“… this book is an indulgence that won’t make you feel guilty. It’s like the best crème brulee: light but not insubstantial, a story with the most over-the-top conspicuous consumption, fashion extravagances and mind-boggling parties but at the core, it’s well-written, memorable and funny. And funny is the hardest of all.” 

-Gabriella Parro, Indigo Bookseller

Curious, aren’t you? What is this title being raved about? Get ready for Crazy Rich Asians. What is it, you ask? Well …

Crazy Rich Asians is the outrageously funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of the season.

Uproarious, addictive, and filled with jaw-dropping opulence, Crazy Rich Asians is an insider’s look at the Asian Jet Set; a perfect depiction of the clash between Overseas Chinese and Mainland Chinese; and a fabulous novel about what it means to be young, in love, and gloriously, crazily rich.
 

The Devil Wears Prada + the Shopaholic series + a little Bridget Jones = Crazy Rich Asians. A novel that transports you to an over-the-top world that you want to read about and characters you won't forget. 

The Fiction Blog is pleased to share this excerpt today from this novel that should be a must on your vacation packing list. 

***

Nick put his arm around Rachel and said, “Here, come meet my grandmother.” They walked across the room, and on the sofa closest to the veranda, flanked by a spectacled man smartly attired in a white linen suit and a strikingly beautiful lady, sat a shrunken woman. Shang Su Yi had steel-gray hair held in place by an ivory headband, and she was dressed simply in a rose-colored silk blouse, tailored cream trousers, and brown loafers. She was older and frailer than Rachel had expected, and though her features were partially obscured by a thick pair of tinted bifocals, her regal countenance was unmistakable. Standing completely still behind Nick’s grandmother were two ladies in immaculate matching gowns of iridescent silk.

Nick addressed his grandmother in Cantonese. “Ah Ma, I’d like you to meet my friend Rachel Chu, from America.”

“So nice to meet you!” Rachel blurted in English, completely forgetting her Mandarin.

Nick’s grandmother peered up at Rachel for a moment. “Thank you for coming,” she replied haltingly, in English, before turning swiftly to resume her conversation in Hokkien with the lady at her side. The man in the white linen suit smiled quickly at Rachel, but then he too turned away. The two ladies swathed in silk stared inscrutably at Rachel, and she smiled back at them tensely.

“Let’s get some punch,” Nick said, steering Rachel toward a table where a uniformed waiter wearing white cotton gloves was serving punch out of a huge Venetian glass punch bowl.

“Oh my God, that had to be the most awkward moment of my life! I think I really annoyed your grandmother,” Rachel whispered.

“Nonsense. She was just in the middle of another conversation, that’s all,” Nick said soothingly.

“Who were those two women in matching silk dresses standing like statues behind her?” Rachel asked.

“Oh, those are her lady’s maids.”

“Excuse me?”

“Her lady’s maids. They never leave her side.”

“Like ladies-in-waiting? They look so elegant.”

“Yes, they’re from Thailand, and they were trained to serve in the royal court.”

“Is this a common thing in Singapore? Importing royal maids from Thailand?” Rachel asked incredulously.

“I don’t believe so. This service was a special lifetime gift to my grandmother.”

“A gift? From whom?”

“The King of Thailand. Though it was the last one, not Bhumibol the current king. Or was it the one before that? Anyway, he was apparently a great friend of my grandmother’s. He decreed that she must only be waited on by court-trained ladies. So there has been a constant rotation ever since my grandmother was a young woman.”

“Oh,” Rachel said, stupefied. She took the glass of punch from Nick and noticed that the fine etching on the Venetian glassware perfectly matched the intricate fretwork pattern on the ceiling. She leaned against the back of a sofa for support, suddenly feeling overwhelmed. There was too much for her to take in—the army of white-gloved servants hovering about, the confusion of new faces, the mind-blowing opulence. Who knew that Nick’s family would turn out to be these extremely grand people? And why didn’t he prepare her for all this a little more?

Rachel felt a gentle tap on her shoulder. She turned around to see Nick’s cousin holding a sleepy toddler. “Astrid!” she cried, delighted to see a friendly face at last. Astrid was adorned in the chicest outfit Rachel had ever seen, quite diff erent from how she had remembered her in New York. So this was Astrid in her natural habitat.

