Alastair Bruce’s Wall of Days Set for Publication in the UK

by Amanda on Aug 16th, 2011

Alastair Bruce‘s Wall of Days is set for publication in the UK by Clerkenwell Press, an imprint of Profile Books. Wall of Days was recently longlisted for the Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” and was shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize – Africa Region in February this year:

Press release:

The novel Wall of Days by debut novelist Alastair Bruce, published by Umuzi in 2010, is heading for big things.

It is being released in the United Kingdom this month and will be launched at the Edinburgh Festival on 18 August 2011. The UK publisher, which has acquired world English rights excluding southern Africa, is Clerkenwell Press. This brand new imprint of the prestigious publisher Profile Books (also owners of Serpent’s Tail and The Economist Books) has selected Wall of Days as one of its three launch titles.

This selection is an even greater honour for being the choice of Clerkenwell Press publisher Geoff Mulligan, one of the best-known UK editors and the man behind great authors of the world such as JM Coetzee, Louis de Bernières, Toni Morrison and André Brink.

Recently, the novel was chosen by Amazon.com as one of only twelve annual Amazon Rising Stars. And on Wednesday 10 August 2011, it was included in the Guardian’s longlist for the “Not the Booker Prize”. This is a prize awarded to a book voted by the public as the one that deserves to win the coveted Man Booker Prize.

In South Africa it was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, Best First Book, Africa Region.

André Brink wrote of it: “Seldom in recent years have I been so deeply impressed by a first novel as by Alastair Bruce’s visionary and profound Wall of Days … [It is] told by a consummate storyteller who appears well set to become a defining novelist of our time.”

Alastair Bruce was born in Port Elizabeth and studied at the University of Cape Town where he started in a science degree course but ended with a masters in English Literature. He has been living in the United Kingdom for over ten years where he works in electronic publishing. He is married and has a baby daughter.

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