Alphabet Featured on Shelf Awareness

Each week, Shelf Awareness and its top industry insiders select and feature the top 25 new releases of the week.

In addition to the countless hits on its website, Shelf Awareness's weekly newsletter also goes out to over 300,000 subscribers.

Featured today on their front page is Alphabet by Kathy Page, an incredible novel we've released for the first time this fall in the United States, and also reissued here in Canada as part of our new Reset reprint series.

Shelf Awareness loves it:

Alphabet transforms from a novel of crime and punishment into a nuanced psychological profile of a killer, ultimately providing a gut-wrenching reminder of the atrocities contained within institutional walls and the lengths to which we are willing to go in order to protect our innermost selves. … Heartbreaking and emotional.

We're thrilled to see such great coverage for Kathy. Alphabet is gaining momentum and quietly making waves in the states. It's definitely a book to keep your eye on.

And it's not just Shelf Awareness and the starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus I'm talking about.

Hearty recommendations from the likes of indies like Emily Pullen from Brooklyn's Word Bookstore, featured below, give us the additional pleasure of knowing that the book is physically being put in people's hands. This is a book that will transform readers of all stripes, and there are people on the ground getting behind it and making this happen. 

We hope that those of you discovering the book through Shelf Awareness for the first time will try to seek out the novel from such unacknowledged heroes as Emily before making the digital rounds:

If you like fiction that makes you a little uncomfortable (but still has a compelling voice), try Alphabet by Kathy Page. The narrator is in prison in the UK for killing his girlfriend, and we see his various coping mechanisms and treatments and eventual attempts to learn how to connect with people in a healthy way. His journey will surprise you. - Emily Pullen

Publishers Weekly Praises Kathy Page's Alphabet

Kathy Page's Alphabet, one of our new reprint titles (though a first publication south of the 49th) comes in for some praise -  and our second starred review for the book in the US -- from Publisher's Weekly: 

Page’s gritty and illuminating sixth novel, originally published in 2004, and shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards in 2005, follows Simon Austen, a convicted murderer, through a series of inner triumphs and small victories as he makes his way through the British penal system. Fascinating from the first page, readers watch Austen as he learns how to read, becomes a letter writer for his fellow inmates, and “gets into education, big time,” eventually earning all his high school credits. He decides to address the issue of his inability to relate to women, on his own at first, by corresponding with various women. His description, in one of those letters, of the events that lead him to strangle his girlfriend sends him into a tailspin as he begins to face the underlying reasons behind the impulsive violent act that has defined his life. He is sent to an intensive therapeutic program that forces him to face many of his most serious issues. The journey Austen makes is primarily an inner one, a slow peeling back of the layers of protection he uses to shut everyone out, including himself. As he starts to let people in, in a series of increasingly authentic interactions, we bear witness to his slow and inspiring transformation.