In celebration of his latest book ‘Underworlds’, renowned image-collector Stephen Ellcock joins us in conversation with musician Beth Orton.

Underworlds

A darkly evocative compendium of images exploring natural, constructed, imaginary and subconscious underworlds, curated by renowned image collector and social media figure Stephen Ellcock.

From the burrows and secret bunkers beneath our feet to imagined hellscapes and surrealist dreamscapes, the disquieting, alarming and wonderful visuals span natural and constructed subterranea and imagined and subconscious worlds.

A personal introduction by Stephen together with contextual chapter introductions establish the key themes, while supplementary texts elucidate essential concepts, historical events and figures.

Thought-provoking literary, philosophical and spiritual quotations punctuate the intriguing images. Together, the images and authoritative text highlight the interplay between the real and the imagined, revealing how the real has fed our fears and hopes and informed our imagination – and conversely, how our imagination has depicted the esoteric, the abject and the unknown.

Tickets are £5 which is redeemable against a copy of the book on the night. Available here.

We’re so excited to welcome Lex Croucher to West End Lane Books to celebrate the release of the third book in their Regency series, ‘Trouble’. Lex will be joining us on the 27th of July from 7pm to discuss the book, and we’ll have time for signing afterwards too!

There's a new governess at Fairmont House, and she's going to be nothing but trouble. Emily Laurence is a liar. She is not polite, she's not polished, and she has never taught a child in her life.

This position was meant to be her sister's - brilliant, kind Amy, who isn't perpetually angry, dangerously reckless, and who does (inexplicably) like children. But Amy is unwell and needs a doctor, their father is gone and their mother is useless, so here Emily is, pretending to be something she's not. If she can get away with her deception for long enough to earn a few months' wages and slip some expensive trinkets into her pockets along the way, perhaps they'll be all right.

That is, as long as she doesn't get involved with the Edwards family's dramas. Emily refuses to care about her charges - Grace, who talks too much and loves too hard, and Aster, who is frankly terrifying but might just be the wittiest sixteen-year-old Emily has ever met - or the servants, who insist on acting as if they're each other's family. And she certainly hasn't noticed her employer, the brooding, taciturn Captain Edwards, no matter how good he might look without a shirt on .

. . As Fairmont House draws her in, Emily's lies start to come undone.

Can she fix her mistakes before it's too late?

Tickets cost £5 which will be redeemable against a copy of ‘Destination Fabulous’ on the night. Please note that you will not receive a physical ticket for this event and will instead be added to our guest list.

Tickets are available here: https://www.welbooks.co.uk/shop/p/an-evening-with-lex-croucher

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

James Mayhew reads from his award-winning new book, Once Upon a Tune, and will be performing a concert earlier in the day at 3pm. No tickets are required at this free event, and copies of the book will be available to purchase on the day.

More information can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-family-festival

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

Music tells stories, and many great composers were inspired by myths and folktales. James Mayhew’s unique way of presenting classical concerts has him joining musicians to narrate and illustrate live on stage during performances; the illustrations are projected onto a screen so that audience can watch the pictures grow in time to the music – this afternoon’s inspiration is the brothers Grimm Bremen Town Musicians accompanied by a quartet from Fantasia Orchestra.

More information can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-family-festival

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

Polly Toynbee’s prosperous ancestors, committed left-wing rabble-rousers railing against injustice, could never claim to be working class, settling instead for the affluent life of academia and journalism. So where does that leave their ideals of class equality? Through a colourful, entertaining examination of her own family, containing everyone from Jessica Mitford to Bertrand Russell and featuring ancestral home Castle Howard as a backdrop, the journalist, author, and broadcaster explores the myth of mobility, the guilt of privilege, and asks for a truly honest conversation about class in Britain.

Polly Toynbee will be in conversation with Georgina Godwin.

