March 13th
7pm
Join us for a joint book launch! From Sophie Ward, the Booker Prize-longlisted author of Love and Other Thought Experiments, comes a masterful and gripping thriller about truth, silence, and the weight of the past. Meanwhile, Margot Douaihy presents her masterful debut, Scorched Grace in which Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this "unique and confident" debut crime novel (Gillian Flynn).
The Schoolhouse
Isobel lives an isolated life in North London, where she works at a nearby library. She feels safe, so long as she keeps to her routines and doesn’t let her thoughts stray too far into the past. But a newspaper photograph of a missing local schoolgirl and a letter from her old teacher send her spiraling and bring back the trauma of what happened years ago, when she was a pupil at The Schoolhouse.
The Schoolhouse was a 1970s experimental school where the usual rules did not apply. Life there was a dark interplay of freedom and adventure, violence and fear. It was here that Isobel learned that some truths should never be revealed. But try as she might, the truth is coming for Isobel, and everything and everyone she has tried to protect are now at risk.
Scorched Grace
Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this "unique and confident" debut crime novel (Gillian Flynn).
When Saint Sebastian's School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding New Orleans community are thrust into chaos.
Patience is a virtue, but punk rocker turned nun Sister Holiday isn't satisfied to just wait around for officials to return her home and sanctuary to its former peace, instead deciding to unveil the mysterious attacker herself. Her investigation leads her down a twisty path of suspicion and secrets, turning her against colleagues, students, and even fellow Sisters along the way. And to piece together the clues of this high-stakes mystery, she must at last reckon with the sins of her own past.
An exciting start to a bold series that breathes new life into the hard-boiled genre, Scorched Grace is a fast-paced and punchy whodunnit that will keep readers guessing until the very end.
We recommend that guests wear masks on the night.
Sophie Ward is an actor and a writer. She has published articles in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Spectator, Diva, and Red magazine, and her short stories have been published in the anthologies Finding a Voice, Book of Numbers, The Spiral Path, and The Gold Room. Her book A Marriage Proposal: The Importance of Equal Marriage and What it Means for All of Us was published as a Guardian short eBook in 2014. In 2018, Sophie won the Pindrop short story award for "Sunbed." She has a degree in philosophy and literature and a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, on the use of narrative in philosophy of mind.
Margot Douaihy is a Lebanese American originally from Scranton, PA, now living in Northampton, MA. She received her PhD in creative writing from the University of Lancaster in the UK. She is the author of the poetry collections Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, Scranton Lace, and Girls Like You. She is a founding member of the Creative Writing Studies Organization and an active member of Sisters in Crime and the Radius of Arab American Writers. A recipient of the Mass Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship, she was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, Aesthetica Magazine’s Creative Writing Award, and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation’s Hemingway Shorts. Her writing has been featured in Queer Life, Queer Love; Colorado Review; Diode Editions; The Florida Review; North American Review; PBS NewsHour; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; and elsewhere. Margot teaches creative writing at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, NH, where she also serves as the editor of the Northern New England Review. As a coeditor of the Elements in Crime Narrative Series with Cambridge University Press, she strives to reshape crime writing scholarship, with a focus on the contemporary, the future, inclusivity, and decoloniality.
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