“Hello, hello!” Astrid said cheerily. “Cassian, this is Auntie Rachel. Say hi to Auntie Rachel?” Astrid gestured. The child stared at Rachel for a moment, before burying his head shyly into his mother’s shoulder.

“Here, let me take this big boy out of your hands!” Nick grinned, lifting a squirming Cassian out of Astrid’s arms, and then deftly handing her a glass of punch.

“Thanks, Nicky,” Astrid said as she turned to Rachel. “How are you finding Singapore so far? Having a good time?”

“A great time! Although tonight’s been a bit . . . overwhelming.”

“I can only imagine,” Astrid said with a knowing glint in her eye.

“No, I’m not sure you can,” Rachel said.

***

Excerpted from Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Kwan. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved.

Advice for a Human #84: You are more than the sum of your particles. And that is quite a sum.

It’s easy for someone to point out things you have to be thankful for. But the reality is that so many of us are overwhelmed in our own lives and have trouble stopping to appreciate the simple things. Matt Haig’s new book, The Humans, will help you do that.

Haig writes with humour and wit, but his prose feels coated in proof that he understands the basic wonders that make us human. The Humans is the story of an alien who is never named. He is sent from space by his superiors to exterminate Andrew Martin, a scholar and mathematician who has solved an epic mathematical equation that will change the course of the human’s future – and he must be stopped. The alien, our narrator, steals Andrew’s body and poses as Andrew while figuring out who else knows about the miraculous solving of the equation (for they too, must be exterminated). 

We quickly learn that Andrew Martin was not the nicest guy; not to his devoted and exhausted wife, Isobel, or his tormented teenage son, Gulliver. As our narrator uncovers more about Andrew’s discovery, and about who he was as a person, something peculiar begins to happen. Why does he look forward to talks with Gulliver, or to the warmth he feels when he is near Isobel, or his strolls around the neighborhood with his new canine companion, Newton?

The Humans is a little quirk, a little love story, a little Douglas Adams and a little philosophy thrown into a mixing bowl. What comes out is a great story that helps us to appreciate the inherent wonders of humanity and what it means to be a living, breathing human being.

This is the perfect book to read this summer, lounging in the sun with the smell of barbeque in the air. Read on into the evening, throw a blanket over your legs, watch the stars come out and think about the galaxies far beyond ours. Be happy to be alive.

Advice for a Human #64: Be alive. That is your supreme duty to the world.

Vladimir Nabokov's final, incomplete work was meant to be burned, according to the author's last wishes. But neither his wife nor his son had the heart to do as they were asked, and after several decades of indecision, the work was finally made available to the public: not handed over to another writer to complete, as often happens, but preserved in exactly the state Nabokov left it, fragmentary and handwritten.

Some critics disapproved, saying the work was not up to the standards of Nabokov's greatest writing and should not have been shared. Martin Amis said cuttingly in his Guardian review, "Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies."

Those critics' mistake, however, is in thinking of The Original of Laura as a novel. It's not—it is more like the skeleton of one. It's a collection of index cards, helpfully printed on thick paper and perforated so that readers can tear them out, shuffle them, and play Nabokov for a moment, tantalized by such phrases as "a vertical line chalked against a plum tinted darkness" and "heart or brain—when the ray projected by me reaches the lake of Dante or the Island of Reil".

What Nabokov would have made of these notes, we can only imagine—and the imagining is a great part of the experience of this book. It resists cover-to-cover reading, but it invites quick dips, page skips, and the search for talismanic sentences.

The final page is a pencilled note like the others, in Nabokov's hand, bearing a list of synonyms: efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate. I, for one, am glad none of these things happened to The Original of Laura.

Khaled Hosseini's novels have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide. Now, six years after A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted at #1 (spending fourteen consecutive weeks at #1 and nearly a full year on the hardcover list) Hosseini returns with a book that is broader in scope and setting than anything he's ever written before: And The Mountains Echoed.

On May 27, Indigo has an exclusive interview with this beloved novelist, and we want to open this opportunity to you, our customers. Did you read and love The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns? What would you ask this bestselling author?

Post your questions in the comments below or on Twitter using the hashtag #EchoedQandA. We'll choose the best to ask Khaled Hosseini, and record his response as a personalized video for each question.

