An evening with Salley Vickers & Ajay Close

Two phenomenal novelists share the stage on International Women’s Day to explore fictional families, their legacies and their secrets.

Salley Vickers and Ajay Close are celebrated for the nuance and psychological complexity of their novels, qualities in abundance in their latest works, Cousins  and The Daughter of Lady Macbeth. 

Since bursting onto the literary scene with her stunning and sensational debut, Miss Garnet’s Angel in 2000, Vickers’ popular novels have been a continual presence in bookshops up and down the country. Her novels, now onto her tenth, have been praised for their richly layered stories, that, alongside her imaginative plots and relatable characters, make her a much loved author of stunning capacities. Cousins is a subtle novel weaving darkness and light which takes us from the outbreak of World War Two to the present day, exploring the recurrence of tragedy, the nature of transgression, and the limits of morality and love.

Combining grace with gravity and wisdom with wit, this latest novel by Salley Vickers simply radiates soul. – Victoria Cooper

Novelist and dramatist Ajay Close has been listed for the Orange Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Her last, A Petrol Scented Spring was a riveting novel of repression, jealousy and love, and the struggle for women’s emancipation in Scotland. Now she’s back with a contemporary novel, The Daughter of Lady Macbeth.  Freya is desperate for a child, but knows little of her origins – her own mother refusing to share any details of her father. When she signs on at a fertility clinic she discovers a new capacity for deception. Lies and secrets unravel, it seems mother and daughter have more in common than either of them suspects.

‘Sensual, wise and raw, The Daughter of Lady Macbeth gets to the heart of what it means to be a mother, or wish you were.‘-Rosemary Goring