Tesco Books Blog

Not so long ago we asked all of you to get in touch and tell us the most extreme situation you’ve ever been in for the chance to win a bundle of Bear Grylls books and a £100 voucher for Blacks. We had people writing in with everything from jumping off of ferries mid-Channel to being stuck in the house with a tin and no opener (admittedly not that extreme…) to being attacked by a baboon! Who would have thought you were such a daring bunch!

We’ve been through your answers and picked a winner at random and I’m pleased to announce that the daredevil who will be walking away with all the goodies is Arabella, with her extreme story…

Being stuck half way down the side of a waterfall which had seemed like the easy route to find our way back to the car but with the ground giving way and nothing to grab hold of we got stuck with a choice of trying to crawl back up a muddy bank which only one of us could have achieved by standing on the other, or jumping onto a sloping bank below and risking breaking our ankles… It was getting dark so we jumped. We made it back to the car in one piece but were so plastered in mud we had to completely strip off and don plastic macs before racing into town to buy food before the shops closed.

Commiserations to everyone that didn’t get lucky this time – we’ve got plenty more competitions in the pipeline so keep your eyes peeled for your next chance to win! Also, if you’re on Twitter, remember we’ll be running our weekly #FreeReadsFriday giveaways this Friday, so keep an eye out for that hashtag!

To celebrate the launch of his new book, Me the Queen and Christopher, Giles Andreae – author of numerous award-winning children’s books, including the bestselling Giraffes Can’t Dance and the creator of the well-known Purple Ronnie poetry range – has agreed to stop by and answer questions from the Tesco Books Blog readers!

Giles also written a few words for all of you…

My top tip for becoming a writer is: read a lot, write a lot and write from the heart.

To celebrate the launch of my new book, Me the Queen and Christopher, I thought I would stop by and answer 10 of my favourite questions from Tesco readers. To encourage creative questions, I am also going to give away a selection of my picture books to the best question – just a little something to brighten your day! 

If you have a question for Giles, just leave it in the comments!

Browse our range of Giles Andreae’s children’s books online on Tesco Direct!

Lucy Silchester, the heroine of my novel The Time of my Life, definitely is. In the opening scenes of my book, she’s stuck in a rut and she’s not telling the truth to her friends, her family, herself. She’s created a cage for herself – she’s completely trapped with the lies she’s created and she can’t be honest with anyone.

I like to write about ordinary people we can all relate to and place them in extraordinary situations. I think that’s when we are truly tested as people. So Lucy is a normal thirty-year-old girl who has got herself into a bit of a pickle. She’s forced to look at herself, at who she is, and that helps her really think about the important questions. We meet her when she’s at her lowest ebb – her life really has hit rock-bottom. I follow her on her journey of self-discovery. My philosophy of life is that when we are going through the most difficult moments in our lives, we find that we have strength within us that we never knew existed.

No matter what I write, I try to make sure that I’m writing from an honest place, that I’m writing from the heart. I pour everything into what I write: when my characters laugh, I laugh, when my characters cry, I cry. I have to really feel everything I’m writing because it’s the only way to accurately portray true emotion. I don’t want to lie to my readers – it has to be completely true, it has to have been felt. I really hope you feel like you’re living Lucy’s journey with her, and I really you hope you enjoy the book. I loved writing it. Please tell me what you thought.

All the best,

Cecelia

Buy the Time of My Life by number one bestselling author Cecelia Ahern online for just £2.99!

Ahead of the release of her new book, The Faithless, we caught up with best selling author Martina Cole for a quick chat.

How do you relax?

My latest passion is gardening. We never had a garden when I was growing up, although my mum used to take a pair of nail scissors with her to pinch cuttings from plants to put in our window box!  But even though I inherited her love of being outdoors, the idea of gardening always seemed boring until a few years ago when I found the house of my dreams. Feeling so settled made me think I really wanted to put my mark on the garden too. I was a complete beginner and since then there’s been a lot of trial and error. I even have a chicken coop with ten hens and cockerels, so we have fresh eggs every day.

