary volume. From his birth in Abyssinia to his final years spent in Kenya, Africa provided more than bookends to a life, however, and Thesiger saw it very much as his spiritual home, declaring even that he hoped to end his days there. A lifetime’s engagement with the continent provides the necessary biographical context and makes possible a fresh examination of his importance as an explorer, collector and photographer.

Taken over five decades, the African pictures also document Thesiger’s development as a photographer, in particular as a portraitist. ‘Ever since my time in Northern Darfur,’ he wrote, ‘it has been people, not places, not hunting, not even exploration that have mattered to me most.’ Although known to a large extent for his often romantic images of landscape, Thesiger saw these as secondary, ‘a setting for my portraits of the people.’ Appropriately for an ethnographic museum, therefore, the exhibition is also a celebration of the men and women depicted and the diverse cultures which they represent. From the Afar, Konso and Boran of Ethiopia, the Nuer and Dinka of Sudan, the Berbers of Morocco, and the Samburu and Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, ‘Wilfred Thesiger in Africa’ offers glimpses of some of the most fascinating cultures and places on the African continent, seen through the lens of one of its most celebrated observers.

Philip N. Grover and Christopher Morton

Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

June 2010

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition continues at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, until 5 June 2011

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa

Edited by Christopher Morton and Philip N. Grover

With contributions by Alexander Maitland, Sir David Attenborough, Benedict Allen, Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Edwards, Philip N. Grover, Schuyler Jones and Christopher Morton.

I first visited the Maltese islands in the summer of my third birthday. I don’t actually remember the visit, instead my prompt is an old cine camera film of a small me walking off Gozo ferry, holding hands with my mum and waving at my dad.

My mum was born in Malta, to a Maltese mother and an English father and I grew up spending my summer holidays on the island (locals call it The Rock). We’d visit every summer, taking presents for our vast extended family. We were very much the English relatives, gifting huge bars of Cadbury’s chocolate and brightly coloured plastic beads and bracelets.  We’d spend the first few days visiting relative after relative and each time my dad would be given Cisk lager in a bottle and I’d drink ice cold Kinnie (a Maltese soft drink made from a blend of oranges and aromatic herbs) through a straw.

I treasured the whole summers that I’d spend on the island playing in the sun and the blue, crystal-clear sea.  Some days we’d explore beaches, Golden Sands, Għadira, Armier or take boat trips to Gozo, to Comino, to the Blue Lagoon or around the Blue Grotto of Żurrieq. When the midday sun was too much for us, we’d pile into our battered hire car and explore beautiful sun-bleached countryside spanned with rubble walls, quaint little villages and numerous awe-inspiring churches. The churches, even then, even when I was too small to know my own beliefs, carried a mystery that made me shiver. Other days we’d choose to catch a rusty bus and travel to the capital city Valletta or to Mdina, the medieval, silent, old city next to Rabat.  Then at night, as the temperature cooled, we’d promenade along the sea fronts of Sliema or Bugibba, we’d meet with relatives and walk, chatting and hearing stories that were full of history and folklore. At weekends we’d join in festas (village feasts), buying nougat from street vendors and staying up late to watch firework displays decorating the night sky. People danced in the streets, bedtimes were forgotten. There was no fear, just welcoming arms, open doors and a receiving that made me feel like I belonged, like I was safe.

Today’s Malta is a modern country depending mainly on tourism and IT. Visitors arrive with the expectation that because the Maltese archipelago, consisting of three islands: Malta, Gozo and Comino, is so small that they can see all of the beauty spots within a short visit but they are wrong. The islands conceal so much, so many tiny hidden gems waiting to be discovered and explored. The look of the island may have altered from the summers that I spent there, but the feel and the integrity remains the same. Spirituality, tradition, mystery, determination, resourcefulness, pride, culture, linguistics, history- these islands have such a wealthy pot to draw from.

Making the decision to set ‘Like Bees to Honey’ in Malta was an easy one. My grandparents met in Malta during conflict and chaos, many years ago. My grandfather was a non-Catholic English soldier and my grandmother a Catholic Maltese girl who sacrificed for a love that lasted and grew through decades. Their story offered me a seed, just as their love for each other made me believe in a happily ever after. ‘Like Bees to Honey’ is a tribute to my grandparents, to the mystic that covers the Maltese islands and to the magic of childhood summers.

We are delighted to launch the UNCOVER FIRST campaign together with The Reading Agency and UK Libraries which will promote six novels, perfect for Reading Groups, over a period of six months.

Our campaign promotes and supports Reading Groups by highlighting six titles perfect for your Reading Group. So if you’ve stumbled across this page and aren’t a UK library – we don’t mind. Download our reading group notes and enjoy! It’s your chance to UNCOVER FIRST some of these amazing titles.

Reading notes for All the Living

Reading notes for Brixton Beach

Reading notes for The Elephant Keeper

Reading notes for Wolf Hall

Reading notes for The Lace Reader

Reading notes for The Book of Fires