All paperbacks and ebooks now in the British Library

 
Following the British Library’s recent implementation of full functionality for admitting the flicker of ebooks into the venerable British Library Catalogue, the ebook formats of these five published tales have popped up there, complementing the longstanding presence of their dead-tree paperback sisters on the shelves at Saint Pancras, London:

http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?mode=Basic&vid=BLVU1&vl(freeText0)=Rohan%20Quine&fn=search&tab=local_tab&

This is something of a homecoming, because a significant amount of those five was written in the British Library, in the Science 3 Reading Room. I usually chose this room instead of the Humanities Reading Rooms, because a roomful of sober scientists makes for a more focused novel-writing environment than a roomful of hothouse-flower artists (who tend, as we know, to swoon and emote and generally make a rumpus between the book-stacks).

It’s a homecoming for these publications in another respect, too. As a nod to the Science 3 Reading Room and its shelves filled with thousands of bound volumes of hardcore scientific journals, the novelist heroine of The Host in the Attic, named Alaia Danielle, is described as working in that very reading room while she writes her novel The Imagination Thief. As Alaia puts it herself: “I often get up and reach down some volume of cosmology or nuclear physics … and I feel such a sense of peace and wonder, as I leaf through those pages dotted with exotic equations. Of course I can’t understand them, but for me those pages full of elegantly-typeset symbols spill out a cool, dry beauty, of a quite paralysing perfection! Honestly, I just stand there bathing in it. I feel so cleansed and elevated by the surface of those symbols—probably a lot more than I would if I understood them. […] I think my favourite journal title is the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos. Isn’t that just the best? I’m also partial to Fuzzy Sets and Systems…”

Three extended tasters of text from the novella The Host in the Attic are here; its synopsis is here; and 18 brief text and video teasers from it are here.

Its listings at all book retailers (and its own various British-Library-related catalogue entries) are here for its ebook format, and here for its paperback format. Or it may be purchased directly from this website.