Gardening is the perfect way to relax. If I’m struggling with a plot, I spend an hour pruning and it really helps with clarity. And after writing about crime and death, it’s a relief to wake up to a garden bursting with colour and life. That’s what I love most – watching things coming to life.

What makes you angry?

Bigotry & Injustice. I was brought up never to judge anyone by their colour, creed, or sexuality. These beliefs have coloured my work as I try to understand the motivations behind human behaviour and bring humanity to my stories. I try to make my characters three-dimensional. My books are scary not because they are particularly gory but because they are realistic. I have axes to grind. If you rob a bank you get 18 years in prison. If you murder a little child, you get a lot less. These things bother me. In this country I feel money and property are more important than people and I hope this comes across in my writing. This is why I support organisations like Gingerbread for single parents and am proud to be a patron of Chelmsford Women’s Aid.

What’s  your biggest indulgence?

Shopping! Shoes, handbags, clothes, cars, books, paintings… you name it really. I’ve got a good clothes shopping tip – just because something comes in your size doesn’t mean you should wear it.

What’s most important in life to you?

My children and grandchildren are everything to me. My son Christopher is now 35, married and a father to three children and my beautiful daughter Freddie-Mary is thirteen.

And my friends – I’ve known my closest friends since I was at school – I’m loyal to them and they’re loyal to me. If my success ended tomorrow I know I’d have them and my family and that’s what’s most important to me.

To celebrate publication of The Faithless in paperback on the 10^th May we have a fantastic competition just for you – the chance to win a pair of exclusive tickets to Martina’s hardback launch in September! All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning is tell us what your favourite Martina Cole book is and why?

We look forward to reading your answers!

Buy The Faithless by Martina Cole – our book of the week – online from Tesco Direct for just £2.99!

Not only is Gok Wan one of the UK’s top fashion stylists, but he can cook too! His fantastic new book, Gok Cooks Chinese, contains 80 personal and family recipes, which are not only delicious and healthy but incredibly simple to make.

From his unique perspective he gives us his personal and modern take on the Chinese food that he grew up eating. His food is about balance, health, flavour and fun.

You will find recipes for all occasions and moods, whether entertaining friends or enjoying a meal at home by yourself. With this cookbook Gok demystify Chinese ingredients and equipment, showing us how easy it is to shop and cook just like him.

To celebrate this official tie-in to Gok Wan’s new primetime television cookery series, to be aired on Channel 4 in May 2012, we will be hosting a Q&A with him on our blog.

If you have a question for Gok and would like to be in with a chance of winning a signed copy of Gok Cooks Chinese - just leave a question for him in the comments. Gok will pick his 10 favourites to answer, each chosen answer will receive a signed copy of the book!

Once you’ve done that, head over to our competition page for the chance to win a meal at the fabulous Hakkasan Hanway Place in London worth £250 and overnight stay at The Sanderson Hotel!

We look forward to reading your questions!

Buy Gok Cooks Chinese online from Tesco Direct for just £8.86!

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As the nation becomes more and more fascinated by the surviving singers’ every utterance – Vince Kidd now has a whopping 53,180 followers (and counting) on Twitter – it must be a bizarre learning curve for the artists who only a matter of seven short weeks ago no-one gave a monkeys about. While they’re clearly having the time of their lives on the show, the downside of instant fame is that suddenly everyone has an opinion on you, as talented 20 year old Ruth Brown has recently discovered online.

No-one knows what it’s like to have their persona picked-apart better than Jessie J. As she explained during our interview for the official behind-the-scenes book, even now the constant scrutiny can get her down: ‘The core is the voice and the singing and the performance. But you do all of a sudden have to learn how it feels to have people pick you apart and have an opinion on how your hair looks, and your eyebrows and how skinny you are and if you sweat. It’s just like the world all of a sudden thinks they can own that.’

When coaching her team Jessie told me she feels connected to ‘each and every one of them’ because she can put herself in their shoes.

