Join our book writing contest

The Herald is teaming up with publishing firm Mighty Pens to encourage writers of all standards to craft their own book. Many of us would like to write a book – a novel, or even a short story. Among us there are people who have a great fictional tale inside them, an interesting life story or perhaps an interest in birds of prey, historic buildings, or Scottish life.

Mighty Pens produces books in many different ways from basic publishing for family and fun to commercial publishing. Books can be hardback, paperback, e-books and audio. Mighty Pens also has a coaching facility. The possibilities are enormous since Mighty Pens can help you with novels, short stories, full-scale non-fiction books and articles, script-writing, songwriting, press and marketing, website copy, poetry and just about anything else that requires writing. Browse mightypens.co.uk and email for further advice. Mention HMPP in your message for priority information.

HOW TO ENTER:

If you are over 18 write a short story or non-fiction article of no more than 1200 words. The subject matter must be suitable for general readership. The piece must not have appeared before in any other publication or been placed in another competition.

Send your entry with your name, postal address and email and phone number, and mark your entry HMPSS to competitions@theherald.co.uk or by post to The Herald Writing Competition, Marketing department, The Herald, 125 Fullarton Drive, Glasgow, G32 8FG.

The closing date is February 16 at noon. There will be three winners selected by the Herald-Mighty Pens panel. Prizes include:

* A personal appraisal by one of Mighty Pens’ award-winning coaches

* Mighty Pens Membership for a year

* Your work appearing on The Herald website

* Your work in Mighty Pens Magazine

* A Mighty Pens coaching course of your choice

Editor’s decision is final.

THE DISORIENTED Amin Maalouf

(World Editions, £12.99) Twenty-five years have passed since Adam left an unnamed Middle Eastern country (which we can assume was Lebanon) when civil war broke out. He now lives the life of an exile in Paris, but a phone call summoning him back to see his dying friend Mourad compels him to return. He and Mourad haven’t spoken for years, and over the next fortnight, as Adam reconnects with his old circle of friends, Maalouf explores why they fell out. Remembering how Muslims, Christians and Jews got along before the civil war, he listens to how his friends’ paths have diverged and how unhappily things have gone for them, taking in what they have to say and trying to wring some sense out of it. A thoughtful novel about loss and identity, The Disoriented, with its punning title, is a dialogue about the Middle East, examining a variety of perspectives on issues that remain unresolved.

WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS

DEAD

Barbara Comyns

(Daunt, £9.99)

Plucked from semiobscurity, this singular novel, published in 1954 (and banned in Ireland), is set in an English village in the 1880s, introducing the fearsome matriarch Grandmother Willoweed, who refuses to walk on any land she doesn’t own, and her son Ebin, a lifelong underachiever now widowed, raising three children and desperate to get out from under his mother’s thumb. Focusing as much on the villagers as the Willoweeds, it opens in the aftermath of a flood, which precedes a madness that rages through the community causing villagers to take their own lives, beginning with the hens who drop off their perches to drown. It may have been overlooked at the time, but Comyns’s surreal imagery, humour and the sustained dreamlike mood feel much more in tune with modern tastes. An oddity, but also a rediscovered gem.

TURNCOAT Anthony J Quinn

(No Exit, £9.99)

The period immediately preceding the Good Friday Agreement is mined for maximum tension in Quinn’s latest novel. His central character, Desmond Maguire, is a Catholic detective in the RUC, the turncoat of the title. He’s seen by the Catholic community as having turned his back on them, but isn’t fully accepted by the RUC either. When he ends up as the only survivor of an ambush, Maguire finds himself the focus of a lot of unwelcome and dangerous attention. In search of his informer, Ruby, he heads for the damp and foggy Station Island, a religious community on Lough Derg. But the barefoot and fasting pilgrims there seem to have their own agenda, and the sinister atmosphere takes its toll on the already shaken, and alcoholic, Maguire, preying on his guilt, selfdoubt and paranoia. With the constant threat of betrayal and violence, the oppressive atmosphere never lifts in this chilling, uneasy thriller.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT