Join us for a Q&A and book signing with award-winning Irish authors Donal Ryan (We Are The Kings) and Molly Aitken (Bright I Burn).

We're thrilled to be hosting a Q&A and book signing with Irish Book Award winner Donal Ryan in conversation about his new novel Where Are the Kings alongside Molly Aitken, bestselling author of Bright I Burn.

Date: Wednesday, 9 September

Time: 7-8.30pm

Tickets: £10

Venue: The Grove Bookshop, 10 The Grove, Ilkley, LS29 9EG. If demand exceeds our shop capacity, the event may move to a larger local venue and you will be notified.

Tickets can be purchased in the shop or here via Eventbrite.

Refreshments will be served.

Refunds available, minus the Eventbrite fee, up to 7 days before the event.

Our Guests

Donal Ryan is a novelist and short story-writer from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. He has won several national and international awards for his fiction, and has twice been nominated for the Booker Prize. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. Donal is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, where he lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children. The Queen of Dirt Island is his seventh book and was an instant number one bestseller in Ireland.

Molly Aitken is the author of Bright I Burn, a Royal Society of Literature Encore Prize shortlisted novel, and The Island Child. Her prize-winning short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and Ploughshares.

About the books:

Where Are the Kings by Donal Ryan

Jack is just eleven years old when he bikes furiously down the hill after his mother’s car, desperate to reach her before she reaches the lake. What happens next cannot be undone.

Jack’s life changes forever just as he enters those pivotal years when he will transition from boy to man, when nothing makes sense at the best of times. Suddenly he is thrust into a family he’s never known: his mother’s parents, ferocious Nana and temperamental Grandad; her brothers, his gruff uncles Haulie and Theo and the irascible JJ, who’s young enough to be Jack’s cousin; and her sister Rose, whose mere presence ignites every atom in his changing body. Yet this big, chaotic, loveable family is hiding something from Jack—something about the mother who disappeared into the lake and the father who was institutionalized after her death. How can a boy with so many questions, in a family with so many secrets, understand the person he is becoming? Without his mother to ground him on earth, will Jack spin off into the stars?

A heartbreaking, wisecracking ode to family and the complexity of love, this novel is Donal Ryan’s most powerful and beautifully written story yet.

Bright I Burn by Molly Aitken

In thirteenth-century Ireland, a woman with power is a woman to be feared.

When a young Alice Kyteler sees her mother wither under the constraints of family responsibilities, she vows that she won't suffer the same fate. Soon Alice discovers she has a flair for making money, and builds a flourishing business. But as her wealth and stature grow, so too do the rumours about her private life. By the time she has moved on to her fourth husband, a blaze of local gossip and resentment culminates in an accusation that could prove fatal.

Inspired by the first recorded person in Ireland to have been condemned as a witch, Bright I Burn gives voice to a woman lost to history, who dared to carve her own space in a man’s world.

Reviews:

Where Are the Kings:

‘Beautiful, hilarious and completely gripping.’ (Rachel Joyce)

'No one gets inside the heart like Donal Ryan.' (Kit de Waal)

‘Donal Ryan conjures up characters so solid, so complete and authentic, it immediately feels as though you have known them for your entire life.’ (Joanna Cannon)

'Tender, funny, mysterious and hopeful... a flawless gem.' (M L Stedman, Sunday Times bestselling author of A Far-flung Life and The Light Between Oceans)

'Warm, irreverent and desperately humane.' (Jan Carson, author of Few & Far Between)

'So arresting, so captivating...a book that makes you look at the world differently, while at the same time cranking open your heart and letting the whole world pour in.' (Annie Mac)

Bright I Burn:

"Gripping." (The New Yorker)

"An imaginative, very stylishly written, and entertaining book." (Irish Times)

"Blistering. . . . Beguiling. . . . A fiercely intelligent and often surprising examination of a woman's choices and their consequences." (Publishers Weekly)

"Aitken's beguiling lyricism reminds us of the deeper truths that linger in the shadows of the riverbank, at the edge of the woods." (Karen Powell, author of Fifteen Wild Decembers)

"Spellbinding . . . A stunning rendition of one fierce Irish woman's voice pitted against the patriarchal power constructs of Medieval Ireland." --Anya Bergman, author of The Witches of Vardø

"Aitken is a distinct, singular, stunning voice in historical fiction, and Bright I Burn is a triumph. It took my breath away." --Jenny Musta

Description supplied by the event organiser.