An Evening with Lars Mytting & Philip Hoare

Author of the bestselling Norwegian Wood, Lars Mytting, and the award-winning Philip Hoare join us in the bookshop for an evening of wood and water, spanning the battlefields of the Somme and the darkest corners of the ocean. Both Lars and Philip will discuss their latest books, which explore the human psyche and its interactions with the natural world.

Lars Mytting, ubiquitous in the UK with an outdoor, Scandinavian lifestyle has, across Europe, formed an impressive reputation as a novelist. This year marks the first time his fiction will be published in English, and we’re delighted to welcome him to the bookshop to celebrate The Sixteen Trees of The Somme, a sweeping tale of family ties, loss, and self-discovery. This poignant and elegant novel tells the tale of Edvard, an orphan who journeys from home to Shetland to the battlefields of France, all in an effort to uncover the mystery of his parents’ deaths. The Sixteen Trees of The Somme is sure to establish Lars one of the most prominent voices in translated contemporary fiction.

Philip Hoare joins us to celebrate the third and final work of his watery series comprising The Sea Inside; Leviathan, or The Whale; and his latest RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. In this book, Philip engages with tales human and animal and brushes up against figures from across history, all in an effort to chart the stories of those enchanted (or even, perhaps, maddened) by the sea. Pitched between the natural and the unnatural, this is a book that is beguiling, strange, and fluid as its subject.

Join us as Philip and Lars read from their work, do homage to the edges of land and water, mind and world, and explore the shared borders of their respectively beautiful writing.