Tim Winton
Tuesday 26th June, 8pm
Please note the new venue for this event is Christ Church, Julian Road. If you have booked places we will be in touch very shortly to confirm this. Internationally bestselling master storyteller, Tim Winton joins us on a rare visit from his native Australia with a tender and heartbreaking new novel, The Shepherd’s Hut. It […] See more »
Historian Antony Beevor
Wednesday 27th June, 8pm
Award-winning historian Antony Beevor comes to talk about one of the great airborne battles of WW2 in his new work, Arnhem. Allied Operation Market Garden was a bold concept and a costly failure, with large casualties and German reprisals lasting until the end of the war. Join us for a gripping evening, as Beevor reconstructs […] See more »
Pickling Hero Thom Eagle
Thursday 28th June, 8pm
Thom Eagle, chef, writer, and Young British Foodies-nominated pickler, will talk and lead us through a pickling and fermenting tasting this evening. Here at the bookshop, we are huge fans of his joyous food writing in his debut, First Catch – beautiful hymn to a single early spring meal. A cookbook without recipes, this is […] See more »
On the Trail of Charles Dickens – a Literary Walk
Sunday 1st July, 10.30am
The details of Dickens’ early visits to Bath are shrouded in mystery and legend, and although Bath features prominently in The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens seems to have loathed the place, describing it as a ‘mouldy old roosting place … which the dead have succeeded in rising and taking.’ Join us for a literary walk around […] See more »
Towards Understanding: A Translated Fiction Reading Group
Monday 2nd July, 7.30pm
The Man Booker International winning novel Flights interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we […] See more »
Amy Sackville
Tuesday 3rd July, 8pm
A novel of brilliance, imagination, intrigue and style about the painter Velazquez and his royal subject and benefactor, King Philip IV of Spain. Painter to the King charts Velasquez’ time at the court of King Philip IV of Spain, a court collapsing under the weight of its own excess. This is a portrait of Diego Velazquez, […] See more »
Honey and Co. Bookshop Supper
Wednesday 4th July, 8pm
The Honeys are the affectionate Israeli husband and wife team behind the tiny, award-winning Honey & Co empire. Sarit and Itamar are a magnetic presence – they entertain, they inform and they create a special kind of culinary magic. Honey & Co At Home is the highly anticipated third book that follows hot on the […] See more »
A.M. Homes
Monday 9th July, 8pm
A.M Homes returns with signature humour and psychological accuracy, to tell thirteen stories exposing the heart of an uneasy 21st-century America. In tales of a family obsessed with the surfaces of their lives, or the story of a shopper who suddenly finds himself nominated to run for President, she explores our attachments to each other […] See more »
Chef Will Bowlby of Kricket
Wednesday 11th July, 8pm
Head chef and co-founder of the award-winning, Kricket, Will Bowlby is one of Britain’s most talented young chefs. His passion began with his grandmother’s East African curry lunches and led him to working with Jamie Oliver, Rowley Leigh and at Mumbai’s famous Khyber. He takes the many layered Indian palate and creates authentic dishes with […] See more »
Will Eaves Launch for Murmur
Wednesday 11th July, 8pm
An evening to celebrate the publication of Will Eaves’ brilliant latest novel, Murmur. Taking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and a rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we […] See more »
An Evening with Matt Haig
Wednesday 18th July, 8pm
The world is messing with our minds. Rates of stress and anxiety are rising. A fast, nervous planet is creating fast and nervous lives. We are more connected, yet feel more alone. And we are encouraged to worry about everything from world politics to our body mass index. How can we stay sane on a planet that makes us mad? […] See more »
Tim Parks on Consciousness
Thursday 26th July, 8pm
Most philosophers believe that our experience is locked inside our skulls, an unreliable representation of a quite different reality outside. Colour, smell and sound, they tell us, occur only in our heads. Yet when neuroscientists look inside our brains to see what’s going on, they find only billions of neurons exchanging electrical impulses and releasing […] See more »
Sarah Langford on In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law
Wednesday 5th September, 8pm
Sarah Langford is a barrister. Her job is to stand in court representing the bad, the vulnerable, the heart-broken and the hopeful. She must become their voice: weave their story around the black and white of the law and tell it to the court-room. These stories may not make headlines but they will change the lives […] See more »
Exclusive: Sebastian Faulks Launch for Paris Echo
Tuesday 11th September, 8pm
Standard £20 place includes a copy of the book. ‘Faulks is beyond doubt a master’ Financial Times Here is Paris as you have never seen it before – a city in which every building seems to hold the echo of an unacknowledged past, the shadows of Vichy and Algeria. American postdoctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan […] See more »
Andrew Miller Book Launch for Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
Thursday 13th September, 8pm
