Salley Vickers

*This is rescheduled from December 2019. If you have already booked a place, it is still valid.*

The new novel from Salley Vickers, Grandmothers is the story of three very different women and their relationship with the younger generation: fiercely independent Nan, who leads a secret life as an award-winning poet when she is not teaching her grandson Billy how to lie; glamorous Blanche, deprived of the company of her beloved granddaughter Kitty by her hostile daughter-in-law, who finds solace in rebelliously taking to drink and shop lifting; and shy, bookish Minna who in the safety of shepherd’s hut shares with her surrogate granddaughter Rose her passion for reading. The outlook of all three women subtly alters when through their encounters with each other they discover that the past is always with us and that we go on learning and changing until the very end.

Grandmothers is a beautifully observed, sometimes subversive, often tender and elegiac novel, and it is a joy to welcome Salley to Edinburgh to tell us about it.

‘Vickers sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand. She’s a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists.’ Philip Pullman