IBW Event: Ben Aaronovitch Book Signing - 20th June

We are extremely excited to be welcoming legendary author Ben Aaronovitch to Mostly Books on Thursday 20th June from 12pm.  

Sunday Times bestselling author of the Rivers of London series, Ben Aaronovitch, is embarking on an exclusive tour of Independent Bookshops to celebrate Independent Bookshop Week and to coincide with the release of his new novella, The October Man.  Ben will be visiting Abingdon as part of the tour.

Trier is famous for wine, Romans and for being Germany's oldest city. So when a man is found dead with, his body impossibly covered in a fungal rot, the local authorities know they are out of their depth. Fortunately this is Germany, where there are procedures for everything.

Enter Investigator Tobias Winter, whose aim is to get in, deal with the problem, and get out with the minimum of fuss, personal danger and paperwork. With the help of frighteningly enthusiastic local cop, Vanessa Sommer, he's quick to link the first victim to a group of ordinary middle aged men - and to realise they may have accidentally reawakened a bloody conflict from a previous century. But the rot is still spreading, literally and with the suspect list extending to people born before Frederick the Great solving the case may mean unearthing the city's secret magical history.

. . .

so long as that history doesn't kill them first

Email us to pre-order your copy of The October Man.  

Ben Aaronovitch was born in London in 1964 and had the kind of dull routine childhood that drives a man either to drink or to science fiction. He is a screenwriter, with early notable success on BBC’s legendary Doctor Who, for which he wrote some episodes now widely regarded as classics, and which even he is quite fond of. After a decade of such work, he decided it was time to show the world what he could really do, and embarked on his first serious original novel. The result is Midnight Riot, the debut adventure of Peter Grant.

Register for free via Eventbrite.

Ben will be signing books at Mostly Books from 12pm on Thursday 20th June. Please arrive in good time for the signing to ensure you get the chance to meet Ben, he is a very popular author and we expect a crowd.  Please note that registration for the event cannot guarantee meeting Ben.

IBW Event: Katherine Rundell in Conversation with Lucy Mangan - 20th June

Award-winning author, Katherine Rundell, will be at Mostly Books on Thursday 20th June talking to Guardian journalist and author, Lucy Mangan, about why we should be reading more children's books. 

In 2016, Katherine Rundell - Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and prize-winning author of five novels for children – found her understanding of the world she lived in upturned: by Brexit, Trump, a sweep across Europe towards nationalism and insularity, terrorist attacks.  Literary fiction did not help her understanding, so instead, she turned to old narratives, told for the benefit of children and adults and anyone who would listen.

This Independent Bookshop Week (IBW), join Katherine Rundell – author of The Good Thieves, Lucy Mangan, Journalist and author of Bookworm; a Memoir of Childhood Reading, for an inspiring conversation about how children’s books ignite, and can re-ignite, the imagination; how children's fiction, with its unabashed emotion and playfulness, can awaken old hungers and create new perspectives on the world.

Katherine Rundell is the bestselling author of five children's novels, for which she has won the Costa Children’s Book Award, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize amongst many others. She spent her childhood in Africa and Europe before taking her degree at the University of Oxford and becoming a Fellow of All Souls College. As well as writing, she studies Renaissance literature; and is learning, as a direct result of writing her new stunning adventure story The Good Thieves (June 2019), to fly on the flying trapeze.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start.  Tickets are £12.50 and include a drink and a copy of Katherine's essay written exclusively for IBW called Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.  

Copies of The Good Thieves and some of Katherine's backlist plus Lucy's new book, Bookworm; a Memoir of Childhood Reading will be available to purchase on the night.

Tickets are available from Mostly Books and from EventBrite.