birmingham book festival october 24th serpents tail
Cake & Crime: Sophie Hannah
12 months ago
Saturday 9th April 2011
Cake & Crime: Sophie Hannah
2pm – 3.15pm / £8 & £6 (includes refreshments)/ Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Celebrating the publication of her sixth psychological crime thriller Lasting Damage, and the forthcoming ITV dramatisation of an earlier novel in the same series, Point of Rescue, Sophie comes to Birmingham to eat yummy cake and talk about her writing career so far.
About Lasting Damage
It`s 1.15 a.m. Connie Bowskill should be asleep. Instead, she`s logging on to a property website in search of a particular house: 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. She knows it`s for sale; she saw the estate agent`s board in the front garden less than six hours ago.
Soon Connie is clicking on the `Virtual Tour` button, keen to see the inside of 11 Bentley Grove and put her mind at rest once and for all. She finds herself looking at a scene from a nightmare: in the living room, in the middle of the carpet, there`s a woman lying face down in a huge pool of blood. In shock, Connie wakes her husband Kit. But when Kit sits down at the computer to take a look, he sees no dead body, only a pristine beige carpet in a perfectly ordinary room…
Sophie Hannah is the author of five internationally bestselling psychological thrillers – Little Face, Hurting Distance, The Point of Rescue, The Other Half Lives and A Room Swept White. Her novels are published in 20 countries, with more foreign rights deals under negotiation. The Other Half Lives was shortlisted for the 2010 Independent Booksellers’ Book of the Year Award. Little Face and Hurting Distance were both longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, and Little Face was longlisted for the IMPAC Award. The Point of Rescue is currently being made for television, and will appear on ITV1 in 2011. Lasting Damage is the sixth novel in this series.
Sophie has also published five collections of poetry. Her fifth, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award. Her poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is thirty-nine and lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children, where she is Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College.
Join us for lots of cake and coffee and the chance to hear Sophie talk about her work. Questions welcome!
With thanks to Hodder and Stoughton
Book Online or call 0844 870 0000
Win Tickets to the Spring Thing!
1 year ago
Want to win a pair of tickets to the Spring Thing? Fifty words or less on a book/short story/poem/collection/show you’ve read/seen and loved by one of the day’s writers – see
http://www.birminghambookfestival.org/events-2010/spring-thing-more-details for the full list. Send it to sara[at]birminghambookfestival[dot]org …by 5pm Friday 30 April 2010, with your name and email address. Good luck!
Review of Black Rock by Amanda Smyth
2 years ago
Amanda Smyth is taking part in our Readers Day on Saturday 24th October. I’ve had her book on my ‘to read’ pile for some time, after it was recommended to me by Amanda’s editor at Serpents Tail (after a while, they get to know what kind of books you like, and send them to you without you even having to ask – reason #4305834634608945 why this just might be the best job in the world).
When the book arrived, I had my nose buried in something else, and while I was reading that, as sometimes happens, a few events appeared on the horizon which demanded me to read other books that were not Black Rock. In the run up to the Festival (absolute worst time to try and do this, I know) I am trying to catch up on my reading list, and so picked up Black Rock - and am I glad that I did.
Black Rock is a pleasure, a surprising and sorrowful novel full of great language and with a genuinely thorough plot. I’m not going to tell you what it’s about, because I don’t want to give it away – and because perhaps, like me, you quite relish the slight recklessness of jumping into the world of a book knowing nothing more about it than that your colleague/dad/best friend/a random man on the train really loved it. I will tell you, however, that it is a beautiful story of survival, of changing times and of loss. Smyth writes of the deepest betrayals and long kept secrets as though they happen everyday – which, of course, they do, we just don’t always know about it. The book is warm, and mature in its telling, so much so that you find yourself struggling to accept the realities faced by the main characters. They, however, do a much better job, or rather Smyth does in her creation of them.
The book skirts some very old and tender issues rather succinctly – managing to both remind us that bad things have always happened and yet not give itself over to those causes entirely – a clever balance that, for me at least, helped create a book I could enjoy, mindfully, but without feeling like I was being clubbed over the head with the ‘moral of the story’ .
If you’ve read this book, I’d like to know what you thought. If you haven’t, I urge you to read it.
You can see more about Amanda here .
Sara
