Join local author Martine McDonagh are she launches the paperback edition of her latest title, Narcissism for Beginners. Martine will be conversing with Myriad author Ruth Figgest about their new novels, literary inspirations and pathways to publication. Ruth’s debut novel, Magnetism, was published earlier this year. Both novels are sharply observed and darkly comic, and investigate the most fundamental of family ties—the parent-child relationship.

In Martine’s novel, Narcissism for Beginners (longlisted for the 2018 People’s Book Prize and the 2017 Guardian Not The Booker Prize), we meet Sonny Anderson as he tips headlong into adulthood. Kidnapped at age five by his father, Guru Bim, and brought up in a commune in Brazil and then in California, he finally musters the courage to travel to the UK in an attempt to find his mother and learn the truth about his childhood.

Ruth Figgest was was born in Oxford but grew up in the USA. Her stories have been listed for the Bridport and other prizes, and broadcast on Radio 4. Magnetism is set in the American mid- and south-west, and unfolds a love-hate mother-daughter relationship over more than 50 years against a backdrop of sweeping social change, awkward family gatherings, relationship disasters, and plastic surgery.

Tickets are £3 (and include a glass of wine on arrival). They can be booked on the Waterstones website here. Do come and join us.