More information and tickets can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-litfest

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

Hayward’s biography of the England football team, based on interviews with past and present players and coaches, including Alan Shearer and Gareth Southgate, gives a vivid portrait of the team’s story from its 1872 inception to its preparation for the 2022 World Cup, reliving highlights such as the 1966 World Cup victory and the low points - including when the players were obliged to give the Nazi salute in 1938. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand England football and why it means so much to so many.

Paul Hayward will be in conversation with Daniel Gallan.

More information and tickets can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-litfest

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

We do not control what we eat. Every mouthful is informed by the subtle tweaking and nudging of a complex global food system. It sustains us but it is also killing us and the environment, risking our food security. In this book, Dimbleby, founder of the Leon restaurant chain, government adviser and author of the radical National Food Strategy, takes us behind the scenes, revealing what shapes the modern diet, why the global food system is leading us into disaster and what can be done about it.

Henry Dimbleby will be in conversation with Sheila Dillon.

More information and tickets can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-litfest

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

This book is a candid, unsparing and darkly funny memoir of Webb’s far from ordinary childhood; with his mother’s undiagnosed psychological problems, his step-father’s untreated ones and his spartan Quaker boarding school, life was challenging. Drawing on themes of mental health, masculinity, grief and childhood guilt, Webb’s coming of age story portrays both personal and national dysfunction set against the grey backdrop of Britain in the 1970’s. A time of strikes, inflation and IRA bombings. A time when societal attitudes were very different to how they are now.

Justin Webb will be in conversation with Dame Jenni Murray.

More information and tickets can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-litfest

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. As Marsh navigates the transition from doctor to patient, he is haunted by past failures and describes his frustration with illness and old age. He wonders about the mysteries of the brain, the beauty of the natural world and his love for his family. And Finally is ultimately not so much a book about death, but a book about life and what really matters in the end.

Henry Marsh will be in conversation with Hugh Pym.

More information and tickets can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-litfest

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

With Harry and Meghan’s departure from royal life and a cloud hanging over Prince Andrew, the intricate relationship between modern courtiers and royal principals has been exposed to global scrutiny. The question of who is entrusted to guide the royals has never been more vital and the task those courtiers face has never been more challenging. Low reveals complex characters, shifting values and evolving ideas about the future of the institution. This is the story of how the monarchy really works at a pivotal moment in its history

Valentine Low will be in conversation with Simon Lewis.

More information and tickets can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-litfest

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions.

In his book, Philps shows how Stalin created his own reality by silencing foreign reporters during WWII and forcing them to reproduce Kremlin propaganda. In the gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel, foreign war correspondents enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and young women to employ as translators - and to share their beds. Some of these women were brave dissenters whispering the reality of Soviet life to reporters and were punished. This story lifts the lid on Stalin’s operation to control what the western allies’ reporters knew of his regimes policies.

Alan Philps will be in conversation with Michael Binyon.

More information and tickets can be found: https://www.promsatstjudes.org.uk/2023-litfest

Local author Michael Solomon will join us on the 15th June to celebrate the launch of his book ‘The Scapegoat’.

Michael V. Solomon was born in Romania. His grandfather, an important political figure between the two World Wars, was detained by the Communist regime for almost two decades. Like Ovid, his punishment had come without even the semblance of a trial. After university, Solomon started his career in Constanta –Tomis, the city where Ovid had been exiled. Years later he could leave Romania, and after working as a civil engineer, travelling throughout Europe, America and the Middle East, he moved to London at the start of the millennium. With new insights, he composed a first version of The Scapegoat. During the pandemic he re-thought and revised it, and this version has emerged into liberty.

Publius Ovidius Naso (43BC – 17/18AD), known as Ovid, was notable as much for his disgrace as for his poetry. By pleasing his contemporaries, befriending patricians and subtly mocking the Emperor Augustus, he was transformed from a provincial outsider to Rome’s darling – and, for some, its corrupter. Banished without trial to a remote port on the Black Sea, he continued to write. The Scapegoat follows Ovid on his fictitious journey out of exile. In the year 14AD, Ovid is in his sixth year of banishment in Tomis, at the Black Sea he resists joining a conspiracy against the Emperor and hopes that his friends in Rome will obtain his pardon. However, when Augustus dies later that year, the conspirators, terrified that their treasonous plan will come to light, move Ovid to a garrison along the Danube where they intend to kill him. He manages to escape, is caught, but instead of being killed, he is sent to Rome and is turned into an outlaw – and a scapegoat. To discover who was Ovid the man, Michael V. Solomon travelled in his footsteps, seeking the same landscapes today that Ovid found two thousand years ago while trying to imagine Ovid’s journey out of exile.

Author Anna Murphy will be joining us to discuss her new book Destination Fabulous on Wednesday 14th June. Anna will be in conversation with journalist Jo Elvin.

At 50, Anna Murphy feels more visible than at any point in her life to date.

Her new book, Destination Fabulous, is the toolkit you need to embrace your age and celebrate the wisdom and inner beauty that comes with it. It's not about impossible goals. It's not about running a marathon (unless you want it to be).

It's not about denying the ageing process, nor attempting to erase its signs. It's not about letting everything go, either. It's about balance.

It's about the possible and the present. And it's about the future you want. How do you lift and smooth your face naturally? Should you go grey, and, if so, how? How do you deal with menopause? Anna combines her knowledge from years of writing about fashion and beauty with her openness to the alternative ways of thinking found in disciplines such as yoga and Chinese medicine.

For her natural is always best. As for fashion, Anna knows better than anyone that this can be the ultimate route into surfacing the true you. She shares all her tricks for finding your way to a wardrobe that will transform not just the way you look but the way you feel.

And she shares the highlights of her conversations over the years with super-stylish agers such as Iris Apfel and Miuccia Prada. How have they got it right?Drawing on the wisdom of writers as diverse as Pema Choedroen and Eckhart Tolle, Dorothy Rowe and Osho, Nora Ephron and Mary Oliver, she writes about saying goodbye to what doesn't serve you and welcoming what does; about forging relationships that work for you as well as others; and about finding your purpose, whether in your personal or professional life. Discover how the bumps on her road have helped her find her way to her true path.

Her hope is that this book will help you to find yours, too.

Tickets cost £5 which will be redeemable against a copy of ‘Destination Fabulous’ on the night. Please note that you will not receive a physical ticket for this event and will instead be added to our guest list.

Tickets are available here: https://www.welbooks.co.uk/shop/p/annamurphy

We are excited to announce that bestselling author, Jonathan Coe will be joining us on November 3rd to talk about his new novel Bournville at 7pm.

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family. In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades.

Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave.

As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before? Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself.

Tickets are £5 per person which is redeemable against the book on the night. If you cannot make the event you can pre order a signed and dedicated copy of Bournville below.

Brian Bilston will be returning to West End Lane Books on 13th October to celebrate the publication of his new poetry collection Days Like These : An alternative guide to the year in 366 poems. Tickets are £5 per person which is redeemable against the book on the night.

In this playful, innovative collection, Brian Bilston writes a poem to accompany every day of the year. Each poem is inspired by a significant - often curious - event associated with that day: from Open an Umbrella Indoors Day to the day on which New York banned public flirting; from the launch of the Rubik's Cube to the first appearance of the phrase, 'the best thing since sliced bread'. Perfect for reading aloud and sharing with friends, Days Like These: An alternative guide to the year in 366 poems will take the blues out of Monday, flatten the Wednesday hump, and amplify that Friday feeling.

A brilliant way to enliven every day of the year.

If you cannot make the event you can pre order a signed and dedicated copy of Days Like These. Follow the link below to pre order your copy or buy your ticket.

Join us for the publication day book launch for Robin Ince’s new book, Bibliomaniac : An Obsessive's Tour of the Bookshops of Britain. Tickets are £5 per person, redeemable against the book on the night.

