Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature, will be reading from and signing copies of her debut novel, The Truth about Julia (Allen & Unwin, 2016), at Waterstones St Margaret’s Street store in Canterbury on Thursday 30 June at 6.30pm, as part of an author’s talk involving three new voices in fiction.
At the event, entitled ‘Three Novelists in a Café’, Anna will be joined by Nadim Safdar talking about his love story Akram’s War (Atlantic Books, 2016) and Dave Sanger on his new book All Their Minds In Tandem (Quercus Books, 2016).
In Anna’s novel The Truth about Julia, Julia White – a beautiful and intelligent young woman – blows up a coffee shop in central London, killing twenty-four people before turning herself in to the police. Apart from publishing a potentially ironic manifesto, she refuses to explain the reasons for her actions. Clare Hardenberg, an investigative journalist, has been commissioned to write a biography of Julia but at the start of the novel she is on her way to prison herself. What has brought her to this point?
Nadim Safdar was picked by The Guardian as one of the 10 new writers to watch in 2016. Akram’s War tells the story of Akram Khan, who one night walks out of his house towards an appointed time and place where he is supposed to detonate a bomb that will end his life and that of many innocent bystanders. As he wanders through the town he encounters Grace, whose life has been marred just as his has, forming an unlikely closeness borne of need and necessity. Delicately drawn, Akram’s War is an honest and shocking kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary Britain, and of the ways in which the twists and turns of fate can scar and mark a life.
Dave Sanger has worked at Faber and Faber and lives near Dover. His book All Their Minds in Tandem is set in 1879 in New Georgetown, West Virginia. A mysterious figure by the name of ‘The Maker’ has entered this small community and, almost immediately upon doing so, started entering the minds of the townsfolk. As we enter these characters’ lives, and lightly tread our way through their brains, their bedrooms, their backstories and beyond, we will see what it is they all hope for and hide – and learn just why The Maker has chosen to meet them.
Tickets for this event cost £3, redeemable off the book purchase, and are available from Waterstone’s Canterbury. Further details of the event are available at: www.waterstones.com/events/three-novelists-in-a-caf/canterbury-st-margarets-street-15816