chasing bawa

March seems to be a busy month in literary and publishing circles with lots of parties and events and I recently went to two lovely ones. Penguin Books kindly invited me to their annual Bloggers Night with readings from some of their authors. And wine, of course.

The Bloggers Night at Foyles was Penguin’s fourth event of its kind. I went to the first one as a guest, missed the second, returned for the third and fourth. It’s interesting to see the change in faces and blogging trends and one of the main reasons I go to these events is to catch-up with some of my blogging friends. This year I got to say hello to Annabel, Jackie, Hayley, David, Simon T and Dioni who I have known for around 4 years but don’t get to meet enough to chat about books. Lovely crowd and wonderful bloggers all. And I met Alex from Bookanista and Watermark Books in King’s Cross which has an incredible selection of titles and which you must all visit.

The other main reason is to hear the authors read from their new books, of course. One of the things I love about hearing authors speak is they finish what the blurb on their books set out to do. Sometimes I may not be taken by an unfamiliar author or book but after an author has finished a reading, my interest is often sparked and I rush out to get the book. In this case, it was Simon Wroe who captured what was funny so succinctly in his short reading of Chop Chop that I was instantly seduced.

There was a nice mixture of genres from historical to literary culminating in a performance by Will Self which was very Will Self from his new novel Shark. We also heard from M.J. Carter who read the beginning of her new novel The Infidel Stain, the sequel to her delightful The Strangler Vine. Rebecca Hunt read from her second novel Everland about two antarctic explorations separated in time. I love historical books about polar explorations after reading Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter so I should get stuck into this soon. Elizabeth Fremantle read from Sisters of Treason about the fate of Lady Jane Grey’s sisters – I didn’t realise she had any and I’m sure their lives must have been dramatic. Emma Healey read from Elizabeth is Missing tackling dementia and a missing girl from long ago, Livi Michael from Succession about Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, and Nina Stibbe from Man at the Helm about the hilarious consequences of a recently divorced mother and her three kids moving to a small English village in the 70s.

I’m particularly looking forward to reading Man at the Helm after hearing Stibbe read as it’s not the kind of book I would normally read but sounded hilariously charming but I’ll have to wait as it’s not out until August.

It was a wonderful evening and I came away with some books too – lucky me.

Everland by Rebecca Hunt
Chop Chop by Simon Wroe

And three books by Deborah Levy which I plan to read for #ReadWomen2014:
Things I Don’t Want To Know
The Unloved
Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography