Author, playwright and downright inspiration Barney Norris will be in conversation with Jon about his new novel, The Vanishing Hours.

Skint Estate is the gritty, profound and darkly funny memoir from writer Cash Carraway, a first-hand account of life and death below the poverty line in austerity Britain. It’s a book about poverty, motherhood and survival.

“And was it always your ambition to live in a refuge, work in a peep show and become a single mum?”
In this extraordinary debut memoir, Cash Carraway details the day to day realities of living in poverty in the UK – staying in a women’s refuge whilst pregnant, working in peepshows and suffering impoverishment, loneliness and violence. Bringing poetry and humour to the starkest of circumstances, Cash’s heart-wrenching account is moving and inspiring in equal parts, told with dark wit and underscoring her extraordinary resilience.

Blunt, dignified and brutally revealing, Skint Estate takes Cash’s personal story and skilfully weaves it into a manifesto for change. With two-fingers up to the establishment, Cash takes us from council house childhood to single motherhood, working multiple jobs yet relying on food banks and temporary accommodation, finding lifelines in her love for her daughter, community and friendships.

Skint Estate is a call-to-action, shedding light on what life is like for people living in poverty in the UK today, and looking towards a better future.

‘Whenever someone attempts to silence me I always remember this: being able to survive in the conditions in which women like us are forced to live, means that we are resourceful and powerful in a way they’ll never be able to fathom. We fight to hold onto our dignity whilst living in the most undignified of situations. We are formidable creatures and when we own our power and collectively use it then we will channel it in a positive way to create change. I’m certain of that.’

 

Kerry Hudson grew up in all-encompassing poverty. Always on the move with her mother, she attended nine primary schools and five secondary schools, living in B&Bs and council flats. Twenty years later Kerry’s life is very different – she’s a prize-winning novelist who has travelled the world. ‘LOWBORN – Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns’ is Kerry’s exploration of where she came from, revisiting her roots, or lack of them to discover what being poor really means in today’s Britain, with a positive aim of raising awareness and inspiring change.
Tickets £5 online or in store.

Three skilled authors of high acclaim have agreed to come together for just one night to give us their take on modern Britain, exploring the relationship between past and future, truth and memory, dystopia and orthodoxy.
‘In Care of Wooden Floors’ Will Wiles had us marvelling at what the Guardian observed as “his eye for beauty” with a tale of perfection, frustration and solitude set in an unnamed oppressive post-soviet city. Plume brings us home to a more familiar landscape where the plumped and buffed surface of modern London belies an all-together darker, more chaotic and meretricious underside when two lives collide with shocking consequences, and catastrophe spirals upwards as well as down.

I Still Dream from expert fictional explorer James Smythe is described as “a haunting meditation on the implications of AI and what it means to live and die in the age of technology” by the bestselling writer of Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel. Here we meet a clever young coder who creates Organon, named after a Kate Bush track, that grows into an imperative companion and as the story travels forward into the future, it presides over the unimaginable – a possible collapse of society itself.

Somewhere wedged between those two momentous scenarios, we have Perfidious Albion, the phrase whose dictionary definition refers to ‘duplicity’ and ‘treachery.’ This can mean only one thing, and you can be sure that Sam Byers dishes up plenty of Brexitty political power play upon a hill of hitherto complacency, that builds into a battle for viral supremacy against a backdrop of dwindling values versus the gloss of social media. We can’t think of three books that better depict the blurring of truth with satire in the current day UK. Good luck to us all.

 

Drawing the body with a FEMALE GAZE
Join the brilliant artist Tallulah Pomeroy to discuss the art and stories in her brilliant illustrated book ‘A Girl’s Guide to Personal Hygiene’ in conversation with journalist Lauren Bravo ‘What Would the SPICE GIRLS do?’ Expect a bold, insightful and inspiring feminist conflab about bodies, and how we can portray our own truthfully.
Part of the FEMINIST BOOK FORTNIGHT 2019
Thursday 9th May, 7.30pm. Tickets £5 include wine and beer.

Putting the PSYCH into Psychological Thriller.

Former clinical psychologist, Bev Thomas’ novel ‘A Good Enough Mother’ is a dark and gripping exploration of the complex dynamic between a patient and a therapist, and a look at the responsibility and limitations of motherhood.
‘The Silent Patient’ by Alex Michaelides centres on a famous artist, Alicia, who one day shoots her husband in the head five times and then never speaks again. We follow Theo, her psychotherapist, who is determined to find out the reason for Alicia’s silence. Alex did a Post- Grad in Psychotherapy and spent time working in a secure psychiatric unit. Both authors will be in discussion with journalist Marisa Bate (author of ‘The Periodic Table of Feminism’) about how they put their knowledge into their gripping fiction.
Tickets £5

After the break-up of his band Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, Jim Bob goes in search of who he is, while constantly being reminded who he was. Whether singing in a disco-pop band, performing solo acoustic ballads, writing novels or acting in a musical, he will always be – Jim Bob from Carter.
At first Jim Bob views this as a burden and something to escape from but gradually he comes to accept and, eventually to celebrate, his past. Jim’s new book is the story of the extended gap year between the acrimonious break-up of Carter in 1997, their reformation in 2007 and split again in 2014.
Book signing and reading. Free event.