Girls' Night In: the 10th Anniversary Collection Jessica Adams (Editor)

Girls' Night In: the 10th Anniversary Collection

 Jessica Adams (Editor)

 

Extract

Introduction

Thank you for buying this book. Your purchase will help to raise more money for War Child, the charity which helps children who have been affected by war and conflict. Since 2000, the Girls' Night In series (and its companion series for children, Kids' Night In) has raised over million for War Child. We hope that this collection - featuring many contributions from the last decade - will go even further.

Stella McCartney's introduction from the original edition explained how Girls' Night In began:

'This book was the brainchild of writing friends Chris Manby, Jessica Adams and Fiona Walker. Meeting up for drinks one night, they talked about the host of young women whose unique brand of fiction was topping the book charts, and decided to bring all that tal­ent together in one book for one terrific cause.'

Since that time, the editor list has grown to include Maggie Alderson, Imogen Edwards-Jones, Nick Earls, Lauren Henderson, Carole Matthews and Sarah Mlynowski.

Girls' Night In has also become an international phenomenon, appearing in the bestseller lists in Australia, the UK, the USA, France and Holland.

Contributions to the Girls' Night In series over the years have involved some very famous names, including Bob Geldof, Kate Moss and Jamie Oliver. We've also been lucky to have international best­selling authors like Cecelia Ahearn, Candace Bushnell, Meg Cabot, Nick Hornby, Cathy Kelly, Marian Keyes and Sophie Kinsella, just to name a few.

We hope that some of your favourite writers are in this book. And we hope that you make some new discoveries too; finding great new authors to read is part of what Girls' Night In is all about. If you would like to complete your collection then remember that the first four books in the series are still available too, with many more wonderful stories and contributions.

Thanks to Kaz Cooke and our cover artist and illustrator Anna Johnson, who have given the series such a distinctive style.

We would also like to acknowledge everyone who has given their time, energy and talent to the series over the last ten years. Every con­tributor, editor and publicist. Everyone in the media who supported us. Every librarian who put us on their shelves. Very special thanks to our agents at Curtis Brown around the world, who have generously represented the project from the start.

In addition, we would like to acknowledge James Williams, who has voluntarily run the Girls' Night In web site http://girlsnight.in since the beginning.

Finally, a glass of champagne to our agent for this edition, the indefatigable Tara Wynne, our American agent Laura Dail, and our Penguin Australia editor Jocelyn Hungerford.

The Girls' Night In series exists for War Child, so our final thanks must go to the War Child teams around the world, past and present, for turning the money from Girls' Night In into life-changing projects for children from Africa to Afghanistan.

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