Why play to 12,000 people when you can play to 12? In Autumn 2021, Robin Ince's stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox was postponed due to the pandemic. Rather than do nothing, he decided instead to go on a tour of over a hundred bookshops in the UK, from Wigtown to Penzance; from Swansea to Margate.

Packed with witty anecdotes and tall tales, Bibliomaniac takes the reader on a journey across Britain as Robin explores his lifelong love of bookshops and books - and also tries to find out just why he can never have enough of them. It is the story of an addiction and a romance, and also of an occasional points failure just outside Oxenholme.

If you cannot make it to the event you can order your own signed and dedicated copy of Bibliomaniac. Get your signed copy or ticket below.

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their offical bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions. All tickets for the Proms At St Jude's Litfest can be found by clicking this link:

Proms At St Jude’s Litfest Tickets

The third event on Sunday is from TV presenter and political columnist Steve Richards.

Was Harold Wilson a bigger figure than Denis Healey? Would David Miliband have become Prime Minister were it not for brother Ed?

Journalist and commentator Steve Richards looks at 11 Prime Ministers we never had, examining why they failed to make the final leap. Steve is perhaps best known for his political one-man show Rock ’n’ Roll Politics.

Former No 10 chief of staff Nick Timothy calls the book: “An insightful and entertaining work from one of our brightest and best writers and broadcasters.”

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their official bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions. All tickets for the Proms At St Jude's Litfest can be found by clicking this link:

Proms At St Jude’s Litfest Tickets

The second event on Sunday is from food writer Claudia Roden.

Claudia's delightful new book conjures up the spell cast by the Mediterranean and its influence on her life-long love of cooking. The Cairo-born and French-educated writer says: “The smell of garlic sizzling with crushed coriander takes me back to Egypt and the aroma of saffron and orange zest mingled with aniseed and garlic triggers memories of the Riviera.”

Like her earlier classic works, The Food of Italy, The Food of Spain and The Book of Jewish Food - a 25th anniversary special edition of which is now on sale - this new offering seamlessly blends culinary tales with recipes from a master of her craft.

Claudia is in conversation with BBC Food Programme presenter Dan Saladino whose new book Eating to Extinction laments the steady loss of the world's rarest foods.

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their official bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions. All tickets for the Proms At St Jude's Litfest can be found by clicking this link:

Proms At St Jude’s Litfest Tickets

The first event on Sunday is from novelist Charlotte Mendelson who will be talking about her latest release, The Exhibitionist.

A dazzling, hilarious, sad and sexy exploration of toxic marital and family dynamics, Charlotte's newest novel explores art and ego, stifled ambition and queer desire, sacrifice and freedom.

Novelist Sarah Waters calls the book “a devastating treat of a novel – funny, furious, dark and delicious”. Charlotte's earlier work earned much success. When We Were Bad was named book of the year by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times among others.

She is in conversation with Ham & High features editor Bridget Galton.

The date and time of this event has changed from Saturday 25th at 11.30 to Sunday 26th at 10am.

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their official bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions. All tickets for the Proms At St Jude's Litfest can be found by clicking this link:

Proms At St Jude’s Litfest Tickets

The first event of the weekend is from BBC Journalist, Jon Sopel.

This is a diary of an election like no other...

Jon, then BBC North America editor, followed Donald Trump on the extraordinary 2020 US presidential campaign trail. As the election heats up and a global pandemic sweeps in, challenging the very institutions of American politics, Jon shows us what really goes on behind the scenes at every key moment.

He is in conversation with Simon Lewis, director of communications at 10 Downing Street during Gordon Brown's time as Prime Minister.

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their official bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions. All tickets for the Proms At St Jude's Litfest can be found by clicking this link:

Proms At St Jude’s Litfest Tickets

The final event on Saturday is from Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja who will be speaking about their book Spike: The Virus v the People.

This acclaimed inside story of the Covid pandemic questions government assertions it “followed the science”. Jeremy, head of health research foundation the Wellcome Trust and an authority on infectious diseases, was one of the first to hear about a mysterious new illness in China and was later a key figure on the SAGE emergency committee.

Financial Times science columnist Anjana Ahuja has covered the outbreak extensively.

They are in conversation with BBC Heath Editor Hugh Pym who has been reporting on politics, economics and NHS finance for more than two decades.

We are proud to be partnering with the Proms At St Jude's Litfest as their official bookseller. Join us for a weekend of fantastic author talks and discussions. All tickets for the Proms At St Jude's Litfest can be found by clicking this link:

Proms At St Jude’s Litfest Tickets

The third event of the weekend is from prize-winning author, Francis Spufford.

In this powerful novel, Francis imagines the possible futures of five children killed in a wartime rocket attack on London. He lets them experience all the changes of the 20th century and live out their triumphs and disasters.

Ingenious and profound, critics have called it “full of warmth and beauty”, “a story of the everyday, the miraculous and the everlasting” and “a celebration of the gift of life”.

He is in conversation with Claire Berliner, who is a writer, editor and Head of Programmes at The London Library.

We are delighted to host Julia Paulette Hollenbery, author of The Healing Power of Pleasure: Seven Medicines for Rediscovering the Innate Joy of Being, in conversation with Monique Roffey, Costa Book Award Winner, author of The Mermaid Of Black Conch.

The Healing Power of Pleasure book is a manual for happiness and being human. Exploring trauma and healing, science and spirituality, relationships and the earth, this book is a step-by-step journey through 7 paradigm-shifting medicines, of Slow, Body, Depth, Relationship, Pleasure, Power and Potency.

Packed with insights and learnings from Julia’s life and career, The Healing Power of Pleasure takes readers through the seven ‘medicines’ of slowing down, embodying, deepening, relating, pleasure, power and potential.
Readers will learn how to harness their instinctual intelligence, delight in their body and enjoy truly fulfilling intimate relationships.
Through practical, somatic and breathing exercises, prompting questions and meditations, Julia teaches readers how to develop body awareness, manage emotions stored in the body and understand:
- the different kinds of love
- relationships
- sexuality
- pleasure as a source of nourishment and healing
The Healing Power of Pleasure is a book for anyone wanting to move beyond their daily challenges, ease their stressed mind and body, and rediscover the magic, mystery, sensuality and joy that is possible in everyday life.

Tickets are £5 per person, redeemable against the book on the night. A ticket also includes a complementary glass of wine. If you cannot make the event you can still order a signed copy of The Healing Power Of Pleasure and we can ship worldwide.

West End Lane Books are pleased to host Harriet Evans to speak about the her newest novel The Beloved Girls with author Lissa Evans on 17th May at 7pm.

A successful London barrister, Catherine Christophe, goes missing the day before her wedding anniversary. The clue to her disappearance, it seems, lies buried thirty years in the past.

Somerset, 1989. Janey Lestrange arrives to stay for the summer at the grand old house of the Hunter family. But something is wrong behind the beautiful façades of Vanes. Janey's childhood friend, Kitty Hunter, her brother and their eccentric parents - once so welcoming - do not seem to want her there.

It is only as the night of an ancient and mysterious family ritual looms closer that Janey comes to realise they need her . . .

Decades later, the tragic events of that unforgettable summer still cast the darkest shadow. Can the truth about what happened that night ever be brought into the light?

Tickets are £5, redeemable against the book on the evening. If you cannot make the event you can pre order a signed and dedicated copy of The Beloved Girls.

Elodie Harper will be joining us on 12th May to talk about her new book The House With The Golden Door - the second book in The Wolf Den trilogy. Tickets are £5 per person, redeemable from copies of the book on the night. Tickets also include a complementary glass of wine.

The life of a courtesan in Pompeii is glittering, yet precarious... Amara has escaped her life as a slave in the town's most notorious brothel, but now her existence depends on the affections of her patron: a man she might not know as well as she once thought. At night she dreams of the wolf den, still haunted by her past.

