About “Gingerbread”
Mountain hut by photographer Jef Maion
Unexpected guests and unexpected hosts have been around since human beings first started telling stories. Sometimes the visitors are higher beings who have come to test the moral fibre of the human race — Zeus in Greek mythology, the Archangel Raphael in the Bible, Haroun al-Rashid in the 1001 Nights. Sometimes it is the hosts who are not what they seem — for good or for ill.
So here is another variation, which mixes in 20th-century Swiss history and, of course, a love story.
The story is set on the slopes down from Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald, which are decent middle-aged slopes that you can float down while reading a newspaper. At least, that’s what they are if the weather is right. When it isn’t… well, you’ll see.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. The book doesn’t come out until 19 November, but you can pre-order it now or request a review copy.
About “The Long Man”
The Snow Cow may be subtitled “Ghost Stories for Skiers”, but there haven’t actually been any ghosts yet. So now it’s time for one.
Ghosts hang around for various reasons, but quite a few of them do it because they have something they need to do. This one certainly does.
I’ve been in a blizzard like the one in the story. It was somewhere above the Furgg lift station in Zermatt. It was nearly the end of me. They must have known what they were doing, running the lift in those conditions; but I certainly didn’t know what I was doing, getting on to it.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. The book doesn’t come out until 19 November, but you can pre-order it now or request a review copy.
About “Eve”
There are several stories about women and power in this book. “Eve” is the first. Her name is not an accident: the battle she fights is part of a war that started in the Garden of Eden.
The important thing about power in a relationship is to learn how to use it, and when to use it… and when not to use it. Getting the use of power right or wrong can make or break a marriage.
This is the longest story in the book. You’ll find some fun skiing scenes here, and two intense and crucial scenes in bed, and some sharp social comedy.
My friend Crusty is rather proud of being the model for both the baddie’s dress sense at breakfast and the goodie’s taste in music. People sometimes worry about being put in a story — unless they demand it, which also happens! — but the fact is that one’s friends are never a direct model for characters in the story. The characters come first, and then, when we come to flesh them out, they pick up their dress and speech and mannerisms from what we have seen around us.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. The book doesn’t come out until 19 November, but you can pre-order it now or request a review copy.
About “Predator”
I saw her in St Anton. She had an orange ski suit and a tight body and I followed her down a run that I’d never have attempted if I had been in my right mind.
She didn’t look quite as good from the front and anyway she was more interested in my mad Australian friend Tim’s alleged half-brother, whose looks later got him a job as a DJ in Beirut.
Still, this story is in her honour.
The myth behind the story goes back as far as Homer’s Odyssey and probably further, so it’s at least 2,700 years old. Dante uses it too, but as far as I know I’m the first person to look at it as a love story.
Kind of.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. The book doesn’t come out until 19 November, but you can pre-order it now or request a review copy.
About “The Snow Cow”
It was my mother who showed me that the mountains were some use even outside the skiing season. Her mountain-walking career started with her escape from Switzerland into Italy at the end of the Second World War, and ended with her being helicoptered off the Unterrothorn-Ried path in Zermatt in August 2005. She was an intrepid walker— but she was afraid of cows.
Cows are big. Cows come up to you and breathe on you. Cows are clumsy. Cows can squash you by accident. Cows’ lack of savagery makes them all the more sinister. At least when a lion kills you it is because it wants to eat you.
So I wrote “The Snow Cow” to cheer her up.
The cattle stampede in Arosa is genuine. I’ve been there while it was going on. And enthusiasts really have reintroduced bears into both Italy and Austria. The rest of the story, though, is fiction.
I hope.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. The book doesn’t come out until 19 November, but you can pre-order it now or request a review copy.
The countdown begins
73 days to the publication date, and the first books have arrived. The cow is out of the bag at last.
Welcome to this blog! Watch it closely, because week by week it will bring you one of the stories from The Snow Cow, as well as news of the publication process. Martin Kochanski will be posting here too, telling you how the stories came to be written and hopefully not giving away too much of the plot.
But the first thing is to send out the review copies to journalists. We’ve got a healthy list of targets, but if you are an editor or a reviewer, or know someone who is, then contact us (via the web site) and we can add you to the list.
The Snow Cow 
About “Miss Poyser”
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. The book comes out in four weeks’ time, but you can pre-order it now.