News from the North

Notes from my visit to San Quentin State Prison last month: Take the 101 North across the Golden Gate Bridge, follow the signs for the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge onto Sir Francis Drake Blvd, keep going until you reach the LAST MARIN COUNTY EXIT sign, bear right, and you'll find yourself in the tiny, quaint little hamlet of San Quentin, a few dozen houses and a post office in search of a village, entirely dwarfed by its most famous residence. I drove through the open VISITOR PARKING gates, and readied myself in my rental car. I'd already dressed appropriately: no denim, no blue or orange, no open-toed shoes, nothing "provocative", and above all, no cell phones or recording devices. Carrying only wallet and car keys, I walked back up to the main gate, where the guard on duty was opening and checking the trunks of all of the many cars filing out of the grounds. We congregated near the entrance - "we" being myself and a group of Corrections students from Pittsbu...

So my online poll regarding the setting of my next book was only supposed to run through September. And we do in fact have a clear winner, aided, no doubt, by its recent run of publicity: the troubled nation of Myanmar. However - it is - um - well - let's just say, in light of recent and current events, it's an open question whether travel to Myanmar will be wise or even possible anytime soon, so I'm going to monitor developments and in the meantime, I'll keep the poll open to collect votes for a backup destination. In other news, Beasts of New York is a mere 20 days away from completion, and I'm soon going to to post a fan's German translation of the first part. And speaking of Deutschland, I seem to have sold the German audio rights to my first two books. Ah, sweet, sweet euros.

My favourite Google-translated bits from a bunch of German reviews of Blood Price . There are clearly still a few bugs in the system: -- A Menschenschmuggler is found fast, but that does not want money, but Pauls of programming skills. Paul is carried forward to Albania and programs him a Website [...] The Cover is black-red. On the title page above titles and name of the author stand in large type characters. Among them are the picture of an enormous building and the outlines of humans, who burn both. This thriller from the view of the unemployed person of programmer and inspired of baking packman Paul is written. Its unemployment rests heavily on it and its relationship with the Bosnierin Talena into a deep crisis led. When the two decide to help Talenas sister it must pull itself on its own tuft from the sump and take responsibility. It goes through scarcely 500 sides an unbelievable development within that. It remains reliable nevertheless and a outstanding identity figure. The cir...

The Guardian 's Books Blog today published a brief essay of mine about free online publishing. Sweet. They've long been my favourite UK newspaper. And they're even paying me, to my surprise, which makes this an official byline.

Guess what? It's time for a contest. And a vote. Yes, we're gettin' all celebratory and democratic around here. But first - you'll hopefully be pleased to learn that my fourth thriller, Night of Knives (aka "the Africa book") has been completed and copyedited, and is now officially in the Publishing Pipeline, set for official UK hardcover release on December 13th, just in time for Christmas. (If you're feeling very precocious indeed you can even advance-order a copy from Amazon.co.uk) Now that Book Four is in the can, the inevitable question is, of course: what and where next? Good question. And guess what? It's up to you to answer it. You see, starting today, and continuing through the end of September, I'm holding an online vote/contest to determine the country in which my next novel will be set, and by extension, where I'll be travelling (and travel-blogging) next. What's more, five lucky winners will receive signed copies of Invisible...

I have an article in this month's CrimeSpree magazine. The article isn't online, but I'm sure the good folks of CrimeSpree are OK with me posting it here: Everything Is Extraordinary a brief history of the travel thriller It's a big scary world out there. Just imagine. Imagine yourself walking off a 747 and emerging from an airport into one of the developing world's megalopolises, Mumbai or Cairo or Sao Paulo, each bigger by far than New York. Imagine a seething maelstrom of chaos, noise, smoke and smog; potholed streets clogged by teeming crowds, the ragged masses of poor people living on rooftops, in cemeteries, in alleys in the shadow of five-star hotels. Imagine the nonstop assault on all of your senses, including your senses of decorum, personal space, disgust, and wonder; the mixed smells of diesel and open fires and rotting filth and street-corner spice markets; the splashes of bright colour – gleaming motorcycles, women's dresses, a pyramid of some myst...