Andrew Miller’s Pure was a stunning historical novel rightly garlanded with many prizes. His latest novel Now We Shall be Entirely Free is written in richly evocative, luminous prose, with the grip of a thriller. One rainswept winter’s night in 1809, an unconscious man is carried into a house in Somerset. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain’s disastrous […] See more »
Kate Atkinson
Wednesday 19th September, 8pm
Join us for an evening with prizewinning author Kate Atkinson. In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But […] See more »
Yotam Ottolenghi & Tara Wigley
Tuesday 25th September, 8pm
He’s the undisputed master of the multi-ingredient recipe, but Yotam Ottolenghi also does simple brilliantly. He is in Bath with his co-author Tara Wigley this evening to talk about and cook from the stunning new cookbook we have all been wishing for: a taste of Ottolenghi made easy. Ottolenghi Simple showcases Yotam’s standout dishes that will suit whatever […] See more »
An Evening with Ben Macintyre
Wednesday 3rd October, 8pm
On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the […] See more »
Launch of Tim Liardet’s New and Selected Poems
Thursday 4th October, 8pm
In Arcimboldo’s famous seventeenth-century Mannerist portraits, the sitter’s face is composed of organic matter. In subordinating a mixture of elements into an unrelated whole, imagination can transform the medium of expression itself. Tim Liardet’s Arcimboldo’s Bulldog: New and Selected Poems spans nine of his ten award-winning collections and adds new poems, fresh produce, reconfiguring his life’s work […] See more »
Hannah Fry on How Algorithms will Define our Future and Why We Should Learn To Live With It
Tuesday 9th October, 8pm
Welcome to the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions – in healthcare, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go even who we send to prison. So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want? You are accused of a […] See more »
King Edward School 2018 Anthology Launch
Wednesday 10th October, 7.30pm
‘The images are alive, the language sings, wonderful ideas bounce off every page’ – Anna Wilson The Anthology 2018 is the sixth annual collection of poetry, short stories and art work from the talented young writers and artists of King Edward’s School, Bath. This year’s guest editor, author Anna Wilson, provided inspiration for verse themed around My […] See more »
Oliver Bullough on Moneyland
Wednesday 24th October, 8pm
The investigative journalist and author of The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame be Great, Oliver Bullough, takes us on a journey into the universe of the lawless, stateless superrich, where third-world kleptocrats rub shoulders with terror financiers, captains of industry and western heads of state. From the ruins of Kiev to the Bond-villain lairs of Knightsbridge and Central Park, something […] See more »
An Evening with Don Paterson
Wednesday 31st October, 8pm
Aphorisms have been described as ‘the obscure hinterland between poetry and prose’ (New Yorker) – short pithy statements that capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades. In The Fall at Home, master of the form Don Paterson brings the best examples from his two previous volumes together with ingenious new material relevant […] See more »
Launch of Carrie Etter’s Poetry Collection Weather in Normal
Thursday 8th November, 8pm
The Weather in Normal explores the poet’s loss of her hometown of Normal, Illinois through her parents’ deaths, the sale of the family home, and the effects of climate change, a collection at once innovative, emotive, and deeply resonant. Taking the temperature of memory, Etter’s deeply moving fourth collection maps family and personal history against the […] See more »
The Eve of the Armistice Centenary with Allan Mallinson
Saturday 10th November, 8pm
With Fight to the Finish, Allan Mallinson offers a new and original portrait month by month on “The War to End War,” in which complexities are never lost or sacrificed for the sake of simplicity. Join us on the eve of the Armistice Centenary as he describes the extraordinary story of what happened in those frantic last days and […] See more »
Max Hastings on Vietnam
Tuesday 27th November, 8pm
From the best-selling author of All Hell Let Loose comes a masterful chronicle of one of the most devastating international conflicts of the 20th century and how its people were affected. Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive conflict since the Second World War, first creating a humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for […] See more »
An Evening with James Runcie
Tuesday 9th April 2019, 8pm
“There is no denying the winning charm of these artfully fashioned mysteries” – The Independent. Crime fiction is a treasured genre for us here in Bath; from the gritty to the cosy, we love it all. It’s therefore an absolute delight to welcome none other than James Runcie to the bookshop to discuss Quickstep, a prequel […] See more »
James Hawes Book Launch for The Shortest History of England
Tuesday 16th April 2019, 8pm
James Hawes wrote the authoritative, and highly enjoyable bestseller The Shortest History of Germany. His brief yet rewarding book examined Germany’s place in a continent on the throes of upheaval. Garlanded with superb reviews, it is an exhilarating book to read. His highly anticipated The Shortest History of England is equally excellent. Comprehensive, yet still concise, the book […] See more »