The Indigo Blog is pleased to share a sneak peek at one of the most anticipated sequels of the season: Lauren Weisberger’s  Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, coming June 4, 2013:

***

chapter 1

as long as she lived

The rain fell in sideways sheets, cold and relentless, the winds whipping it in every direction, making an umbrella, slicker, and rain boots nearly useless. Not that Andy had any of those things. Her two-hundred-dollar Burberry umbrella had refused to open and finally snapped when she tried to force it; the cropped rabbit jacket with the oversize collar and no hood cinched fabulously around her waist but did nothing to stop the bone-chilling cold; and the brand-new stacked suede Prada pumps cheered her with their poppy fuchsia color but left the better part of her foot exposed.  Even her skinny leggings left her legs feeling naked, the wind making the leather feel as protective as a pair of a silk stockings.  Already the fifteen inches that had blanketed New York were beginning to melt into a slushy gray mess, and Andy wished for the thousandth time that she lived anywhere but here.

As if to punctuate her thought, a taxi barreled through a yellow light and blared its horn at Andy, who had committed the grievous crime of trying to cross the street. She restrained herself from offering him the finger—everyone was armed these days - and instead gritted her teeth and hurled mental curses his way.  Considering the size of her heels, she made decent progress for the next two or three blocks. Fifty-Second, Fifty-Third, Fifty-Fourth . . . it wasn’t too far now, and at least she’d have a moment or two to warm up before beginning the race back to the office. She was consoling herself with the promise of a hot coffee and maybe, just maybe, a chocolate chip cookie, when suddenly, somewhere, she heard that ring.

Where was it coming from? Andy glanced around, but her fellow pedestrians didn’t seem to notice the sound, which was growing louder every second. Br-rrring! Br-rrring! That ringtone.

She would recognize it anywhere for as long as she lived, although Andy was surprised they were still making phones with it. She simply hadn’t heard it in so long and yet . . . it all came rushing back. She knew before she pulled her phone from her bag what she would find, but she was still shocked to see those two words on her caller ID screen: MIRANDA PRIESTLY.

She would not answer. Could not. Andy took a deep breath, hit “ignore,” and tossed the phone back into her bag. It started ringing again almost immediately. Andy could feel her heart begin to beat faster, and it got more and more difficult to fill her lungs. Inhale,  exhale, she instructed herself, tucking her chin to protect her face from what was now pounding sleet, and just keep walking. She was less than two blocks from the restaurant—she could see it lit up ahead like a warm, shimmering promise—when a particularly nasty gust propelled her forward, causing her to lose her balance and step directly into one of the worst parts of a Manhattan winter: the black, slushy puddle of dirt and water and salt and trash and god knows what else so filthy and freezing and shockingly deep that one could do nothing but surrender to it.

Which is exactly what Andy did, right there in the pool of hell that had accumulated between the street and the curb. She stood, flamingo-like, perched gracefully on one submerged foot, holding the other one rather impressively above the watery mess for a good thirty or forty seconds, weighing her options. Around her, people gave her and the slushy little lake wide berth, only those with knee-high rubber boots daring to tromp directly through the middle. But no one offered her a hand and, realizing that the puddle had a large enough perimeter that she couldn’t jump to escape in any one direction, she steeled herself for another shock of cold and placed her left foot beside her right. The icy water rushed up her legs and came to a stop on her lower calf, subsuming both fuchsia shoes and a good five inches of leather pant, and it was all Andy could do not to cry.

Her shoes and leggings were ruined; her feet felt like she might lose them to frostbite; she had no option for extricating herself from the mess except continuing to slog through it; and all Andy could think was, That’s exactly what you get for screening Miranda Priestly.

There wasn’t time to dwell on her misery, though, because as soon as she made it to the curb and stopped to evaluate the damage, her phone rang again. It had been ballsy—hell, downright reckless—to ignore the first call. She simply couldn’t do it again. Dripping, shivering, and near tears, Andy tapped the screen and said hello.

“Ahn-dre-ah? Is that you? You’ve already been gone for an eternity. I’ll ask you only one time. Where. Is. My. Lunch? I simply won’t be kept waiting like this.”

Of course it’s me, Andy thought. You dialed my number. Who else would be answering?

“I’m so sorry, Miranda. It’s really horrid out right now, and I’m trying my best to—”

“I’ll expect you back here immediately. That’s all.” And before Andy could say another word, the line was disconnected.

***

Special thanks to Simon and Schuster Canada for sharing this excerpt. 

Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns releases on June 4, 2013. 

Robert Rotenberg’s latest Ari Greene thriller, Stranglehold, is out now.  The Indigo Fiction Blog is pleased to share this original post from the author himself. 

***

The greatest line I’ve ever heard about fiction writing is that it has a great advantage over non-fiction, because fiction can tell the truth.

Sounds odd. But think. You want to know about England in the early 1800s what do you read? Dickens. California during the dust bowl in the 1930s? Steinbeck of course.

Now I’m not saying I’m a Dickens or a Steinbeck, but what I try to do in my novels is to show Toronto as it really is. Now. Today. Not an all-cutesy CBC-type happy multicultural soap opera where everyone is sweet all the time. And not some dark, horrid place where heinous crimes happen every hour.

Just the facts. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is a city in radical transformation. Shedding its adolescent skin, and not really sure what true maturity will bring. Hence the stasis. The indecision. And that key component that makes all great literature: the conflict.

My first novel, Old City Hall, takes the reader to the heart of Toronto’s central criminal courthouse. The place where the real action happens. In my second book, The Guilty Plea, a wealthy third-generation family is crumbling while a brilliant, but unsure woman from small-town Ontario is trying to make her way in the Big Smoke. How much more Toronto can you get?

Last year, Stray Bullets came out. The title evokes to Torontonians the horror of recent years when innocent by-standers have been felled by the increasing gun violence on our city streets.

My new book, Stranglehold, takes place during a hotly contested election for the next mayor of Toronto. It’s a high-stakes campaign. The establishment candidate is being challenged by a rough and tumble upstart, a part-time high school rugby coach whose campaign is all about getting ‘tough on crime.’

In each book I try to tell three stories. Draw a circle in your mind. Then draw a ring around it, and a third ring. The inner circle is the tale of the crime itself. (Just one murder per book. Always at the start, then no more blood and guts. Just brain power.) Ring number two reveals the characters my readers have now come to know, their personal lives and how they intersect with the criminal trial (the inner ring) they all face.

The outside ring is the city. To me Toronto is a character in and of itself. A living, breathing, ever changing player on the wider stage.

I’m thrilled to say that this focus on the city, really drilling down to see what makes it tick and not pretending the setting is in “Nowheresville U.S.A.,” has paid off. The Det. Greene’s Toronto maps on my website is extremely popular. And now America’s National Public Radio (NPR) is coming up to do a story about me and the city I write about. It will air in early June. Hopefully by then you’ll have read Stranglehold. It’s available everywhere in Canada on May 7.

Bet you can’t read just one chapter. Enjoy.

-Robert Rotenberg

***

Thanks to our friends at Simon and Schuster Canada for facilitating this blog post, and to Robert Rotenberg for composing it.

Neil Gaiman once said, “Good fiction unites us, as humans, because it gives us empathy. Because it makes us look at the world through other people’s eyes. And it’s a wonderful way of realizing that other people exist.” After reading Anthony Marra’s stunning first novel, I am aware of just how in the dark I’ve been. Not only do other people exist, of course, but other people are miraculous. Other people, regardless of whether you have met them, or ever will, are sparks of wonder.

This novel’s honesty and power hit me right in the solar plexus. I’m talking straight to the gut, take-your-breath-away, raw, crippling honesty. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena tells the story of six incredible characters during the horrific turmoil in Chechnya from 1994-2004. The book opens with a haunting scene featuring two of these characters, Akhmed and his best friend’s daughter, Havaa. The previous evening, Akhmed had watched from his window as his best friend Dokka was tied up and thrown into the back of a Russian military vehicle. He knew this was coming, and knew that Dokka was smart enough to hide his only child, and so Akhmed and Havaa begin a long journey, through an eerie and secretive forest in order to stay off the main roads. They are headed to a half-decrepit hospital, where a woman named Dr. Sonja Rabina still tends to the burned and the broken. 

Akhmed knows that his time is limited, for those who took Dokka will eventually come for him, but before they do, he must secure the safety of his dear friend’s daughter. What he doesn’t know is that Sonja has been living in her own private hell for these past ten years.

I came to this book with no knowledge of the terrifying details of Chechnya’s unrest, but I learned quickly. You will be unable to turn away from the astonishing prose that fills these pages. The most powerful book I have read in years, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is an intricately woven story that takes you into the depths of hell, and yet provides you with the most remarkable beacon of hope. This is a story of betrayal, love, family, and most of all, it is written proof that the spirit can be unbreakable.

