Thursday 29th July 7.30pm VIA ZOOM.
To celebrate the lovely honour of being the Crime Writer Association’s Bookshop of the Month for July 2021, we wanted to celebrate crime writing! So we are delighted that thriller writer & journalist Lucy Atkins will be Zooming in to discuss her fourth novel, the critically-acclaimed thriller ‘Magpie Lane’. Lucy will be joined by wonderful writer William Shaw, with his interviewing hat on.
This will be a kind of ‘Open Book Group’ style event – 2 of our book groups will be reading ‘Magpie Lane’, we are very happy to invite non book-group members to join the event but we strongly recommend that you read the book first, as there may be SPOILERS and we can’t have that with a thriller!
Lucy Atkins is an award winning British author and journalist. She has written four novels, most recently the critically acclaimed MAGPIE LANE. Many of her books are published internationally and THE NIGHT VISITOR (2017) has been optioned for television. Lucy teaches on the Creative Writing Masters degree at the University of Oxford. She was a judge for the 2017 Costa Book Awards , and is a book critic for The Sunday Times. She has lived in Boston, Seattle and Philadelphia, and is now based in Oxford, with her family and her dog.
About Magpie Lane
When the eight-year-old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers.
As Dee looks back over her time in the Master’s Lodging – an eerie and ancient house – a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother.
But is Dee telling the whole story? Is her growing friendship with the eccentric house historian, Linklater, any cause for concern? And most of all, why was Felicity silent?
Roaming Oxford’s secret passages and hidden graveyards, Magpie Lane explores the true meaning of family – and what it is to be denied one.