Hey, whaddaya know - I'm on the front page of cbc.ca with my 10 Tips for Travel to Exotic Countries . Even got a nice email from Medecins sans Frontieres thanking me for the plug. Meanwhile, Beasts of New York got Whatevered . I may be going to San Diego's in/famous ComicCon this weekend. Then again I may not be. Oh, the suspense.

But this blog isn't all about me. No, really, it isn't. Take this post, for instance. I have a few friends with books coming out in the next few months, and I want to tell you all about them: Cathy Wong , who is a naturopathic doctor, nutritionist, and About.com's Alternative Medicine guide, just published her first book, The Inside-Out Diet . If you're like me, you're suspicious of all diet/health-food books, but I can assure you from personal experience, Cathy's terrific, knowledgeable and thoughtful, she champions health and loves food at the same time. Go buy it. Jo Walton's Farthing comes out in paperback, in August, and its sequel Ha'Penny in early October. These books should really need no introduction - I've lost count of how many awards Farthing has been nominated for. And rightfully so. It's brilliant. And terrifying. And oh so relevant despite being sit in an alternate-history 1949. Go buy them. Speaking of sequels, Sarah Langan...

This - according to Google Translator - is a review of The Blood Price , which was just published in Germany (and in German): Well investigated travel thriller with Action Jon Evans second book with his hero Paul Wood is exactly the same dragging along like its Erstling “deadly path”. Paul was there still as a baking packman in Nepal on the way, he describes this time the Bosnia drawn by the civil war, drives with us to Albania, into the Karibik and to COUNT down on the famous artist celebration “Burning one” into Arizona. Evans urgently describes the situation in ex Yugoslavia and the tensions, which are still present under the ethnical groups there. Even if sometimes the action hooks somewhat, one marks to it that he argues much with his topics (usually even locally) and authentically reported on it. Naturally there is also this book a actionreichen Showdown to hope in which Paul and its friends the thing into the hand rather takes, instead of for the police. Who does not know thus i...

OK - I have gone ahead and launched the online serialization of my "children's book for adults" Beasts of New York . I'll be posting a chapter a day for the next 2-3 months, until the whole book is online. It's a fun read, I promise.

My fine UK publishers, Hodder & Stoughton , have given the official thumbs-up to my fourth novel, The Night of Knives , aka "the Africa book." And there was much rejoicing. What's more, I just handed in a draft of my graphic novel The Executor to my editor at Vertigo Comics . And now that I'm done writin' I can start readin' again. (Curiously, I don't read much while I'm writing.) Just finished Kirino's Out , which is brilliant but bleak. Yesterday I purchased from Amazon, in no particular order: A Few Short Notes About Tropical Butterflies by John Murray, The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, Air by Geoff Ryman, Carnival by Elizabeth Bear, The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder, House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, and Links by Nuruddin Farah. And I want to finally read I Am Legend by Richard Matheson before the movie comes out, but Amazon had no cheap paperback version available, so I'll check local bookstores. Oh, and I have an in...

So Invisible Armies was reviewed by Kirkus Reviews about six weeks ago. I figured the absence of a congratulatory note from my publisher meant it was a negative review (Kirkus is famous for being cranky), and anyways it would pop up on the bn.com page soon enough anyway. Well, said review has resolutely failed to appear, so today I went hunting around for a free online source for Kirkus Reviews, because I wasn't about to pay them forty bucks to read one (presumably negative) review. O fellow writers, please note, to my and perhaps your amazement, such a source actually does exist: NoveList . (Just ues their search form.) Anyway, to my further amazement, it's actually quite a nice review: Cyber-spacey thriller about good-guy hackers vs. bad-guy hackers, the fate of the planet hanging on every click ... Evans is clearly at home among the exuberant, idiosyncratic Cyberniks, and — occasional dollops of melodrama aside — he makes their world fresh and entertaining . (I'm not go...

