When a water-borne blight hits a small community on a remote Scottish island in C.A. Fletcher’s Dead Water, its initial inconvenience soon grows into a nightmarish ordeal as the outwardly harmonious fabric of the community is irreversibly torn apart.
Meet wooden automata, sentient weather, talking cats, compellent inks and a host of colourful characters in Neil Williamson’s Queen of Clouds, the prequel to his debut novel The Moon King. When Billy Braid is sent to the Sunshine City of Karpentine, he never expected to find love, get embroiled in Machiavellian intrigues or become instrumental in saving the city from misbehaving weather.
Lorraine Wilson’s debut novel This Is Our Undoing, biologist Lina Stephenson has found refuge in the remote Rila Mountains. When an old enemy dies, Lina’s dangerous past resurfaces. Trapped with her vulnerable sister alongside the dead man’s family, Lina is facing pressure from all sides. But the forest is hiding its own threats and as a catastrophic storm closes in, Lina realises there’s a high price to be paid to save her family.
About the event
Running time: 60 minutes
Venue: Pleasance Theatre
Price: £10/£8 concession - In Person - or £6/£4 concession - Live Stream - (plus 50p booking fee)
This event takes place in person and is broadcast via live stream.
About the authors
Charlie’s a screenwriter and a novelist and he lives on the edge of Edinburgh. He’s been lots of other things too – temperamentally unsuitable bar staff (grumpy, not talkative), temporary laundry manager in a big London hotel, detail-shop car-wash jockey in Reno, Nevada, despatch runner for a film company in Soho, food critic (not a very good one, basically never met a meal he didn’t like. Or at least eat too much of), national newspaper columnist (Scotland’s a nation, right?) and a film editor at the BBC. He studied Literature at St Andrews University, and later took a grad degree in Screenwriting at USC.
Follow C.A. Fletcher on Twitter @CharlieFletch_r or visit his website.
Neil Williamson is a writer and musician from Glasgow. If you know Glasgow, you'll understand why he writes about the weather so much. In addition to his novels, he's responsible for seventy odd short stories, some of which you can find in his collections, The Ephemera and Secret Language. His work has been shortlisted for British Science Fiction Association, British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards.
Follow Neil Williamson on Twitter @neilwilliamson or visit his website.
Lorraine Wilson lives by the sea in Scotland, writing speculative fiction set in the wilderness and heavily influenced by folklore. She is fascinated by the way both mythology and our relationship with the natural world act as mirrors of ourselves and lenses for how we view others, and with a heritage best described as a product of the British Empire, she is drawn to themes of family, trauma, and belonging. After gaining a PhD in behavioural ecology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland she spent several years as a conservation researcher in odd corners of the world before turning to writing. She has been stalked by wolves, caught the bubonic plague, and once had a tree frog called ‘Algernon’ who lived in her sink.
Follow Lorraine Wilson on Twitter @raine_clouds or visit her website.