This book is not easy to read, but like Neil Gaiman said, it will make you understand the marvelous existence of others; the power and strength of them, the sorrows, the unwavering hope and the beauty in them. This book is colossal.  

Helene Wecker's debut novel, The Golem and The Jinni, is a compulsively readable debut novel about two supernatural creatures in turn of the century immigrant New York.

Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay; unmoored and adrift as her ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.

Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert, trapped in an old copper flask, and released in New York City, though still not entirely free.

Ahmad and Chava become unlikely friends and soul mates with a mystical connection. The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale.

A magical debut; essential reading for lovers of historical fiction, fairy tales and the fantastic: read our review of the book, and read chapter one.

The Indigo Blog is pleased to present this interview with the author.

Helene Wecker (HW): There's too many to name! On one level, I had the old golem stories and the stories of jinn/genies, the Thousand and One Nights and so on. For the Golem, Frankenstein's in there too, and a little Pygmalion maybe, and modern scifi that looks at what happens when we create human-like life: Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the replicants from Blade Runner. For the Jinni, I feel like he was influenced by a number of heroes from different fantasy novels. Bertran de Talair in Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne comes to mind.

IFB: Which character was harder to write?

HW: The Golem was more difficult to write, because she's so influenced by the desires and fears of others. That meant I had to be constantly taking into account what was happening around her, and what she might be picking up on.

IFB: Apart from any historical research you did, what elements of the story did you draw from Jewish and Arabic folklore? I'm thinking particularly of Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

HW: I definitely drew from the Thousand and One Nights, as well as the Jewish folktales of Rabbi Loew and the Golem of Prague. Once I had the basic outlines of my characters, though, I stepped away from the old stories. I found I was too worried about getting it "right," and had to let myself develop my own versions of these beings.

IFB: The connections between the characters seem like they could only have happened in the tightly-knit immigrant communities of New York. How important was the setting of the story to the plot?

HW: Very important! The Jewish Lower East Side and Little Syria really were like little cities in their own right -- especially the Lower East Side, which in 1899 had already been thriving for decades. The immigrant communities were so self-contained that you could spend all day speaking your own language to everyone you met, but if you walked just a few blocks in any direction you would be at a total loss. (I'm guessing it's still like for many New Yorkers.) This meant that I could have two entire cultures living barely a mile apart, with no real knowledge of each other. As the book progresses, and the plot threads of the two communities start to overlap, it starts to feel like worlds colliding, even though technically they're all neighbors.

IFB: Were you to go walking with Chava and Ahmed on an evening in contemporary New York, where would you take them first?

HW: Such a great question... First I'd take them to an observation deck, maybe Top of the Rock or the Empire State Building, so they could get a good look at how the city's grown and changed. Then maybe Central Park, just so they could see that some New York institutions are still very much the same. I also get the feeling the Golem would really enjoy the High Line. And the Jinni would probably want to go clubbing. Unfortunately most of my own favorite spots in NYC are food-related, and neither of them eat!

IFB: The metalwork that Ahmed creates in the novel is stunning. Did you base his masterpiece on an existing artist's work?

HW: No, I didn't – it just sort of came to me. I knew he'd be more interesting in making works of art than in everyday objects like pots and pans, and I was trying to imagine the sorts of pieces he'd create. At the same time, I was researching what it was like to live in the old tenement buildings, and I kept coming across references to the pressed tin ceilings. It seemed like a natural fit.

IFB: Chava was designed as a perfect wife for one particular kind of man – obedient, intelligent, and mostly asexual – but these traits don't translate into perfect wifedom once she marries Michael. What do you think would have happened if her creator had lived? Would she be the "perfect wife" for him, or are there fatal flaws in his own imaginings?

HW: Oh, she absolutely would have been his perfect wife, for at least a week or two. I think he would've grown bored with her obedience pretty quickly. Eventually he would've wanted her to be more lively and unpredictable, which would've been difficult for her, if not impossible, since she was essentially a slave to his will. There's lots of sci-fi tales about computers or robots that are given conflicting commands and eventually go bonkers, or turn on their creators. I can definitely see that happening.

