Buy this book or the puppy gets it #4

Time to give another fellow writer a bit of a plug.

Please consider, if you will, adorning your bookshelf with Three Things About Me by Aliya Whiteley - a lovely woman who I once conned out of a free bookmark, conniving scoundrel that I am.

Aliya's novel is one of the second wave of books to be released by Macmillan New Writing - the publishing venture that has yet to utterly destroy the industry if not literature itself as many of the "tosserati" predicted. But what's it about? From the blurb (I'm so lazy...):

Seven potential customer service representatives start their training course under the professional guidance of Rob Church. From the start, he is disillusioned with the quality of his latest batch of trainees, but ever the professional and an inveterate optimist, he plunges into his routine. His worst fears are confirmed. Each of his charges, with one exception, is a loser.

A horror story, then - although perhaps not the kind that involves a fiendish, lank-haired, dead Japanese girl crawling out of a television set. But I haven't read the book so I could yet be proved wrong. Either way, I've been in those corporate training environments before and that is an horrific enough experience even without ghostly Asian kids in desperate need of a comb scrambling out of household appliances.

Anyway, it all sounds like a good laugh so go and buy a copy or the puppy... so on and so forth.