Kit de Waal

CANCELLED: This event has now been cancelled. If you had made a booking, we will be contacting you separately via email about different options.

Kit de Waal is the award-winning author of My Name is Leon, The Trick to Time, and Supporting Cast. Her work has been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and My Name is Leon won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Now she brings us a childhood memoir set to become a classic: stinging, warm-hearted, and true.

Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder sometimes all at once and believed the world would end in 1975. Meanwhile, her father stuffed barrels full of goodies for his relatives in the Caribbean, cooked elaborate meals on a whim and splurged money they didn’t have on cars, suits and shoes fit for a prince. Both of her parents were waiting for paradise. It never came.

Caught between three worlds, Irish, Caribbean and British in 1960s Birmingham, Kit and her brothers and sisters knew all the words to the best songs, caught sticklebacks in jam jars and braved hunger and hellfire until they could all escape.

Without Warning and Only Sometimes is the story of an extraordinary childhood. It is the story of a girl who grew up in a house where the Bible was the only book on offer, and how she went on to discover a love of reading that inspires her to this day.

We hope you can join us for an evening hearing more from Kit on this remarkable new memoir.