Tomorrow is a momentous day for each and every one of us. Well, for me, anyways. For tomorrow is the day my book Invisible Armies - easily the best thing I've published yet, I think - is at long last officially released in the USA. It won't actually hit stores for another two weeks yet, but all the same, shop early (at amazon.com or bn.com ), shop often, post reviews on web sites and telephone poles, steal your neighbours' credit cards and shop again. Meanwhile, I'm giving away my next book for free. Yes, free. You see, last year I wrote a novel about a squirrel. Yes, a squirrel. It's called Beasts of New York , and I'm going to serialize the entire thing online, at beastsofnewyork.com , at a rate of one chapter a day, starting in mid-July. It's an unusual little book - I call it "a children's book for adults" - but I'm very, very fond of it, and I'm putting it online in the hope it might find a wide audience, so do tune in if you can...

It seems I am 'the helicopter guy.' Putative cover for my next book: I like it a lot.

Good news from Merrie Olde Englande: Hodder & Stoughton , my excellent UK publishers, will be reissuing Trail of the Dead and The Blood Price early next year, in conjunction with the paperback release of The Night of Knives . (And Invisible Armies , which comes out in paperback this August, will hopefully still be on the shelves too...) Fun with Flickr to distract you until then: 17 years of visas . My favourite travel pictures and where I took them, arrayed on a world map - click on a hotspot to see the photos taken there.

If you're a Canadian woman, you should rush out and sign up at defineyourself.ca . What is it? I, um, don't really know. All I know is my sisters are the evil masterminds behind the site. My buddy Neil has a terrific video documentary up on the PBS/Frontline World website: India's Missing Girls . A strong cultural preference for male heirs is pushing Indian families to selectively abort as many as half a million female fetuses each year. We trekked from rural Punjab to the narrow alleys of New Delhi to find out why. With music by Grammy Award-winner, Anoushka Shankar.

Little bits of news: I'm about to hand in my fourth novel, The Night Of Knives , aka "the Africa book." And boy, am I glad - I've been working on this one for some eighteen months now. Last week I signed and sent off the contracts for my next project: a graphic novel for DC/Vertigo entitled The Executor . Gonna start work on that in one week's time. My article Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth just got Slashdotted . I am pleased. I appear to be notorious in Nepal . My Super Sekrit Projekt - super sekrit because you'd never believe me if I told you - is sitting on the desks of a half-dozen US publishers, and with luck I'll have more to say on that in the none too distant future. My other Super Sekrit Projekt is under consideration by my agents and publishers. I can say no more for now.

London gothic. Inside an ancient Roman amphitheatre. Cathedral ghosts. The Giralda. Cemetery murals. Jacmel beach. Full set here .

Arrival in the Third World is always discombobulating, especially when the world in question is a mere hundred-minute flight from Miami. Across the turquoise, cloud-shadowed Caribbean; a quick descent over silted river mouths and sardine-packed tin-roof slums; and out into the sundrenched heat of Toussaint Louverture International, airport code PAP for Port-au-Prince, Haiti's sprawling, sweltering, seething capital, the poorest and most violent city in the entire Western Hemisphere. Arrival The streets of a new city are always alien and intimidating, and tenfold so here. Fortunately my friend L. was there to meet me at the airport with her on-loan driver Xavier, a courtly fortysomething man who piloted us in his seriously weathered Toyota Corolla through a city that at first was all slum. Potholed, mud-puddled streets; packs of feral dogs prowling waist-high mounds of trash; mangled, skeletal remains of ancient car crashes, thick with rust; stores set in rotting concrete buildings,...

Translations are somehow much cooler than original texts. At least if you wrote the original text. At least if you're me. I'm not totally sure, but I think they just might be playing up the Burning Man angle. It's a full hundred pages longer than the English trade paperback. I guess German is a bulky language. Or maybe it's just chock-full of soup scenes.