Edinburgh Festival Gliterary Lunch, August 2026

The Daffodil Days
Helen Bain

The Author

Helen Bain works as a sub editor at the Financial Times (formerly at the Guardian, Vogue and Red), and holds two MA degrees from Birkbeck University in creative writing and modern/contemporary literature. She was chosen for The London Library Emerging Writer’s Programme 2020-21 and The Genesis Foundation Emerging Writers’ Programme 2022- 23.

She lives in Sussex but has spent much time in North Tawton, bell-ringing and beekeeping as part of her research.

The Daffodil Days is her first novel.

The Book

The Daffodil Days depicts a pivotal year in the marriage of 20th-century literature’s most infamous couple, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes,  witnessed by the people they lived among. It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of this enigmatic pair, refracted through the rich inner lives of a rural community caught – if only for a moment – in their light.

In the early 1960s, the people of North Tawton go about their days, catching glimpses of one another’s lives. There’s the local GP who knows more about his patients than he would sometimes prefer. There’s the young shop assistant at Kestrels, who understands that the ladies who come there for a new outfit sometimes hope to find a new self. There’s the tenant farm labourer, who rings the tower bells at the church three times a week.

Amid all these lives, a young couple move into focus. New to the town with their small daughter, they have escaped London for a quieter existence in the thatched house beside the church, Court Green. The life they intend to build here – out of second-hand furniture painted with hearts and flowers, and expertly cooked suppers for weekend guests – will be a good and happy one.

Praise for Helen Bain

‘This deeply researched and utterly convincing debut is an astonishing achievement’ The Guardian

Photography copyright Sarah Weal

The Jewel Keepers
Sara Sheridan

The Author

Sara Sheridan has written more than 20 books including novels, non-fiction, TV tie ins, and ghost writing. Her work has been the Nicola Sturgeon’s Summer Pick at the David Hume Institute, shortlisted for the Saltire Prize, the Wilbur Smith Prize and the C WA Dagger in the Library, and she has also won a Scottish Libraries Award.

Her novel The Fair Botanists was the Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2022 and featured in series seven of the Queen’s Reading Room. Sara has also written two plays for BBC Radio 4 and has reported from both Tallin and Sharjah for Radio 4’s Our Own Correspondent.

The Book

Men would kill for this treasure.  The McKenzie women will guard it with their lives.

London, 1837. When 25-year-old Araminta McKenzie-Moore is summoned from Richmond to her great aunt’s deathbed in Edinburgh, it’s the first time she’s met her extended family. The McKenzie women, however, have been keeping a close eye on her. For they have a long, secret and dangerous history as Jewel Keepers to the Scottish Crown and they need Araminta to play her part to solve a puzzle which stretches back generations.

But the McKenzies are not alone in this high-stakes treasure hunt though history. They’re being pursued. The last of her line, if Araminta succeeds, she will uncover something more valuable than mere jewels – a secret that will change the lives of all women living on this, the cusp of the Queen Victoria’s rule.

Featuring real historical events and places amid its fiction, The Jewel Keepers is an immersive,evocative story of intrigue.

Praise for Sara Sheridan

‘Compelling, fascinating . . . A cracking good read’ – Val McDermid on The Fair Botanists