Events

Go on a voyage of discovery with authors Esi Edugyan and Aida Edemariam, as they present stories about characters who are looking for a better life. Discussing their latest novels, the two award-winning writers explore the universal desire for improved circumstances and how they found inspiration in history and in characters who share an unbroken spirit. Edugyan's latest novel Washington Black tells the story of an eleven-year-old field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation whose quest for freedom takes him on an odyssey from the Canadian Arctic to the muddy streets of London.Read More

Eating is one of life's greatest pleasures. In Eat Up!, Ruby Tandoh, (a Great British Bake Off finalist) celebrates food. She will arm you against the fad diets, food crazes and bad science that can make eating guilt-laden. Filled with advice on everything from mental health to recipe ideas and shopping tips, this is a book to help you fall back in love with food and put the pleasure back into eating.Read More

Sarah Perry's second novel The Essex Serpent was nominated for numerous awards and has been a huge bestseller. Shortlisted for the Costa Book Award for Best Novel, the Encore Award and the International Dylan Thomas Prize, it was Waterstones Book of the Year 2016 and won the overall Book of the Year Award at the British Book Awards, 2017. She will read from her brand new novel Melmoth and discuss her writing with BBC Radio 4's James Naughtie. James Naughtie is one of our best-known broadcasters, special correspondent and books editor for BBC News. For 21 years he presented Today, and has hosted every edition of Bookclub on BBC Radio 4 since the programme began in 1998. As an author he has written books on politics and music, and two espionage novels, The Madness of July and Paris Spring.Read More

An evening of Halloween tales with Sarah Perry, Mark Haddon, Sophie Hannah, Andrew Michael Hurley and Richard MacLean Smith.Read More

veryone that Melmoth seeks out must make a choice: to live with what they've done, or be led into the darkness. Helen can't stop reading, or shake the feeling that someone is watching her. As her past finally catches up with her, she too must choose which path to take. We have followed the career of Sarah Perry from her debut After me comes the Flood to the sensational best-seller The Essex Serpent and we are delighted to welcome her back for her third novel, Melmoth. Inspired by the largely forgotten nineteenth century novel of the same name, Melmoth is an exquisitely written, gripping masterpiece of moral complexity, asking us profound questions about mercy, redemption, and how to make the best of our conflicted world. An evening of gothic brilliance awaits...Read More

Join Lucy Popescu for a Hallowe'en evening of witches, werewolves, black magic and the supernatural, featuring spine-tingling readings from award winning children's writer Sally Gardner and acclaimed novelists Syd Moore, Beth Underdown and Cathi Unsworth Tickets include a glass of wine or soft drink. Book online, in store or by phoning 020 7636 1577.Read More

Joanna Walsh on Break.Up at the Bridport Literary FestivalRead More

Sarah Perry's scintillating second novel The Essex Serpent was the smash hit of the year on its release. It took home the 2016 Waterstones Book of the Year and the 2017 British Book Award prizes for Fiction Book of the Year as well as Overall Book of the Year, hitting the top of the bestseller lists thanks to its dark blend of folkloric myth and gothic sensibility. That potent mixture underpins Melmoth, Perry's brilliantly devastating new novel. For two decades Helen Franklin has hidden from the memory of something she cannot forgive herself for, but when a strange manuscript filled with tales from the darkest episodes of human history comes into her possession, her fragile, cocooned existence is jeopardised. The manuscript is haunted by the dread-inducing Melmoth, the loneliest being in the world, a silent woman in black condemned to stalk the earth and lure the guilty into a lifetime of wandering by her side. Compelled to read on despite a growing feeling that she's being watched, Helen's secrets bubble to the surface and soon she is faced with a decision: does she confront the past or not? Join Sarah Perry and BBC Arts' Serena Field for an unmissable discussion about this morally complex tale which asks hard questions about memory, mercy and redemption, transcending its gothic sources to speak urgently to our troubling times. Copies of Melmoth will be available to purchase on the night and there will be a book signing with Sarah Perry following the event.Read More

Ever since The Essex Serpent exploded onto the literary scene, Sarah Perry has been considered one of the finest voices in British fiction writing. A Sunday Times bestseller, Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, and longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, The Essex Serpent has been one of the most popular and talked-about novels of recent years. Now, Sarah has followed up on this monumental success with a lyrical, haunting treatise on loneliness, grief, guilt, and love. Drawing on the legend of Melmoth the Wanderer, Sarah transports the reader to the frost-riddled streets of modern Prague in winter. Gently, yet insistently, we are pulled back into the past, through centuries of hauntings and lifetimes of regret and shame, culminating in a contemporary mystery as the secrets of those dogged by Melmoth's presence are brought to the surface. Through Sarah's trademark sumptuously beautiful prose, the lives touched by Melmoth are laid bare, their weaknesses, strengths, fears, and passions exquisitely sketched. Eerie and soulful, Melmoth is not only a worthy successor to The Essex Serpent, it is a masterclass in fiction writing. In 2016 we were fortunate enough to host Sarah as a rising star of fiction. We are enormously proud to welcome her again as one of Britain's best-loved contemporary novelists.Read More

Melmoth, Sarah Perry's follow-up to her wildly-successful historical novel, The Essex Serpent, promises to be one of the most talked-about books of 2018. Helen Franklin is assailed with guilt for past misdeeds but her sheltered life is upended when a strange manuscript comes into her possession. Filled with testimonies from the darkest chapters of human history, it records sightings of a tall, silent woman in black - Melmoth, the loneliest being in the world. Everyone that Melmoth seeks out must make a choice: to live with what they've done, or be led into the darkness. As her past finally catches up with her, Helen too must choose which path to take.Read More

We are thrilled to welcome Sarah Perry, the author of 2016's Waterstones Book of the Year The Essex Serpent, to Belfast in conversation with Paul McVeigh to discuss her new novel Melmoth. Sarah Perry is the UK's most extraordinary writer of Gothic literature. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway. She has been the writer in residence at Gladstone's Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague. After Me Comes the Flood, her first novel, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. Her latest novel, The Essex Serpent, was a number one bestseller in hardback, Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2017, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and Dylan Thomas Award, and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction 2017. Melmoth is a profound, ambitiously realised work of fiction which asks fundamental questions about guilt, forgiveness, moral reckoning and how we come to terms with our actions in a conflicted world. A compulsive, terrifying and thoroughly modern Gothic novel, and a response to the Irish Gothic classic Melmoth the Wanderer.Read More