The best of year CD sleeve notes come a little earlier this year. If you want to read about my new novel The Pretender, scroll down. The picture to the left is from the launch at the wonderful Bromley House Library in Nottingham, which was a terrific evening, with family and friends going back more than thirty years, including former tutors from both my spells as a university student and many former students from my current spell as a creative writing tutor (thanks to Aly for the photo). And now, on with the show. This is the 21st of our annual favourite music of the year compilations for family and friends. Sleevenotes updated daily until done. 1. MGMT – Time To Pretend I don’t do…

I edit a series of short novellas (we used to call them long short stories, but things have moved on) for Five Leaves. The sixth and seventh in the Crime Express series are published today. They’re corkers, the best yet. First we have ‘Gun’ by Ray Banks, a tight, gripping noir by a young writer new to me. I defy you not to read in a sitting. Then there’s the only book in the series that I commissioned myself, ‘Speaking Of Lust’ by Lawrence Block, a grand master of crime writing, who I’ve been reading for donkey’s years, and who I was lucky enough to meet up with in New York earlier this year. This is a very spicy quartet of shaggy something stories, told…

‘The Pretender’ is about a young man with an accidental gift for literary forgery. He gets involved in the world of a small but very distinguished literary magazine. Soon he finds that the magazine is in financial trouble and the only way he can help it survive is by ‘finding’ new manuscripts by authors who have written for the magazine in the past. And he happens to have access to the typewriter that Graham Greene wrote one of his best known short stories on. ‘The Pretender’ is as much a coming-of-age novel as it is a thriller. It’s a story about writing and creativity and is my most autobiographical novel, although not a word in it is true. I started to write a version of…

One of the differences I’m discovering between publishing a YA novel and publishing an ‘adult literary(ish)’ novel is that people ask you to write articles and the like to promote it. An advance chapter of ‘The Pretender’ appears in the new issue of Staple, out any day now. This little feature (with the photo above) appears in today’s Sheffield Telegraph, and is reprinted here for my readers outside Yorkshire (that’s Handsworth, Sheffield by the way). David Belbin was born in Handsworth in 1958 and now lives in Nottingham. He has published more than thirty novels for teenagers, including ‘Denial’, set in Sheffield. His new novel, ‘The Pretender’, out next week, is more for adults. It’s a novel about a bookish young man with an accidental…

The box above was one of many that arrived today at the publishers and distributors. Technically, it’s not on sale for a fortnight and I’ll be writing more about this, my first novel for an adult audience, in the coming weeks. But you can download an extract and, indeed, buy an advance copy of The Pretender here. It looks fantastic, for which all praise to the publishers, Five Leaves.