Gliterary Lunches - Food For Thought

Sex and Stravinsky
by Barbara Trapido

The Author

Award winning Barbara Trapido is back with a vibrant, profound and, as always, irresistible novel. She is the author of five novels including Brother of the More Famous Jack (winner of a Whitbread special prize for fiction) and most recently the Travelling Hornplayer (shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread Novel Award. She was born in South Africa and lives in Oxford.

Praise for Barbara Trapido

'Her readers hold her in desperate affection and her fiction inspires an almost compulsive desire to share ... A seductive writer'
Libby Brooks, The Guardian

The Plot

Brilliant Australian Caroline can command everyone except her own ghoulish mother, which means that things aren't easy for Josh and Zoe, her husband and ballet-loving twelve-year-old daughter. Josh has bizarre origins in a South African mining town, but now teaches mime in Bristol. Meanwhile, on the east coast of Africa, Hattie Thomas, Josh's first love, has taken to writing girls' ballet books from the turret of her fabulous house. From far and wide, they are drawn together; drawn to Jack's place. Beautiful, mysterious Jack, the one-time housemaid's child who has journeyed via Mozambique, Senegal and Milan, and is back exactly where he started. In its mix of people from different spheres, the book throws up the complexity, cruelty and richness of the global world and comes together like a dance; a masquerade in which things are not always what they seem.

Gillespie and I
by Jane Harris

The Author

Jane Harris was born in Belfast and brought up in Glasgow. Her debut novel, The Observations - published in over twenty territories - was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and she was also shortlisted for the British Book Awards Waterstone's Newcomer of the Year and the South Bank Show Times Breakthrough Award. She lives in London with her husband Tom.

Praise for Jane Harris

'The Observations is an astonishing imaginative feat, brilliantly written in bravura, bawdy style ... what makes it such a thrilling read is Harris's lively language and sheer love of words.'
Jackie McGlone, Scotland on Sunday

The Plot

As she sits in her Bloomsbury home, elderly Harriet Baxter sets out to relate the story of her acquaintance, nearly four decades previously, with Ned Gillespie, a talented artist who never achieved the fame that she maintains he deserved. Featuring a memorable cast of characters, infused with atmosphere and period detail, and shot through with wicked humour, Gillespie and I is a powerful and haunting second novel from one of today's most striking new voices.