Join us as we welcome Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Jessica Andrews to read from and discuss their new novels.

STARLING DAYS by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she's not about to jump but they don't believe her. Her husband, Oscar is called to pick her up.

Oscar hopes that leaving New York for a few months will give Mina the space to heal. They travel to London, to an apartment wall-papered with indigo-eyed birds, to Oscars oldest friends, to a canal and blooming flower market. Mina, a classicist, searches for solutions to her failing mental health using mythological women. But she finds a beam of light in a living woman. Friendship and attraction blossom until Oscar and Mina's complicated love is tested.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's first novel HARMLESS LIKE YOU won the Author's Club First Novel Award, a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize. In the USA it was a New York Times Editors' Choice and an NPR 2017 Great Read. Her work has appeared in Granta, the Guardian and the Paris Review among other places.

SALTWATER by Jessica Andrews

When Lucy wins a place at university, she thinks London will unlock her future. It is a city alive with pop up bars, cool girls and neon lights illuminating the Thames at night. At least this is what Lucy expects, having grown up seemingly a world away in working-class Sunderland, amid legendary family stories of Irish immigrants and boarding houses, now-defunct ice rinks and an engagement ring at a fish market.

Yet Lucy's transition to a new life is more overwhelming than she ever expected. As she works long shifts to make ends meet and navigates chaotic parties from East London warehouses to South Kensington mansions, she still feels like an outsider among her fellow students. When things come to a head at her graduation, Lucy takes off for Ireland, seeking solace in her late grandfather's cottage and the wild landscape that surrounds it, wondering if she can piece together who she really is.

Lyrical and boundary-breaking, SALTWATER explores the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, the challenges of shifting class identity and the way that the strongest feelings of love can be the hardest to define.

Jessica Andrews writes fiction and poetry. She grew up in Sunderland and has spent time living in Santa Cruz, Paris, Donegal, Barcelona and London. She has been published by the Independent, Somesuch Stories, AnOther, Caught by the River, Shabby Doll House and Papaya Press, among others. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing classes and co-runs literary magazine The Grapevine, which aims to give a platform to under-represented writers.

Join us as we welcome Yara Rodrigues Fowler to read from and discuss her debut novel, STUBBORN ARCHIVIST, with Bridget Minamore.

When your mother considers another country home, it’s hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can’t pronounce your name, it’s hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it’s hard to understand your place in the world.

This is a novel of growing up between cultures, of finding your space within them and of learning to live in a traumatized body. Our stubborn archivist tells her story through history, through family conversations, through the eyes of her mother, her grandmother and her aunt and slowly she begins to emerge into the world, defining her own sense of identity.

Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in a Brazilian-English household in London, where she still lives. She has a BA in English from Oxford and an MA in Comparative Literature at UCL. Yara is a trustee of Latin American Women’s Aid, the only refuge run for and by Latin American women in the UK and has also given workshops on gender and power to teenage girls with feminist organisation Fearless Futures. Yara’s writing has been published in Litro, and the UCL Publishers’ Prize, and she received a Special Mention in the 2015 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Competition.

Bridget Minamore is a British-Ghanaian writer from south-east London. She is a poet, critic, essayist, and journalist, often writing about pop culture, theatre, race and class. She has been chosen as one of Speaking Volumes’ 40 Stars of Black British Literature, has read her work internationally, and is the lead tutor for the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. TITANIC (Out-Spoken Press), her debut pamphlet of poems on modern love and loss, was published in May 2016.