Top authors Martina Cole and Andy McNab hit the road to champion reading for pleasure

 Bestselling authors Martina Cole (left) and Andy McNab will be clocking up the miles during May/June 2014, travelling theU.K.celebrating the success of national charity The Reading Agency’s Six Book Challenge reading for pleasure programme.

The Six Book Challenge encourages young people and adults who might not otherwise pick up a book to develop a love of reading and improve their literacy skills at the same time. Last year over 35,000 people took part in a variety of settings including workplaces, colleges, libraries, prisons and army education centres.

Included on Martina and Andy’s itineraries are visits to workplaces where Six Book Challenge participation has been high or where reading has been actively promoted by trade union learning representatives with the support of management: these are timed to coincide with national Learning at Work Week (19-25 May).

Martina Cole is official ambassador of the 2014 Six Book Challenge. The acknowledged queen of crime drama, Martina’s 20th novel Revenge (released in paperback on 24 April) went straight to Number One on hardback publication, scoring Martina her eleventh original fiction Number One in a row and her books have sold in excess of eleven million copies in total. Her new novel, The Good Life will be published in October.

Bestselling novelist and former SAS soldier Andy McNab has sold over ten million books in the UK alone. His recent titles are the novels Silencer and The New Patrol and Quick Read Today Everything Changes. The latter tells his own literacy journey from borstal to top author via the army, which he joined at 17 with the reading age of an 11 year old. Andy was the official champion for the 2013 Six Book Challenge and continues to support its work