IFB: On a similar note, Chava chafes against the gender restrictions of her time and place, despite her design – she wants to mourn for Rabbi Meyer; she wants to walk alone. The supernatural elements, among other things, offer a way to comment on the times without seeming anachronistic. If Chava were dropped into our society, what would she have to learn?

HW: I think she'd have a lot of difficulty with the conflicting requirements that our society tends to place on women. Be sexy, but not too sexy; be ambitious and successful, but don't threaten the men around you. She would have a very hard time trying to walk that line. Ironically, she's pretty much the only woman out there who could really "have it all," because she doesn't need to sleep!

IFB: Alternatively, since Chava and Ahmad are effectively immortal, how do you think they would react to today's society? What would they find puzzling or ridiculous?

HW: I think they'd be shocked at the physical isolation of the computer age. Especially the Jinni – the prospect of staring at a screen in a cubicle all day would really be anathema to him. He'd end up a Burning Man type, or an extreme sports athlete, or something else that the Golem would find completely outrageous.

IFB: Aside from Proust, who are your favourite prose authors?

HW: So many! Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Hilary Mantel, A.S. Byatt, Joan Didion, Susanna Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Samuel Delany ... the list goes on and on.

***
Thanks to HarperCollins for facilitating this interview, to the Indigo Blog team for their thoughtful questions, and to Helene Wecker for her insightful answers. We wish her the best of luck with her debut.

Getting books like The Golem and the Jinni before publication is the best part of working at Indigo. We read advance copies to guess a book’s prospects, give feedback to the publisher, and chat with other early readers on Goodreads. But, on occasion, books so seize our imaginations and make such industry noise that we have to tell customers about them early. Books of this calibre turn us into excited kids with a secret. And we’re not very good secret keepers.

I won’t dwell on the plot of The Golem and the Jinni because the tension of its many threads holds it together until a pitch-perfect ending. Spoilers abound. Instead, I'll talk about two magical immigrants, who make Helene Wecker's debut book into the old-fashioned fairy tale we loved as boys and girls. Chava is a golem fashioned from clay, a drudge tied to her master. She feels the emotions of others, so to serve them better. But this creature from Jewish folklore was never meant for a rabbi who wished her choose and chase her own wants. In obedience to him and straining against her nature, Chava must learn to serve herself. Also chafing against unnatural bonds is Ahmad, a jinni. He is an insatiable and narcissistic spirit born of fire, but shackled to a human body by ancient magic. He is a man always on the edge of his Lebanese neighbourhood, the law, and mortality. A meeting between these opposite characters – and the communities they bring with them – is inevitable, but its outcome unpredictable.

The Golem and the Jinni is a masterwork of time and place. It could only happen when and where it does. The kin ties and animosities of immigrant New York pull the folklore of the old world into the new world where old stories are retold and new ones begin. These stories – of family, of secrets, of magic, and of far-off lands and times – fill The Golem and the Jinni. And such stories remain the best ones – the ones we never tire of and the ones we return to again and again.

>> Read Chapter 1 of The Golem and the Jinni.

>> Pre-order The Golem and the Jinni, on sale April 23rd from HarperCollins.

Swinging parties. A mysterious millionaire. True love. Betrayal. Murder. It’s all there in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Often known as The Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby is the tale of the mysterious and wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for Daisy Buchanan, as told by Nick Carraway, a young man determined to learn the truth of who the Great Gatsby is.

Today marks Gatsby’s 88th anniversary of publication, and to celebrate we’ve partnered with Warner Brothers Pictures Canada for an exciting giveaway! How’d you like to take your sweetie to an advanced screening of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby on May 8th, 2013? This movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan in the biggest and boldest screen adaptation yet.

Twitter Contest Details

Get ready Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, and Halifax! Our friends at Warner Brothers Pictures Canada have provided five double-passes for an advanced screening in each of these cities on the evening of Wednesday, May 8th. Our contest only includes this double-pass; winners will have to get to the theatre on their own. All of our other standard Twitter rules apply.

Once @chaptersindigo tweets the contest question on Twitter (at approximately 3:15 pm EDT on Wednesday, April 10), you reply with the name of the city that you'd like to win the double-pass for and include #IndigoAndTheGreatGatsby in your reply. Again, the cities are: Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, and Halifax. All eligible tweets received before 4 pm EDT will be entered into a random draw for the pass to the city indicated in their contest entry tweet.

Good luck, Old Sport!