My Christmas giveaway competition - win TEN copies of The Cut-Throat Café for your school or reading group

How would you like to win ten copies of The Cut-Throat Café for your school or reading group? Welcome to my Christmas giveaway competition! This is to say  a huge thank you to all the schools and librarians who have shown such brilliant support for me and my books this year. I love hearing from schools or classes or book groups that are reading the books together.

And I would also like to thank all the bookshops and book bloggers for their support to introduce even more people to my mysteries that always have a magical twist.

I also have huge thanks for all the readers out there. I love hearing from you and it is wonderful for me to know how much you are enjoying the books. If you want to hear more about what I am working on next, think about signing up to get my newsletter straight into your inbox.

So now for that competition!

As you know, my books feature a lot of puzzles, mysteries to solves, clues, red herrings that require a great deal of detective work. Now I want you to do the detective work and solve a puzzle.

My challenge to you is to guess a book title. Sounds easy? Well there is a catch – I have given you the title and the author, but I have removed all the vowels.

And because this competition is to celebrate my third book this year, the book title is the third book in the series. So although this is a clue, this may not be the author’s most famous book.

Ready for the challenge? Here it is:

HW T SPK DRGNS CRSSD CWLL

Once you think you've got it, submit the answer through the contact form on my website here. 

If more than one person gets the answer right I will pick a winner for random. And this prize is on offer to the UK only, and the closing date is the 31st December.

Good luck!

If you enjoyed this little challenge I have got a bigger challenge for you - and there are even more in my newsletter! But these are just for fun. 

See if you can spot a few more Famous Third Books. Answers will be on my website in the first week of January.

1. TH MRDR F RGR CKRYD GTH CHRST

2. HRRY PTTR ND TH PRSNR F ZKBN JK RWLNG

3. TH FCLSS NS DRK LNDY

4. WTCH WK DN WYNN JNS

5. FRST CLSS MRDR RBN STVNS

6. TH HLLW BY JNTHN STRD

To make it even more tricky, there are some adult books here and children’s. Classics and more modern ones, so I know there are a couple of absolutely tricky ones in there, so very best of luck. And I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Mulțumesc. Bóg zapłać! Dank u. Herzlichen Dank! Thank you so much to everyone!

Not every author gets to have their book translated into a different language, but it is even more incredible to learn that lots of children have been reading my book as part of a reading competition.

The Vorlesewettbewerb is an incredible reading competition in Germany that has been running for over 60 years and is run with bookshops, schools, publishers and is wonderful to be part of it.  

  

(From left to right: The Bad Luck Lighthouse published in The Netherlands, The Lighthouse of Bad Luck published in Poland, The Wizard's Hotel published in Romania and Lighthouse of Ghosts published this week in Germany!)

An incredible 600,000 schoolchildren join in every year, and it is a national knock-out competition where children read from prepared (and unprepared) extracts from recently published children's books.

It sounds completely brilliant, and I'd love to go see one of the readings one day. Here is a link to one of the articles showing a young contestant reading from my book!

I know a lot of schools across Germany chose Hotel Der Magier as one of the recommended texts. 

On Dec 3 my publisher (Carlsen) in Germany launched The Bad Luck Lighthouse as Leuchtturm der Geister.  Exciting! And I'm so thrilled that also the Cut-Throat Cafe will launch there in May 2021. 

I often get sent a complimentary copy of a book, and one thing I love is to find out Nightshade's name in the translation. That can take a lot of detective work! She's known as Nachtschatten (Nightshadow) in German,  Sombra (Shadow) in Spanish, Teni (or Shadows) in Russian and my personal favourite, Černostínka in Czech - which literally means 'black shadow' but looks like something far more disrespectful and funny!

I have written about how it is truly amazing to have your book rewritten - and in some cases, reimagined - by a publisher and translator, renaming your characters, adjusting things to fit local cultural references - and even getting nominated for an award.

As a children's author in the 21st century, it is sometimes overwhelming to keep track of all the wonderful messages and pictures I get sent. I also now have my own YouTube channel for my writing tips. I do try to reply to all the emails and comments.

This end-of-2020 post is really a thank you. It's an extraordinary privilege to do what I do, and I'd like to end this most challenging and traumatic year to simply say thank you to those children who have read my book, wherever you are in the world.

So Mulțumesc. Bóg zapłać! Merci Beaucoup! Dank u! Herzlichen Dank! Thank you so much to everyone! And all the best for 2021.