Marsons

what we do

Marsons is a small publishing house. Originally it specialized in books about food. In recent years we have produced a children's picture book, two novels and a memoir.

We have two main authors and we are now proud to announce that they have worked together to produce the latest addition to our list: a wartime story of two girls. The new book by Judy Jackson and Monika Sears is now out.

Publication date 15 February 2019                                                                                                          

                                                                                                   

 

EPISODES - two girls, two lives, one time

It is a true story, written in the voices of two children, covering the same period: the 2nd World War in Europe.

One is born in London and lives through the Blitz and blackout. The other suffers from Nazi persecution in Poland. EPISODES is an account of the first eleven years of their separate lives from 1939-1945, leading to how they meet in 1950 and continue a friendship which lasts for seven decades.

Available on Amazon  Price £11.99 for the paperback book, £4.99 for Kindle

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Judy Jackson's second novel is SEXTET. Originally a food writer she has now turned to writing about the world of music. One of the themes in her first novel, The Camel Trail, was food-related and for this reason it won the World Gourmand Award for Best Food Literature Book in the UK in 2007.

SEXTET is not about food. It's about music, adultery and a dilemma. It's a story for our time and will appeal to those who are young, and those who have ever been young.

The book was launched at an event in London on 30th April, 2014. Judy Jackson was chosen as one of ten outstanding authors at the One Big Book Launch at the Free Word Centre. Read about it here

You can also see a one minute video, giving you a taste of what Sextet is about: watch it here.

Now, two years after publication SEXTET has also won an award.  You can find out more here.

SEXTET is available in bookshops and on Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions. Click here to read the first few chapters and to buy in USA or buy in UK.

 

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Our book for children, Lookit Cookit, is reaching a wide audience:

Lookit Cookit - kitchen games for curious children.  A magical journey into the mysteries of cooking: with games, experiments and quiz questions. 

The perfect present for any child over about 7. It will give them hours of fun and lead them into the exciting world of taste and colour.

Lookit Cookit costs £9.95 ($16.50) + postage 

available from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk

Lookit Cookit has been nominated for a World Gourmand Cookbook award.

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Winner of the Gourmand award for Best Food literature book in the UK in 2007:

The Camel Trail is a family saga spanning more than a hundred and fifty years

The Levy family kept notebooks and accounts going back to 1840. The story of their lives is dotted with extracts from these journals, giving brief descriptions of the food they ate. As in real life, both happy and tragic events are often bound up with memories of family meals. For the Levys food was more than just a necessity; it was an integral part of their existence, of their place in society.

The Camel Trail is a startling first novel, based on a true story.

It is 1944. Anna Grant inherits a strange legacy from her mother, Dina: a treasure retrieved from a disaster in the Middle East, and a pile of yellowing notebooks . The handwritten pages hint at a world of elegant Victorian tables and lavish balls. Yet behind the apparent calm in the family lies a story of deception and betrayal.

Anna searches for the truth about her grandfather David Levy. What was the catastrophe that left him orphaned in 1837? What brought his seemingly happy marriage to the brink of collapse? She retraces journeys, following a trail from Safed to Gibraltar, from London to Lisbon. While Anna uncovers layers of joy and sadness, revealing the reason for her mother’s repressive behaviour, she copes with her own eccentric husband and the problems of bringing up a child in wartime Britain. But it is the final journey that unlocks the mystery of inherited misery. In her search for the origin of the treasure, Anna uncovers a secret that tormented David all his life.

The novel is an exploration of the author's roots - beginning in Safed in the 1830s and moving through Gibraltar, London and Lisbon. A set of authentic notebooks hints at the lives of David Levy and his family, though the intrigue and mystery surrounding his life is revealed gradually, ending in the discovery of a secret that affected the lives of three generations.

The Camel Trail was published in London on 1st March 2007.  It  is available to order from bookshops (ISBN 978-0-9517220-2-2) or from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

The author is available for interview.

 

 

SEXTET wins an award

SEXTET has won a 2016 literary award from an international organisation Book Excellence Awards, based in Toronto, Ontario. The prize - in the category Novels/Music - was given to Judy Jackson in recognition of its high quality writing, design and market appeal.

SEXTET is not just about music. The main character is a concert pianist, but it will touch readers for its detail about hospitals, intensive care, and dealing with grief and loss. It's a complex story involving six characters whose lives are changed by a seemingly innocent affair.

Order a book here from Amazon. It's on sale at just £2.62, so  you could buy copies for your book club.

 

 

What they say about SEXTET

It's the policy of national newspapers not to review books sent in by small and independent publishers. Peer reviews on Amazon etc. provide views from readers - perhaps the most important indication of the value of a book. Here are some comments on SEXTET:

5* review of An elegant novel of illicit love

"I have not read a novel like this for some years (one thinks back to Anita Brookner). Sextet is Judy Jackson’s second novel, after The Camel Trail (2007), this one being wholly fictional. It is a story of illicit love, its drastic consequences and the coming to terms by each of the parties involved (mainly the four but ultimately six).

The secrecy and risks of the central affair provide electrical potential which powers the narrative and keeps the pages turning. The plot is elegantly designed as a triptique: the drastic events followed first by their antecedents and later by their subsequent working out.

The principal character is a concert pianist and his work provides a certain musical background to the story (unheard melodies are sweeter). Besides piano music, the plot takes us into the worlds of hotel bedroom art, Italian families and, in expert and feeling detail, the birth of extremely premature babies.

Judy Jackson writes with pleasing clarity and economy. She moves easily between the viewpoints of different characters, acutely conveying their reactions and states of mind through successive stages of the affair. The feel of background scenery (including various European cities) comes across with the well-spotted telling detail. Food is well observed, as one would expect from this author. With its many unexpected facets, the book is an enjoyable read." AG Haddenham, Bucks.

