Waterstones and Myriad are delighted to invite you to the launch of Ruth Figgest’s debut novel, Magnetism, at Waterstones Eastbourne. Ruth will be in conversation with Umi Sinha, Myriad author of Belonging.

Mother and daughter Caroline and Erica are best of friends and worst of enemies.

Set in the American mid- and south-west, their story unfolds over more than 50 years against a backdrop of sweeping social change. Feisty and argumentative, they roll with the punches, surviving car crashes, awkward family gatherings, relationship disasters—and plastic surgery.

Sharply observed and darkly comic, Magnetism notches a riveting new path through this most fundamental of family ties.

Ruth Figgest was born in Oxford but grew up in the USA. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Sussex. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport prize five times and one of her stories, ‘The Coffin Gate’, was commissioned for broadcast on Radio 4.

Umi Sinha was born in the military hospital in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1952 to an English mother and Indian father. She grew up in India in the decade following Independence, when there was deeply held resentment against the British. She moved to Britain in 1968 during the backlash against the mass immigration of Asians who had been expelled from Uganda and Kenya. The experience of being an outsider looking for a place to belong, along with the impact of history – political and personal – on individual lives, is a major theme in her writing.

RSVP [email protected]