Join writer Michelle Lovric and Dean of Southwark Mark Oakley to celebrate the release of Michelle's latest book, The Puffin.

Event timings:

Doors open: 18:15

Event start: 18:30

Audience Q&A: 19:15

Book signing: 19:30

Event end: 20:00

Join Dean Mark Oakley and best-selling writer Michelle Lovric for an evening of black humour and dark histories as we celebrate the release of her latest book, The Puffin. This standalone sequel to her acclaimed novel The Book of Human Skin joyously breaks the rules of literary and historical fiction, fusing the politics of coercion, surrender and resistance with a subversive take on faith, language and consciousness. The novel spans a vividly imagined 19th-century Venice, the New World and the Lofoten Islands. Featuring a cast of unforgettable characters – not all of them human – The Puffin’s fiendishly gripping plot is full of comically sadistic twists and turns. Step inside a world of villainy and Venetian decadence and see what happens when a poetical priest and an irreverent writer trade ideas on bad sex, good faith and how to write both.

The Puffin

Venice, 1817. A city humiliated under the heel of the Habsburg empire.

A disfigured traitor. A milliner who recasts biographies with her extraordinary hats. An assassin with a cruel trademark. A poet. Two intersecting love triangles. And a stowaway bird from the remote islands of the north.

When a fingerless nobleman seizes a puffin that arrives mysteriously at the Rialto Market, his single act of appropriation triggers a cascade of events that will embroil all the central characters.

Alva the milliner craves freedom from Venice’s Habsburg occupiers. Meanwhile Senzadita, the nobleman-spy, craves Alva herself and feels entitled to her. Alva’s brother Favaloro imports cod and smuggles sedition from the Lofoten Islands. Alva and Favaloro join the revolutionary sect of the Carbonari, plotting to ransom an Austrian princess. And both fall in love with Tommaso, who walks with a crutch but whose poetry overthrows hearts.

Betrayals shatter all their plans and desires. A secret assassin known as the Hyena begins to pick off the Carbonari. Tommaso falls prey to a ruthless seducer. Alva must sacrifice herself to save Favaloro. Instead, Tommaso’s denounced. The Habsburgs send the poet to the scaffold. The puffin’s fate too hangs in the balance. The assassin’s identity is shockingly revealed. But is it too late?

You won’t have read anything like The Puffin before. Be prepared to be moved, entertained and also perhaps shocked.

Some reviews for The Book of Human Skin

This book is fabulous - funny, horrific, subversive ... I don’t think I have enjoyed anything as much since Perfume. ― Joanne Harris

A witty, exciting, over-the-top page-turner which becomes increasingly addictive... Quite unlike anything else around – and all the better for that. ― Daily Mail

Colourful, intoxicating and brutal. ― She

It’s years since I enjoyed a novel this much - or felt such strong envy of an author for having the breadth and richness of imagination to create such a world’ ― A.N. Wilson

Lovric’s dark tale of familial woe and colonial intrigue will imprint upon the Dear Reader’s skin in the way only a classic can. ― Christy Ann Conlin, Globe and Mail

Michelle Lovric

Michelle Lovric was born in Sydney and now lives between London and Venice. She has published eleven novels set in Venice and Southwark. She’s known for the gothic darkness of her humour and her unflinching explorations of faith in extremis as well as medical curiosities like Holy Anorexia, the compulsion to eat human hair and anthropodermic bibliopegy. Her adult novels include The Book of Human Skin (a TV Book Club pick) and The Remedy (longlisted for the Women’s Prize). She co-authored the bestselling My Sister Milly (about the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler) and a play about the 2017 London Bridge terror attack which was performed in Southwark Cathedral on the first anniversary. She is currently finishing a children’s book set in Venice and Southwark Cathedral in 1905.

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