Join us for an event with local authors Sally Bayley and Alice Jolly as they discuss literature and Sally's latest book, 'Pond Life'.

Pond Life

In a digital age, Pond Life asks who will record the lives that do not appear on screen. Enter Edith Cull, unmarried and working as an occasional cover teacher. Edith's life lacks biography. Her chief pleasure and source of excitement is the cinema. Encouraged by on-screen fantasies, Edith attaches herself to the local chemist, the stalwart Mr. Jarvis. In the same town lives Dorothy Fortescue married to the noble Henry. Behind her manor walls, Dorothy lives out another form of spectral existence. As lady of the manor, Dorothy summons 'Pond Man' who arrives to build her a garden pond; and upon the surface of her pond Dorothy projects the all the scenery of her boredom and grief. The lives of these two women reflect and illuminate one another and in a crucial moment of misreading their lives intertwine...

Sally Bayley

Sally Bayley is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Sally is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches on the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford.

Alice Jolly

Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her writing has been awarded the PEN/Ackerley Prize, an O Henry Prize and the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, and has been longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. She teaches on the Creative Writing Masters at Oxford University. She is the author of 'The Matchbox Girl'

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