Join us for an evening with authors Rachel Seiffert and Joe Dunthorne, as we celebrate their new books, Once The Deed is Done and Children of Radium.

Children of Radium – Joe Dunthorne’s great-grandfather was a family legend: the eccentric pre-war inventor of radioactive toothpaste and the Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. Joe always knew he would write a book about this one day. The only problem was that the old man had already written the book of his life – an unpublished memoir so dense and rambling that none of his living descendants had attempted to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally cracked open the manuscript, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew…

Joe Dunthorne was born and brought up in Swansea. He is the author of three novels and one collection of poetry, including Submarine, which has been translated into fifteen languages and made into an acclaimed film directed by Richard Ayoade, and Wild Abandon, which won the 2012 Encore Award. Children of Radium is his first work of non-fiction. He lives in London.

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Once The Deed Is Done – Rachel Seiffert

To be truly alive means having to make choices. To be truly alive is also, quite simply, to love.

Northern Germany, 1945. Dead of night and dead of winter, a boy hears soldiers and sees strangers – forced labourers – fleeing across the heathland by his small town: shawls and skirts in the snowfall. The end days are close, war brings risk and chance, and Benno is witness to something he barely understands. Peace brings more soldiers – but English this time – and Red Cross staff officers. Ruth, on her first posting from London, is given charge of a refugee camp on the heathland, crowded with former forced labourers. As ever more keep arriving, she hears whispers, rumours of dark secrets about that snowy night. The townspeople close ranks, shutting their mouths and minds to the winter’s events, but the town children are curious about the refugees on their doorstep, and Benno can’t carry his secret alone.

Rachel Seiffert’s first novel, The Dark Room, (2001) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and made into the feature film Lore. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, and in 2011 received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Field Study, her collection of short stories, received an award from PEN International. Her second novel, Afterwards (2007), third novel The Walk Home (2014), and forth novel, A Boy in Winter (2017) were longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her books have been published in eighteen languages.