Join Warwick Books at Warwick Words for an afternoon of two halves: The Real Jane Austen with famed biographer Paula Byrne and Fashion in the Time of Jane Austen with Sarah Jane Downing who recently appeared with Dan Cruikshank on TV.

Jane Austen’s world was revolutionary in every sense. The American colonies, then France, overthrew their kings and established republics, and revolution as well as refinement  was the background to her writing.  Egalitarian ideals were also reflected in the fashions of the period, which adopted designs inspired by the period of classical democracy: light, flowing and diaphanous.

Paula Byrne, who is an acknowleged expert on Jane Austen will talk about her new biography The Real Jane Austin, which is due out in 2012, and Sarah Jane Downing will give an illustrated talk on how fashion was shaped by the cultural ideals of the time. A super afternoon for all Jane Austen fans.

The event takes place on Friday 1 October at the Unitarian Chapel at 3.00pm.

Tickets £8 (Includes afternoon tea).

We are very pleased to announce that John Sutherland and John Crace will be coming to Warwick Words as an unmissable duo as part of our ‘Meet The Author’ series.  John Sutherland will be talking about his new book ‘Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature’, and this promises to be one of the most entertaining talks you have heard in a long while if one of his previous books ‘Curiosities of Literature’ is anything to go by.  ‘Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature’ is a rich and varied exploration of the human condition across the centuries in which John turns up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising or curious artefacts that literature has to offer day by day throughout the year. Particular emphasis will be laid on the dates of the Warwick Words Festival itself, so this will be of added interest. John’s brief CV tells you an awful lot about him………..’John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at UCL (”emeritus” being Latin for “scrapheap” and “Northcliffe” journalistic shorthand for “you cannot be serious”). He currently teaches at the California Institute of Technology and is the author of twenty-odd books, mainly on books of a more important kind than his own.’

His partner at the event John Crace will be talking about his new book which is due out at Warwick Words `Brideshead Abbreviated The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century’.  John, the creator of the Guardian’s Digested Read column, hilariously summarises the great – and not so great – classics of modern literature…His Guardian pieces have rightly acquired a cult following. Each week fans avidly devour his latest razor-sharp literary assassination, while authors turn tremblingly to the appropriate page of the review section, fearful that it may be their turn to be mercilessly sent up.

Now he turns his critical eye on the classics of the last hundred years, offering bite-sized summaries of everything from Mrs Dalloway  to Possession via Lolita and Midnight’s Children. Those who have never quite got round to reading Ulysses  will be delighted to find its essence distilled into a mere four paragraphs. Those who have never quite got on with Seven Pillars of Wisdom will be pleased to find it hilariously parodied in an easily swallowable 752 words. And those who find all such books intimidatingly highbrow will be relieved to find that they can also discover, between the covers of this book, John Crace’s take on the likes of Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling.

Witty, occasionally a bit cruel, the two Johns are ideal foils to each other and this promises to be a real highlight of the Festival, and not to be missed….

The talk has been re-scheduled from the times shown in the hard copy version of the Warwick Words programme and now takes place on Monday 4th October at 7.30pm and is in the Bridge House Theatre.

…one of the best ways to get to know a country is to take yourself to the less touristy, less obvious destinations. And let’s face it: things don’t get much less touristy than Slough…As staff travel writer on “The Times” since 1997, Tom Chesshyre had visited over 80 countries on assignment, and wondered: what is left to be discovered? He realised that the answer might be very close to home. In a mad adventure that took him from Hull to Hell (actually a rather nice holiday location in the Isles of Scilly), Tom visited secret spots of Unsung Britain in search of the least likely holiday destinations.

He got to know the real Coronation Street in Salford, explored Blade Runner Britain in Port Talbot, discovered that everything’s quite green in Milton Keynes, met real-life superheroes and many a suspicious landlady, and watched a football match with celebrity chef Delia Smith in Norwich. With a light and edgy writing style Tom peels back the skin of the unfashionable underbelly of Britain, and embraces it all with the spirit of discovery.

A comic novel, a surreal parody of children’s adventure stories aimed at adult readers in which, unnervingly, the time-travelling characters are aware of their place in the narrative, and the author treats them with curmudgeonly disdain. The plot, creaky and with more holes than a Swiss cheese, is the vehicle for the quirky and unusual humour which is packed onto every page. Our young-adult heroes, Betty, Daniel, Ricky, Amy and their dog Whatshisname, think that they live life on the edge, dominated by secret passwords and meetings. They have a tetchy relationship with Whatshisname, who might just be cleverer than they think; they also have a tetchy relationship with the author, who definitely isn’t. The characters sometimes become uncontrollable. Ricky walks out of the book at one stage and, at another critical point, Daniel demands that his character should wear spectacles. A feeble attempt by the author to kill off his characters fails miserably. This book for adults is crammed with humour, occasionally a little cheeky, never offensive, but always unashamedly silly.

‘The Little Stranger’ and ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ by
Sarah Waters and Shirley Jackson

Reviewed by Tamsin Rosewell

The idea of the sacred or haunted place is as old as the human mind. The earliest ghost stories recorded are from the earliest known writings; clearly, the Haunted House has a significant hold within the human psyche. Haunted house stories continue to have a power to both fascinate and disturb us, even after several thousand years, and it is hardly surprising that this genre sees a steady stream of new additions. What separates the ‘Ghost Story’ genre from ‘Horror’ is very particular : the author has an ability to set the spine tingling, to chill you with moments of real fright and images that stay with you night after night – but never to bring the ghost centre stage. A good ghost story will open with scenes that are almost mundane. The sense of fear creeps up on the book’s inhabitants and the reader so slowly that it is at first barely noticeable. The invasion of the ‘paranormal’ into the ‘normal’ calmly rips the lid off ordinary life, shaking beliefs and the accepted behaviour of people and objects like an earthquake. 

 The two ‘Haunted house’ novels reviewed here written 50 years apart and on different continents – the Hill House of Jackson’s novel is firmly located in American ‘pleasantville’, while Waters’ Hundreds Hall of The Little Stranger nestles in our own cosy Warwickshire.

 In The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith) returns to 1947, where her previous novel Night Watch opened. This time she tells a story of a moldering class system drowning in its own decaying heritage. The story is set at Hundreds Hall, a once splendid Georgian Mansion in Warwickshire. Here a widow and her two grown-up children are struggling to cope with the management of their estate in post war depression.

 Dr Faraday, a local family doctor, ...

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