Get ‘Educated’ in Abingdon

Coming soon – an evening with Tara Westover The next book I’ll be reading will be Educated by Tara Westover (right). Published this week, Tara’s memoir is of growing up off-grid in the hills of Idaho sounds fascinating. Her father spent his time preparing for the end of the world, her mother worked as an unqualified Read More

An afternoon with Matt Haig and 400 schoolchildren!

This afternoon, I was able to put my occasional bookhelper’s hat on and be part of the Mostly Books team managing a mammoth event and signing at OLA school in Abingdon. OLA Librarian Mrs Hickford had invited many of the local state primary schools to join her pupils – and so the main hall was packed Read More

An evening with Vaseem Khan

Last night I went to Mostly Books to hear Vaseem Khan talk about his two crime novels featuring Inspector Chopra which are set in Mumbai. I didn’t have time to read one of the books before the event, but any novel that begins: On the day that he was due to retire, Inspector Ashwin Chopra discovered that Read More

Meg Rosoff at the Oxford Literary Festival

This Wednesday evening I was back in the vaulted delights of the Bodleian Divinity School (where I’d been on Monday).  It was a sheer delight to be in the disappointingly small, but very lovely, audience to hear Meg Rosoff talk about her latest novel in conversation with Suzie Feay. I suspect that if Meg’s latest novel Read More

First Light – Unbound Launch Party

First Light – a celebration of Alan Garner, ed Erica Wagner I will get back to book reviews very soon, but the book launch I attended last night was very special – and apologies – but I will be name-dropping! I love Unbound books and their crowdfunding publishing model, (see here for a Shiny interview I did with Unbound’s Read More

A is for Allingham and Ambler

This post was republished into my blog’s original timeline from my lost post archive. Yesterday, I was delighted be invited to another event for bloggers hosted by the estates department of PFD (literary agents Peters Fraser & Dunlop) at the Groucho Club.  Their Simenon event a few months ago was excellent. This time, they were featuring the work of Read More