An evening with Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron is a legendary traveller and one of Britain’s most respected men of letters; we are delighted to share an evening with this fascinating writer.

Thubron’s long list of accolades spans decades and disciplines, from classic travel literature to fiction. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award, the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award and many more, Thubron has nevertheless remained a largely elusive figure to the reading public. You can imagine our delight at  having him with us in St Andrews to discuss his great body of work and celebrate the release of Night of Fire, his first novel in 15 years.

Ranked amongst The Times’ top 50 greatest postwar British writers it is little surprise that, with this latest novel, Thubron has delivered a searing, poetic masterpiece. Thubron is an acute observer of cultures, of changing environments and of people’s psyches and in his latest novel, he succeeds in translating these insights into enchanting prose.

In Night of Fire the passions and obsessions in a dying house loom and shift, from the hallucinating drug addict in the basement to the landlord training his telescope on the night skies. The tenants’ stories range through an African refugee camp, a Greek Orthodox sanctuary and the cremation-grounds of India: memories that start to criss-cross and mutate in a novel of lingering beauty and mystery.

“The reliable storyteller we needed in place of Marco Polo. His stock in trade makes him invaluable to us” – Independent on Sunday

**Please note the VENUE FOR THIS EVENT HAS CHANGED ~ Colin Thubron will now be speaking in the Bookshop**