Amara longs for the women she was forced to leave behind and worse, finds herself pursued by the man who once owned her. In order to be free, she will need to be as ruthless as he is. Amara knows her existence in Pompeii is subject to Venus, the goddess of love.

Yet finding love may prove to be the most dangerous act of all. We return to Pompeii for the second instalment in Elodie Harper's Wolf Den Trilogy, reimagining the lives of the women from the town's lupanar.

The Jackson Lamb series by Mick Herron has been a runaway bestseller both in our shop and nationwide. We are thrilled to announce that Mick Herron will be returning to West End Lane Books once again ahead of the publication of Bad Actors on 11th May at 7pm. Mick will be in conversation with Sam Leith of The Spectator.

In MI5 a scandal is brewing and there are bad actors everywhere. A key member of a Downing Street think-tank has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, one-time First Desk of MI5's Regent's Park, is tasked with tracking her down.

But the trail leads straight back to Regent's Park HQ itself, with its chief, Diana Taverner, as prime suspect. Meanwhile her Russian counterpart has unexpectedly shown up in London but has slipped under MI5's radar. Over at Slough House, the home for demoted and embittered spies, the slow horses are doing what they do best: adding a little bit of chaos to an already unstable situation.

In a world where lying, cheating and backstabbing is the norm, bad actors are bending the rules for their own gain. If the slow horses want to change the script, they'll need to get their own act together before the final curtain.

Tickets are £5 per person which is redeemable against the book on the night. If you cannot make the event you can pre order a signed and dedicated copy of Bad Actors using the link below.

Join us on the evening of 3rd May to hear art curator Stephen Ellcock and musician Mat Osman discuss their new book England On Fire: A Visual Journey through Albion's Psychic Landscape.

This is a book about English art like no other. Forget the tired rogues' gallery of lords and ladies, forget the tall ships and haywains. These images cut to the heart of England's psychic landscapes to portray an Albion unhinged, where magic and rebellion and destruction are the horses to which the country is hitched.

On these fabled shores we are all castaways, whether our family has lived here for four thousand years or for four. Here you will find depictions of ancient trackways, chalk carvings and standing stones, of animal-masked community rituals, of streets set ablaze in protest, of occult dreams and psychedelic prophecies. There are over 200 images by artists ranging from William Blake, J.M.W.

Turner and Samuel Palmer to Paul Nash, Louis Wain, Bill Brandt, Derek Jarman and Ithell Colquhoun to present-day visionaries such as Paula Rego, Cathy de Monchaux, George Shaw, Jamie Reid, Matt Collishaw,Tacita Dean, Lina Iris Viktor, Yinka Shonibare, Nick Waplington, Dan Hillier, Nicola Tyson, Sutapa Biswas and Chila Kumari Burman. The mind-blowing selection of images is accompanied by short texts by Mat Osman, exploring magic and mazes, ghosts and gardens, shipwrecks and cities. These poetic renderings of a spectral isle, together with Stephen Ellcock's hallucinatory visual journey, reclaim Albion as an eternally inspiring and anarchic domain - an England on fire.

We are delighted to share that bestselling author and literary royalty Patrick Gale will be joining us on 1st April to discuss his new novel Mother’s Boy.

Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura's husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius.

As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work. MOTHER'S BOY is the story of a man who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight.

But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past.

We are very excited to announce that Professor Grace Lavery will be joining us on 23rd March at 7pm to speak about her autobiography, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Penis.

A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, a dance across genres, a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you’ve ever read before.

Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and a 100 per cent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. How could her story be straightforward when she is anything but? The telling of her tale is kaleidoscopic, wild and audacious: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a 1960s femmebot; she is targeted with anonymous letters from a mysterious cabal of clowns; she writes a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of QI (or is it vice versa?).

As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colours. The result is dazzling, unique and unforgettable. Startlingly funny and ruthlessly smart, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.

Tickets are £5 each which are redeemable from the book on the evening. Alternatively, if you cannot make it to the event click here to order your own signed and dedicated copy of Please Miss.