Books With a Bite Blogger Evening

Books With a Bite is the online persona of the YA division of Hachette Children's Group, the new publishing powerhouse formed through the merger of the children's departments in the Hachette Group, including Quercus, Orion, Hodder and Little, Brown. The result is a varied list of books, from contemporary to sci-fi, and one I've particularly fallen in love with after discovering the amazingness that is Passenger by Alexandra Bracken. So when my lovely friend Laura invited me to be her plus one to the Books With a Bite Blogger Evening I of course didn't have to think twice. It was a brilliant night filled with books (and bites), and below you'll find highlights of their upcoming releases.

The evening started with editors and publicists across the Group presenting some of their key titles for the rest of the year, which was a really interesting mixture of themes and genres. From heart-wrenching refugee stories (two, in fact, though they sound very different) right down to a romantic contemporary read set amid music fandom.

The ones that particularly stood out to me were In the Dark, In the Woods by Eliza Wass, The Bone Sparrow by Zana Fraillon and Notes on Being a Teenager by Rosalind Jana. All three of these novels sound highly unique and very current and I cannot wait to read them. Rather than writing down the key themes and interesting tidbits for each of these books, I took a snapshot of the presentation slides, so you can find more about them in the next few pictures.




After the presentations it was time to mingle with fellow book lovers, publishing people and some surprise author guests, all while enjoying a delicious bite (or two) and picking out some of our favourite books to take home in our beautiful new totes.


I had the chance to speak to the authors of The Loneliness of Distant Beings and Orangeboy, Kate Ling and Patrice Lawrence, and these books sound absolutely phenomenal (and the writers were super lovely to boot). TLODB is a romance set in space and Orangeboy is a contemporary read set in London's Hackney. I picked up a copy of both and I've already started reading TLODB, which is brilliant so far.



There were also some older books on display and I was particularly drawn to the titles by Annabel Pitcher, who I've heard a lot of great things about. Being really good and limiting myself to adding only one more book to my ever-growing collection I also picked up a copy of Ketchup Clouds, a story about a girl with a secret who starts writing letters to a murderer on death row. I am majorly intrigued!



Thank you very much to the wonderful folks at Hachette Children's Group for the great event and bookish treats – I can't wait to dig into my beautiful new reads.