Thanet publisher Ozaru Books announces five new releases

MARGATE, U.K. - April 24, 2017 - PRLog -- Ozaru Books, a boutique publishing business based in the East Kent village of St Nicholas-at-Wade, released its first book on 8 May 2008. Exactly nine years later, 8 May 2017, the imprint is marking the anniversary with five new releases, including some first steps into the world of electronic publishing.

The initial date was selected to mark the 85^th birthday of the first book's author, local writer Anneli Jones. 8 May also happened to be the day she had met her future husband: VE day, 1945. Her book, Reflections in an Oval Mirror, describes her life growing up in East Prussia during Hitler's rise to power. Written in English, it is a unique first-hand account of the changes witnessed by a young girl as her world undergoes a seismic shift, from peaceful existence on an idyllic farm to a terrifying trek across Europe, fleeing the Red Army. Despite being the first publication from Ozaru Books, it has remained a consistent long seller in paperback and is now appearing in Kindle.

Sunflowers – Le Soleil, by Murai Shimako, is a one-act play translated from the Japanese by Ben Jones. The script features two modern Japanese women, who gradually reveal how they are each still affected by the Hiroshima bombing, half a century later. The play has been performed in Hiroshima, Tokyo and outside Japan, and is now being released as a low-cost ebook to enable ongoing discussion of the issues raised. Ozaru Books has a secondary focus on literature in translation, particularly from Japanese, through a link with its sister business, the technical translation company BJ Translations.

The Call of Cairnmor, by Romney Marsh author Sally Aviss, is the first novel in her Cairnmor trilogy. Sally is a popular speaker at book festivals and the like throughout East Kent, and her books have gained strong reviews keeping them amongst Ozaru Books' best sellers. Her style combines romance with intrigue and exciting action, and all her books are infused with great historical detail, meticulously researched. Although Cairnmor itself is a fictional Scottish island, the English Channel and local area also feature prominently, as the plotline develops to include several naval events and characters of World War II.

Finally, Bicycle Beginnings, by Stephen Channing, is a mammoth 190,000 word anthology of contemporary articles describing the startling reactions and developments when 'velocipedes' first started to appear. It covers the period 1779 to 1912, and ranges over topics as diverse as race reports, legal developments, technical innovations and inventions, advertisements, acrobatics, clothing, poems, public debate, and women cyclists, ending with a long travelogue, "Berlin to Budapest on a Bicycle" capturing the excitement of a forgotten age of adventure on two wheels. Not all the new-fangled vehicles were only two-wheeled, however: in addition to 'ordinaries' (penny farthings), 'safety' bicycles, tandems, monocycles, and dwarf cycles, the book also sheds light on tricycles, double tricycles, four-wheel velocipedes, ice velocipedes, water-paddle hobby-horses, and more… These are explained with the aid of numerous illustrations, covering the gamut from cartoons to technical drawings and photographs. Rather than a single narrative to be read in one go, it is a collection of fascinating glimpses into cycling's 'golden age', providing a new understanding of a bygone era of experimentation and much amusement, whenever the reader dips into it.

Original plans were to release Bicycle Beginnings only as an eBook, but demand for a 'real' version too has led Ozaru Books to schedule a simultaneous release as a weighty 532-page paperbook. Stephen Channing has published several historical books about East Kent, and his previous volume The Victorian Cyclist won excellent reviews in both the specialist and general press.

All of the books are available in Kindle format from Amazon. Links and further information on the individual books and authors can be found at http://ozaru.net/ozarubooks