‘I was saying to my team yesterday that everyone goes through it. You’re not the only person so don’t feel sorry for yourself. Be realistic, you’re human beings, you’re going to get upset and you’re going to cry. I’ve been papped crying, because sometimes I cry. And they’re like – Jessie’s having a breakdown. No, I’m a girl, girls cry. I was tired, I’d been on planes for three days straight, I hadn’t slept and I missed my family. I was having a moment. It’s normal, deal with it.’

Still it must be hard to hold it together as your fate is revealed to you on live(ish) television, but leaving the competition this week after the public vote Hannah Berney and Ruth-Ann St Luce (sporting a fabulous Amanda Barrie style jumpsuit) handled themselves with total dignity. On Saturday night Hannah delivered a breathtaking vocal (despite her undercarriage being pawed at by a load of dancers) and when her mentor Danny chose Max Milner to stay over her she was teary yet gracious in defeat. Meanwhile Jessie told Ruth-Ann: ‘Your path is gleaming, this is not the end for you.’ While I’ve yet to see a gleaming path, surely Jessie is right – this is just the beginning for both of them…

Buy The Voice: Access All Areas online for just £6.46 from Tesco Direct!

Secret Breakers: The Power of Three is the first instalment of a fantastic code-breaking adventure series for age 9+, with real codes, real mysteries and real danger.

Imagine the chance to solve the Voynich Manuscript – a puzzle that has truly defeated adults for centuries. It’s an ancient manuscript no one has ever been able to decipher. And there are Rules that say it is forbidden to even try to solve it.

But Brodie Bray likes a challenge, and when she receives a coded message through the post her life changes for ever. She’s chosen for a secret team working at World War II code breaking base, Bletchley Park to crack this most complicated code in the world and uncover the secret it hides. Together with her new friends, Brodie must break the rules to break the code, at every turn facing terrible danger. For someone is watching them – and will even kill to stop them.

For the author, H.L. Dennis, code breaking has been ‘a fifteen year adventure’…

I got the idea for ‘Secret Breakers’ one rainy afternoon many, many years ago. I read an article about the most mysterious manuscript in the world. MS 408 is the name given to the manuscript found exactly a century ago by a man called Wilfred Voynich. He discovered the book hidden in a trunk in a castle in Northern Italy. Initially, the manuscript didn’t seem that unusual. It was only when he looked closer that he discovered that the book was written entirely in code.

Of course people have tried for years to break the code of MS 408. Code breakers based at Bletchley Park during World War II tried in 1944, as did other British and American teams at Bletchley in 1962 and 1963.  Everyone has failed. And that got me thinking. I began to wonder what type of person would be up to the challenge of making sense of a book that had baffled the minds of some of the greatest problem solvers who ever lived!

Having been a teacher for nearly two decades I began to think about how some of the children I taught might approach the problem of trying to solve the mysteries hidden by the code in MS 408. I began to think that children might look at the manuscript differently. They might approach the problem from another angle. They might look in a different way to break the secret. And that’s when the idea of ‘Secret Breakers’ was finally born.

Codes literally make my heart race. The idea of being able to discover a secret that no one else might know about…the chance to make sense out of nonsense…the opportunity to look for hidden meaning and to share the thoughts of the creator of the code, thrills me. Working with codes is an adventure…a voyage, every time, into a world of the unknown.

As a teacher nothing is more exciting for me than seeing a child break the code of a story. Stories empower and that is why I wanted my stories to be about everyday children who simply use their ability to ask questions and to see things from a different angle in order to be heroes.

The story arc for Secret Breakers began to take shape properly in 2005 but it incorporated many of the ideas I’d been researching and exploring for the previous nine years. I have been working on this story ever since and every single day I write is exciting…so it’s really been a 15 year adventure!”

In the spirit of things, we’ve got a code all of our own for you or your kids to try and crack. The winners will receive one of five family passes to Bletchley Park, so click here, follow the link and see how you get on!

