The Movie Lover's Novel

[B Pendreigh]

I am a freelance film journalist and writer, based in the UK. I wrote about film for the Guardian for several years, was cinema editor on The Scotsman newspaper and associate editor on Hotdog film magazine and I currently write the film obituaries for the London Times and reviews for Radio Times among other things. I have also written half a dozen books on film and won various awards etc etc etc.

I have a new book out this week - The Man in the Seventh Row: The Movie Lover's Novel. And for the first time this is an ebook - I just left it to my agent to fix up the deal and this seems to be the way things are going.

It is about a film fan who watches a series of classic movies and finds himself up on the screen replacing one or other of the main characters and able to affect the action. Dream come true? Or nightmare as he begins to lose his grip on the outside world?

Barry Norman enthused about it, saying he had never read anything like it before. So did the political and social commentator Andrew Marr and early reviews on amazon are looking good... "Sam Peckinpah’s Brief Encounter was my personal favourite, with Pendreigh taking it where we all know it should have gone, down and dirty on the floor of that borrowed flat. The book is littered with in-jokes and sly winks to the reader."

Details are here Book - The Man In The 7th Row. It includes a short film, riffing on the start of Woody Allen's Manhattan, but with Manhattan replaced by the little Scottish seaside town of North Berwick.

[B Pendreigh]

Thanks to everyone who has been saying such great things about the book on amazon and elsewhere. I have even had an inquiry from a film proucer.