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 "This is a story of complex human relationships, infidelity and deceit. The characters, like all of us, are less than perfect, and the unintended consequences of their actions emerge and fit together as the plot develops towards its moving climax. A riveting story, set in the real world and beautifully told." EP London.

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“I so admire the research into the medical aspects of hospital care and the careful reporting of the intense preparation by the musician for a concert performance.” JM New York.

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Other publications

 

 

A departure from food books, this is an exciting memoir of two young women in the antiquarian book trade.

Don't Forget to Lock it Away! by Monika Sears with Ruth Sands

"What sort of a living are you making, selling old books?"  "My sort of living."

A friendship between two young women that survived thirty years of business partnership in an antiquarian bookshop. There were the Day Books, a new one for each year, a page a day, handsome in black leather, the only real extravagance of the year. They were intended to keep a precise record of books bought, sold, ordered and stolen but quickly deteriorated into comments about sons and lovers, hats and casseroles. There were poems to celebrate and to mourn. There were warnings about the young man caught slumped in the lavatory with the syringe on the floor and about the customer so resistant to washing that the door of the shop had to be kept open even in midwinter. There were days when underlined anger left holes in the paper. There were pages of encouragement and kindness.

"Don't Forget to Lock it Away!" is an anthology of all those adventures and misadventures, our sort of living.

To order a copy, please go to Amazon.co.uk

 

 

Lookit Cookit - what they are saying about it

"I wish I were six again"

"It is magical reading and doing"

"Even a four year old would love the games"

Jewish Historical Fiction

If you're looking for other novels of Jewish interest, here are some of the best:

The Coffee Trader by David Liss (Random House)

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (St. Martin's Press)

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (Random House)

Fateless by Imre Kertesz (Knopf)

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (Harper Collins)

Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor (Chatto & Windus)

The Inn at Lake Devine by Eleanor Lipman (Fourth Estate)

The Plot against America by Philip Roth (Knopf)

The Human Stain by Philip Roth (Knopf)

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne (David Fickling Books)

What the press say

The Camel Trail was chosen by Michele Hanson as Read of the Week in The Guardian (December 11, 2007). She wrote:

"Fascinating family story that shows what secrets can do to your descendents - including some exotic recipes that I rather fancy".

It was highlighted for review in the Guild of Food Writers Newsletter (February 2008):

"This is not a book about food - yet the smells of food - delicious, succulent, flavoursome, rich and sweet, light and refreshing, waft through every page of The Camel Trail. Judy Jackson's new novel, a saga of four generations of a Jewish family, takes us from Safed in the mountains of Galilee in the 1830s to north London in the 1970s.

The tale, which is based on a true story, follows David, orphaned in a disaster in 1837, to the merchant society of mid-Victorian Gibraltar and then on to the London of the 1870s; and Dina, his daughter who returns to the sardine merchants of Gibraltar only to be catapulted back to London as an impoverished young widow. Then we follow Dina's daughter, Anna, who finds fulfilment in the iridescent strands of cooling sugar and the unctuous smoothness of melted chocolate until wartime rations force her into more creative efforts with sheeps' heads and the occasional hard-won onion.

Each chapter of the book is prefaced by a recipe, usually from a family notebook. But it is not just the recipes which create the conviction that the love of food and the love of creating food binds this family together - and is the solace, especially of the women, in times of trial - of which there are many. Such an inherited passion is not uncommon in southern Europe but it is rare among British families - with the exception of British Jewish families for whom food remains the glue which holds the generations together.

Food apart, The Camel Trail is a stonkingly good story. Moving seamlessly from Gibraltar in the 1830s to London in the 1940s, it charts the tragedies and joys of each generation of the Levy family as they rise to wealth and power, and sink back to relative obscurity until, at last, the dark secret which David has carried from Safed, and which haunted both his children and his grandchildren, is unearthed by his great granddaughter.

The Camel Trail wins award

Although it is a novel, because of its food interest, The Camel Trail was entered in the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards. It has been chosen as the UK winner in the category 'Best Food Literature Book 2007'. The winners in each category will then compete for the world awards in May 2008. For more details of the competition and the gala dinner please go to www.cookbookfair.com

The Camel Trail - award winning novel

The Camel Trail is in a similar genre to Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. But unlike that book it has no magical realism (or the vivid sex scenes that made that into a successful film). Judy Jackson's book evokes a world of elegant tables and the simplest of meals and each chapter features an authentic brief recipe of the time. Read about the author

About the author

The author is food writer and novelist Judy Jackson

Judy Jackson has written seven books on food, one of which sold over 40,000 copies. She has been published by Faber, Macdonald, Marsons and Anness/Lorenz. She has produced freelance pieces for many national newspapers, including The Times, The Independent, The Evening Standard and The Telegraph.

Judy has also written an unpublished biography 'Tess Blackburn' and two novels. She writes restaurant reviews for Time Out (Eating Out in London).

Judy writes a daily blog The Armchair Kitchen. It goes out to over 25,000 followers around the world. Every day there is a new post on food, and on Sundays, a piece about writers or books. It can be found here

 

Food books

The Home Book of Jewish Cookery - published by Faber
Microwave Vegetable Cooking - published by Macdonald
A Feast in Fifteen Stories - published by Marsons
The Jewish Kitchen - edited by Judy Jackson - published by Sunburst
The Jewish Cookbook - published by Lorenz/Anness
Classic Jewish - published by Lorenz/Anness
The Essential Jewish Cookbook - published by Lorenz/Anness

Fiction

The Camel Trail

Sextet