Book launch: Emily Barr’s THINGS TO DO BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD.

Today I was honored to join the launch half way across the world virtually of Emily Barr’s timely Young Adult book THINGS TO DO BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD. Emily had conversation with her editor, Ruth Knowles from Penguin Random House, and we were lucky enough to get an early reading from the book will be provided by the talents of the Hall for Cornwall Youth Theatre.

Are you all as excited for this book as I am? I can’t wait to find a way to snag a copy. 

SYNOPSIS:

Timely and powerful; the new coming-of-age thriller from the bestselling author of The One Memory of Flora Banks.

One minute you’re walking in the park, hiding from a party. Then you discover that the next nine months will probably be your last. Everyone’s last. You realise that you happen to be alive at the time when your species becomes extinct.

You have to decide whether to go with it meekly like you usually do or to do something brave, to live your last months with all the energy and bravery you can muster, to rage against the dying of the light.

Olivia struggles to live her real life as fully as she wants to. She plans out conversations and events in her head but actually doing them and interacting with other people is hard. When the news breaks that humans have done such damage to the earth that there’s only nine months of safe air left everybody makes bucket lists and starts living their best lives – everyone, that is, but Olivia who is still struggling to figure out who she wants to be.

Then out of the blue comes contact from a long-lost cousin Olivia didn’t even know existed. Natasha is everything Olivia wants to be and more. And as the girls meet up for their last summer on earth Olivia finds Natasha’s ease and self-confidence having an effect on her. But what if Natasha isn’t everything she first appears to be . . . ?

    THINGS TO DO BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD:

1. Live your best life.
2. Uncover family secrets.
3. Trust no one
What would you do when you hear the news that humans have done such damage to the earth that there might only be a limited amount of safe air left, and that time is running out?
You’d work through your bucket list, heal rifts, do everything you’ve never been brave enough to do before.
Olivia is struggling to do any of this. What it is she truly wants to do? Who do she wants to be?
Then out of the blue comes contact from a long-lost cousin Olivia didn’t even know existed. Natasha is everything Olivia wants to be and more.
And as the girls meet up for a long, hot last summer, Olivia finds Natasha’s ease and self-confidence having an effect on her.
But Natasha definitely isn’t everything she first appears to be . . .

I walked home. I kept hearing footsteps behind me, but every time I turned around, no one was there.

ABOUT EMILY:

Emily Barr worked as a journalist in London, but always hankered after a quiet room and a book to write. She went travelling for a year, writing a column in the Guardian about it as she went, and it was there that she had an idea for a novel set in the world of backpackers in Asia. This became Backpack, which won the WH Smith New Talent Award. She has since written eleven more adult novels published in the UK and around the world, and a novella, Blackout, for the Quick Reads series. Her twelfth novel, The Sleeper, is a psychological thriller set on the London to Cornwall sleeper train.

In 2013 she went to Svalbard with the idea of setting a thriller in the Arctic. The book that came out of it was The One Memory of Flora Banks, a thriller for young adults, which attracted universal interest from publishers before being bought pre-emptively by Penguin earlier this year. It will be published globally in January 2017. She lives in Cornwall with her partner and their children.

Posted by book lover: Brittany P.