From Colchester Football Stadium to Grayson Perry’s A House for Essex, stopping off en route at the Museum of Chelmsford and Anglia Ruskin University, while keeping excellent company with John Crace, Kes Gray, Jonathan Wilson and others, this year’s Essex Book Festival is well and truly underway.
We have a wonderful line-up of authors and events on the menu for this week. We are particularly excited about our three library events with three Sunday Times best-selling authors:
Lesley Kara who will be talking about her latest psychological thriller Troublemaker, as heard on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, at Gray’s Library on Tuesday;
Leading geopolitics expert and journalist Tim Marshall who will be talking about his new edition of Prisoners of Geography at Waltham Abbey Library on Wednesday night;
And finally, the wonderful multimillion-copy bestselling author B.A Paris who will be talking about her latest nail-biting book When I Kill You at South Woodham Ferrers Library on Thursday night.
Tim’s event is already sold out but there are tickets available for Lesley Kara and B.A. Paris.
We’re also really excited to have Siân Hughes, author of the Booker-longlisted and The Authors Club Best First Novel, Pearl, come and talk about her new novel No Such Thing as Monday at Colchester Samaritans Community Centre on Saturday afternoon, following on from Sarah Perry’s event.
No Such Thing as Monday is a full of heart, raw and exhilarating book, that confirms Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.
Anywhere But Here
Talking of people at their most vulnerable, and looking forward to later in the month, we are delighted to be teaming up with Chelmsford Cathedral to welcome award-winning investigative journalist and former Home Office insider Nicola Kelly to the Cathedral on Saturday 20 June to talk Festival Chair Peter Donaldson about her new book Anywhere But Here: How Britain’s Broken Asylum System Fails Us All.
Situated on the beaches and the ports, in the hotels, the courtrooms and the detention centres where the futures of those affected unfold, this is a searing investigation into one of the most urgent issues of our time.
In the words of Caroline Lucas, author of Another England:
‘Beautifully written, bold and brave, ‘Anywhere but Here’ painstakingly separates the reality from the all too frequently toxic rhetoric. A copy should be on every desk not just in the Home Office, but throughout government. A brilliant and hugely timely book.’