Join us for Hour Club!
Your regular reminder that Hour Club is tomorrow (Monday) at 7pm! If you have some work you need to focus on, join me and a friendly group of fellow scribblers for a silent hour of work. Note: it does not have to be “writing”. It can be anything you are trying to make progress with. Click the Zoom link at the bottom of this email to join. And why not take this opportunity to upgrade? Just over £1 a week brings you a growing list of features and benefits, and makes it possible for me to keep writing. I’m really grateful.
Chairing at the 2024 Edinburgh International Book Festival
I am delighted to be chairing two outstanding events at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, presenting four authors whose books I can’t wait to tell you about. If you are in Edinburgh do please come to these events — and do please come and say hello! I’ll be talking about these books in more detail in the coming weeks on Monday Night Reads, and I urge you to consider buying them, so as to join in the conversation!
Lavinia Greenlaw & Samantha Harvey: Life in the Stars
12-Aug 15:30 BST - EFI Spiegeltent - Adult
In Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, six astronauts rotate the Earth, becoming untethered from the lives they’ve left behind. Meanwhile, Lavinia Greenlaw explodes the essay form in The Vast Extent – a collection drawing on art, science, and philosophy to create a constellation for the different ways we can see life. They come together in a conversation that will encourage you to look more closely at the world.
From the celebrated poet, novelist and memoirist, Lavinia Greenlaw, The Vast Extent is a constellation of "exploded essays" about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny and a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. Ranging across caves, seasickness, early photography, boredom, wonder, mountains, mice, the body and its shadow, from the Arctic at midwinter to a shingle spit in Norfolk at midsummer, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to travel such questions as how we might describe what we have never seen before or what helps us to see more clearly or persuades us to see what's not there. Art, science, technology, vision and memory inform one another in this original and illuminating work.
Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief, The Western Wind and Orbital. She is also the author of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease.
Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize, and The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize.
Orbital, was published in November 2023 by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Grove Atlantic (US), and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
She lives in Bath, UK, and is a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
Robbie Arnott & Leo Vardiashvili: In Search of Great Stories
19-Aug 11:00 BST - EFI Venue NW - Adult
In Robbie Arnott’s new book Limberlost, the Tasmania-based writer explores our ideas of masculinity, and our destructive, extractive relationship with the natural world. Leo Vardiashvili’s Hard By a Great Forest is a searching tale of home, memory and sacrifice. Both writers explore life’s big questions through tales that are at turns raw, tender and profound.
Robbie Arnott is the author of Dusk, Limberlost, The Rain Heron and Flames. His novels have been published in over ten languages and have won numerous awards, including The Age Book of the Year and the Voss Literary prize. He lives in Tasmania with his wife and daughter.
Set in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, two years after the occupation of South Ossetia by Russia in 2008, Hard by a Great Forest follows the fortunes of a father and sons who, having fled the conflict for asylum in western Europe, must return to their decaying but still beautiful homeland to rescue each other and make peace with the past. By turns savage and tender, compassionate and harrowing, it is a powerful but ultimately hopeful novel about the individual and collective trauma of war. It publishes in January 2024.
Leo Vardiashvili came to the United Kingdom with his family as a refugee from Georgia when he was thirteen years old. He studied English Literature at Queen Mary College, University of London and now works in the financial sector. He is in his early forties and this is his first novel.
Larchfield Episode Four
Monday at 7pm means a brand new episode of Larchfield! Tomorrow’s episode finds Wystan grappling with malt whisky and Larchfield’s suspicious benefactor, Wallace. His loneliness is so intense he visits Christopher Isherwood in Berlin for a chance to enjoy some night life in the gay bars of the city. These events, whilst fictionalised, are based on the actual events in Auden’s life, and follow his timeline. Meanwhile Dora performs an extraordinary everyday act of mother love, and finds herself drawn to present day Larchfield, as if the poet is calling her…
Join Wystan and Dora (and me!) tomorrow at 7pm.
And finally ….
Sharing my lunch with a friendly sparrow… (sound up!)
Thank you for reading this Sunday Supplement. Monday Night Reads is a reader supported publication. Please share this post with your friends, and do please consider taking out a paid subscription. Thank you so much for your support.
Polly x