Relationships are hard, even without adding in complications.

In Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives under the Sea, Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. Miri can feel Leah slipping from her grasp. Memories of what they had before – the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers – only remind Miri of what she stands to lose. Living in the same space but suddenly separate, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had might be gone.

Paul Tremblay’s latest novel The Pallbearer’s Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unforgettable and unsettling friendship. When Art Barbara started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals, he never expected the coolest girl in the school would join. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool, bringing along her camera to take pictures of the corpses. Decades later, Art tries to make sense of their weird friendship and some strange happenings by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she’s making cuts.

Chaired by Tracy Fahey

About the event

Running time: 60 minutes

Price: £6/£4 concession (plus 50p booking fee)

This event is live on Zoom.

About the authors

Julia Armfield is a fiction writer with a Master’s in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. She lives and works in London with her girlfriend who is fine and their cat who is garbage.

Follow Julia Armfield on Twitter @JuliaArmfield or visit her website.

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of Survivor Song, The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock and A Head Full of Ghosts. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

Follow Paul Tremblay on Twitter @paulGtremblay or visit his website.