Join us for an evening of conversation about fiction writing from the two acclaimed authors, Laura Barnett and Claire Adam. Chaired by the writer and reviewer, Elizabeth Morris.

Laura Barnett – BIRTHS, DEATHS & MARRIAGES

From the Number One bestselling author of THE VERSIONS OF US comes a story of six lifelong friends and one extraordinary year. Told from multiple perspectives, Laura Barnett’s new novel, BIRTHS DEATHS & MARRIAGES is an era-spanning, globe-trotting novel about love, friendship, and how to stay at least relatively sane in an ever crazier world. It’s about a group of friends growing older, a pair of sometime lovers finding their way back to each other, and about kindness and joy.

Zoe, Al, Rachel, Rob, Yas and Indie are six friends who were inseparable at university, yet as the years unfold, they have gone their separate ways. Rob is a history teacher, with a string of broken relationships behind him. Yas is a surgeon and very much her own woman. Indie is married and a successful coffee entrepreneur. Rachel is a stay at home mum with two children. Al, widowed young, is about to take over his father’s funeral business. When Rob’s engagement party throws the gang together, passions are reignited and old connections and resentments resurface. Over the next twelve months, there will be, among the friends, a birth, a marriage, and a death – but whose?

Claire Adam – LOVE FORMS

Six years after her award-winning debut GOLDEN CHILD, published by Sarah Jessica Parker in the US and named one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Changed the World‘, Claire Adam returns with an emotionally absorbing and stunning novel, LOVE FORMS. A literary novel looking at motherhood, family life and the pull of distant lands, it has already been picked as a 2025 highlight by the Sunday Times and Irish Times.