For this month’s Through the Keyhole posts I thought it would be nice to recap the epic few weeks of events we’ve had at Hot Key – there’s been so many brilliant festivals, bookshop talks and school events that we just had to share the joy! First up will be a recap of Garth Nix’s promotional UK and Ireland tour for CLARIEL, the brand new Old Kingdom prequel. There were charter mark shortbreads, towering piles of much loved backlist to be signed and lots of jam-packed, sold out mega events!

So after his long journey from Australia to the UK, we sent him off around the whole country, with stops at *deep breath* the lovely Easons folk in Dublin, the amazing bell ringers of Norwich Waterstones, the cool kids of Bath Children’s Literature Festival, the grinning fans at Leeds Waterstones, the furry microphone armed Scottish Booktrusters, the bookseller Nix lovers in Blackwells Edinburgh, the Nixophiles squeezed into every inch of Glasgow Argyle St Waterstones, the kind people of Manchester Waterstones, the bookselling extraordinaires of Silverdell Books who put on school events for Garth, more school fans in Southampton as well as the awesome in-store signing, an epic day in London with nearly the biggest ever queue Forbidden Planet have ever seen and joining Scott Westerfeld at the Southbank’s YA Weekender before FINALLY ending up at Cheltenham Literary Festival… PHEWF!

It’s hard to narrow down highlights because every single store and festival deserves a huge THANK YOU for all hosting spectacular and dazzling events – it was an amazing experience meeting Nix fans across the country who were so excited and enthusiastic and clutching their shiny new copies of CLARIEL looking beautiful! We must also say a huge THANK YOU to the man himself for answering every question, signing every book, traversing the country on every train we could get him on, and generally being LOVELY and CHARMING at all times. (AND HE SENT US A PRESENT EEEEEH!)

Kicking things off in the UK, Norwich Waterstones set the bar high, with charter mark shortbreads, home made costumes and even a bell ringing performance…