Our second event celebration National Bookshop Day!  Kathy will be in conversation with Deirdre O’Byrne about her career and reading from her new novel from And Other Stories, Dear Evelyn. The story starts between the wars in a working-class South London street where the sensitive Miles seeks out literature in Battersea Library. There he meets Evelyn and there follows an unconventional seventy year love story which moves from the terraced streets of South London to war service in Africa and the cloying bounty of new-built suburbs.

Kathy Page’s work has been praised by Sarah Waters and Margaret Atwood and we are pleased to welcome her over from Canada.

Kathy Page is a British writer, now living in Canada. One of her earlier books, The Story of My Face,  grew out of a writer’s residency at Nottingham Prison. That book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for women’s fiction.

Dr Deirdre O’Byrne is Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, a storyteller and an festival and events organiser.  She also works on the staff here at Five Leaves Bookshop.

Review comments about Dear Evelyn

“captivating” Toronto Star

“With tender, ruthless insight, Kathy Page exposes the secret machinations of a longstanding marriage in her brilliant new novel, Dear Evelyn. Caught in our own brief liaisons, we watch with longing (and horror) as Harry and Evelyn move from breathless first love to the divorce that death inevitably exacts. However you are coupled, you will never look at your partner the same way again.”  Merilyn Simonds, author of  The Convict Lover

“The seven ages of man, and woman, are traced against the tremendous historical and social shifts of a switchback century…quietly hums with emotional charge. The war years, with Harry fighting in North Africa and Evelyn struggling with a young child at home, are especially vivid, but this watchful, empathetic chronicle retains sensitivity through the less obviously eventful decades of home-building and child-rearing….Page’s watchful and very British tale remains devoted to both and forgiving to the end. A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.” Kirkus (starred review)

Admission: £5 including tea and scones. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk