Join us to celebrate the book launch of Alston Moor, published by Goldsmiths Press. This a polyphonic novel creating a portrait over time of one of England’s most remote landscapes, a landscape now suffering degradation and threatened by arson and wildfire.

In 1548, Isabel and her father, together with the priest in this poorest of parishes, grapple with the chaos of the Protestant reformation. Enacted in far away centres of power, the reforms turn daily life and religious traditions upside down. Statues, images of the saints, rosaries, prayer books are burned. Massesfor the dead are denounced as the corrupt practice of a money-grubbing clergy. Isabel holds fast to the old ways. But at her summering ground she encounters the more-worldly cattle drovers who fall into rebellious talk. Surely there are no protestant sympathisers in her parish.

Today, in equally tumultuous and disruptive times, a grieving Elizabeth and her scientist team attempt to right the ecological wrongs and profligacy of the industrial era – the pollution, the age-old tradition of peat cutting for fuel, the draining of peat bogs for cultivation and the spread of sitka spruce plantations. The peatlands offer a climate life-line and there is no time to lose. The novel interrogates how society confronts crisis, whether through science, faith or ritual,and how landscape bears witness to human struggle across the centuries.

We are delighted to be hosting the launch of the award winning science-fiction writer Anne Charnock’s new work of deeply stirring experimental fiction. Alston Moor is an elegiac, beautiful novel that combines historical and speculative fiction with ecological thought and serves as a powerful ruminations on landscape and futurity.

Anne will be conversation with fellow celebrated writer Sandra Newman, author of Julia: a novel, The Men and other incredible works. There will be readings, discussion and some mingling afterwards.

Our Speakers:

Anne Charnock is the author of four novels. She won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Dreams Before the Start of Time. Her debut, A Calculated Life, was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award. During her career in foreign journalism, her reports appeared in New Scientist and The Guardian.

Sandra Newman was born in America but has lived in Germany, Russia, Malaysia, and England. Her professions have ranged from academia to professional gambling. She studied Creative Writing at UEA, and her first novel, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her second novel, Cake, was published by Chatto in 2007. In 2009 she co-wrote How NOT to Write a Novel, and in 2019, The Heavens. Her third novel, The country of Ice Cream Star 2014, was nominated for the 2015 Folio Prize and the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her next novel, The Men, was published in 2022, with Julia, Sandra’s feminist retelling of George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, following soon afterward. She currently lives in New York.

This is a free event, but please do RSVP using the link below. Drinks and snack will be provided but you may also bring your own if you wish.