Book Festivals – Durham
This week the great and the good of fiction are up North to attend the Durham Book Festival. So many authors to see and books to get signed. Which booktrail favourites are out there? Here’s a bit of a BookTrail list of books you can really explore with:
Friday 13th October 11 am – 12 am
Rachel Joyce – The Music Shop
This is the lady who wrote the book about a man who walks from Devon to Berwick in order for him to find someone from his past before she dies. An epic journey for anyone least of all an old man who wore slippers and was not at all prepared for the walk or what he would find at his destination. The Harold FRy was a huge success and now, Rachel is not travelling so far, deciding to spend her time in a wonderful music shop instead. Cue the music…
Lissa Evans – Their Finest – 3pm – 4pm
Lisa heads to Durham to chat about her book which has been turned into a film staring Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy.
Set in 1940’s London, Catrin Code writes for an advertising agency but she is soon conscripted into the world of propaganda films, writing a story about a fabricated romance on the beaches of Dunkirk. When the bombs start to fall, she finds out that the drama behind the scenes is just as dramatic as that in front of the camera.
Doug Johnstone and Louise Welsh – Saturday 14 October – 2.30pm – 3.30 pm
Death on the islands is a great title for this panel. Both have set their books on the Orkney islands and it’s this unforgiving and harsh landscape ideal for crime writers.
Crash land – Doug Johnstone
imagine what you would feel if you did indeed crash land on an island. There’d be little hope of escape or it would be a very slow escape. Islands always seem to be surrounded by as much water as they are mystery and this is certainly true in this novel! The real Orkney is evoked and depicted in this novel as closely as it can be. Of course the author has made some changes he says such as the lack of a bar at Kirkwall airport.
No Dominion – Louise Welsh
Dominion takes place around 7 years following the outbreak of The Sweats. Two of the survivors from London have washed up on the banks of Orkney. This is now a post apocalyptic world and it turns out they might have escaped one world but have fallen deep into another.
Jane Housham – Saturday 14 October – 4pm – 5pm
The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane
True story fictionalized but whether it’s fact of fiction, it would still be a shocking tale. Jane takes you back to Gateshead of 1866 when a young five year old girl disappeared from a country lane only to be found murdered later on.
The area is of course very different now but it’s still a shocking tale into the murder of a child, the ways an investigation was carried out back then,the process of a murder trial and justice, not to mention a view of the Victorians and their lives.
The Golden Era of crime – Saturday 14 October 5.30 – 6.30 pm
All three authors in this panel write about the Golden era of crime when Agatha Christie was Queen of the mysteries and murderous tales of her day. Indeed in Sophie Hannah’s Poirot books, she still is, as her characters have taken on new cases. Agatha Christie and her stories are as popular now as they’ve ever been.
Agatha Christie doesn’t appears in her latest novel Did you See Melody however, but there’s a mystery in the modern day about a missing girl
Andrew Wilson is the one to really pick up the Agatha Christie thread as he writes not about her characters but the woman herself, in a part fact part fiction account of when she herself disappeared for ten days in 1926.
The Josephine Tey stories
Finally, Agatha Christie style detective Josephine Tey is the lady with the mysterious mind in the series of novels by Nicola Upson. There’s a lovely catalogue of cases to delve into if you haven’t read them before. The latest is Nine Lessons.
Sunday 15 October 11.45 – 12.45 am
Larchfield – Polly Clark
https://www.thebooktrail.com/book-trails/larchfield/
Love the story about WH Auden and a female poet whose stories combine in the small town of Helensburgh in Scotland. It’s a really poignant story of two poets separated by decades but whose stories interweave into a very personal account of isolation and hope.