Nine hundred and seventy three days. Thinking. Planning. Waiting for the perfect moment. Former Marine James Bishop will only have one opportunity to make his prison break. And one chance to prove that he isn’t responsible for the murders that put him inside.

The Wrong Man is a fantastic debut novel from author Jason Dean. Its an adrenaline fuelled thriller with all the makings of a great film or TV series – think Prison Break meets The Fugitive with Mission Impossible, in book form!

It is set to be one of the thriller novels of the year and if you can’t wait to read it, we have a sneak peak of the first chapter below. Be sure to let us know what you think!

I hope you’re all as excited as I am that the final part of my Kane Chronicles trilogy -  The Serpent’s Shadow – is finally here and it’s bursting at the seams with action-packed adventure! My two heroes; Carter and Sadie Kane are facing the battle of their lives against Apophis, the giant snake of Chaos, an evil that has been threatening to plunge the world into eternal darkness. Their only hope is an ancient spell – but its magic has been lost for a millennia… will they find the serpent’s shadow in their battle against the forces of Chaos? Or will they be lead to their deaths in the depths of the Underworld?

It has certainly been a race to get this last book finished on time and I’m trying to be more like our adopted dog ‘Speedy’ and write faster!  It has been great fun tackling the Ancient Egyptians and bringing their fascinating myths and legends to life. The Serpent’s Shadow has certainly been my favourite Kane book to write – so I hope you enjoy it too!  You will be able to buy it from Tesco on May 1^st.

Living up to my reputation of The Myth Master (as I’ve been told some of my UK fans call me), I’ll now be returning to the world of Percy Jackson and the Gods of Ancient Greece with The Mark of Athena – the third explosive title in my Heroes of Olympus series which is coming out this October.

Until then thanks to all my UK fans and watch your backs for evil gods and monsters – you never know where they may lurk!

When it comes to singing live there are few people with more experience than Sir Tom Jones. He’s been there, seen it and eaten burgers with Elvis. So when I chatted to him for the official The Voice UK behind-the-scenes book, the man dubbed ‘cooler than an igloo’ by fellow coach will.i.am was full of good advice for his team as they approached singing live to the nation for the very first time.

The key he said was not to think about how many people were watching. ‘You can’t start panicking about how many millions are sitting at home watching you, because if you do start to think like that you’ll crumble.’ He also stressed the need to be well-rehearsed ‘you don’t want to be winging anything’ and the importance of a good night’s sleep beforehand ‘without that you can get very edgy’.

So this weekend, after casting an expert eye over his crew as they sang for their survival, Tom’s heart must’ve been in his mouth as the public vote was revealed. When he picked free-spirited duo Matt & Sueleen over loveable super-fan Sam Buttery it was an incredibly emotional moment – Sam choked back the tears and was a gentleman in defeat, meanwhile a watery-eyed Matt & Sueleen looked gobsmacked and even Matt’s new ponytail had tears in its eyes.

There was another sob-fest when the talented Sophie Griffin was sent home by her mentor will.i.am and frankly we haven’t got through that many Kleenex since our pet chihuahua, Rufus, died in the middle of Kat & Alfie’s wedding in 2003.

With a career that has encompassed struggles as well as highs, Tom Jones understands only too well the frustrations felt by those leaving the show. He revealed his strategy in our interview: ‘As far as I’m concerned it’s about who’s the strongest person on the night, it has to be. They are hard decisions to make and it’s a shame that someone has to go home. But that’s the nature of the competition and I have to try and explain that just because they don’t get through, it doesn’t mean they haven’t got something special.

And Tom knows what he’s talking about – back in the day he was a regular at local talent shows and reveals in the book he didn’t always emerge as the winner. ‘I used to go up against other people. I mean, one night I was beaten by a bleeding ventriloquist,’ he told us, with a chuckle. ‘And she wasn’t very good either. The dummy was great though, she stole the show!’

Buy The Voice: Access All Areas online for just £6.46 from Tesco Direct!