Outlaws & Ashes: New Voices In Fiction: Stuart Evers & Naomi Wood
Sunday 10th April 2011
Outlaws & Ashes: New Voices In Fiction: Stuart Evers
£6.50 / £5 / 12.30 – 1.45pm / Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
It is always a pleasure to discover great new writing. The two authors featured here are well worth taking note of, for their talents and for choosing subjects often avoided.
Stuart’s collection Ten Stories About Smoking weaves tales of love, loss and yearning around the symbolic cigarette, locating the extraordinary in the ordinary. Ten sto
ries of allure, betrayal, nostalgia, solitude, seduction, damage, desire and loss; of silence broken by the click of a lighter; insomnia defined by a glowing ember; a magician’s trick; a lover’s scent; a final wish. These are stories that go to the heart of things.
‘In this remarkable collection, Stuart Evers winds a course through worlds of yearning, secrets and mortification in prose
as lithe as a ribbon of smoke’ Wells Tower
‘Love, loss and recovery are the real themes of these quiet, haunting stories, which add up into an unexpectedly powerful book. An impressive debut’ Aravind Adiga
‘Evers has found possibility in even the bleakest and smallest of lives, with each delicately linked not only by a cigarette but also by a glimpse into how terrifyingly empty a life can be’ David Vann
‘With powerfully understated writing, Evers has an eye for the humor that lives alongside sadness, and above all for the humanity in the smallest of actions’ Evie Wyld
A former bookseller and editor, Stuart Evers now writes about books for the Guardian, Independent, New Statesman, Time Out and many other publications. His fiction has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Litro, The Book Club Boutique Magazine and on EverydayGenius.com.
If you were forced to live with faith, or without, which would you choose? Naomi’s debut novel, The Godless Boys, draws the choices into sharp relief.
England. 1986. The Church controls the country, and all members of the Secular Movement have been expelled to the Island. On the Island, religion is outlawed. A gang of boys patrols the community, searching for signs of faith, and punishing any believers. When an English girl arrives – intent on finding her mother who disappeared, mysteriously, ten years ago – she is swept up in the dangerous games of the gang. But while one boy falls in love with her, the other wants revenge for the wrongs of the past, and, as the violence escalates, the English girl becomes their pawn.
The Godless Boys is a book about faith, and life without faith; about love, and its absence. But above all, it’s about power, and how dangerous it can be to stand out from the crowd. Both violent and tender, it’s a remarkable debut, and clearly marks Naomi Wood as a name to note.
Naomi Wood is 27. She studied at Cambridge and at UEA for her MA in Creative Writing. Originally from York, she has gone on to live in Hong Kong, Paris and Washington DC. This is her first novel.
With thanks to Picador.
