Susan Beale & Susan Fletcher – Edinburgh Gliterary Lunch

Sponsored by Blackadders Solicitors

The Good Guy by Susan Beale

The Author

Susan has worked as a journalist and editor in the US and Europe. She is a former competitive figure skater. She is a recent graduate of the Bath Spa MA in Creative Writing. The Good Guy is her first novel.  Susan was raised on Cape Cod, lived in Belgium and France, and now lives in the Wells, Somerset.

The Book

Inspiration for The Good Guy came from Susan’s own adoption files and from conversations with her birth mother, with whom she reconnected as an adult. The papers, sixteen single-spaced pages including interviews with her mother, grandmother and her birth father, paint a portrait of America on the cusp of the sexual revolution. It’s a time of unprecedented prosperity, freedom and conformity.  Photo: Copyright Austen Thygesen

Ted, a car-tyre salesman in 1960s suburban New England, is a dreamer who craves admiration. His wife Abigail longs for a life of the mind. Single-girl Penny just wants to be loved.  After a chance encounter, Ted becomes enamoured with Penny and begins inventing a whole new life with her at its centre.  But when this fantasy collides with reality, the fallout threatens everything, and everyone, he holds dear.

The Good Guy is a deeply compelling debut about love, marriage, the pressure to conform, and what happens when good intentions and self-deception are taken to extremes.

Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew by Susan Fletcher

The Author

Susan Fletcher was born in 1979 in Birmingham. She graduated from the UEA Creative Writing Course and now lives in Stratford-upon-Avon.  Her first novel Eve Green won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the Richard and Judy Summer Read. Her second novel, Oystercatchers was published to great critical acclaim.   Others followed, including Gliterary Lunch favourite, Corrag.

Praise for Susan Fletcher

Her prose is extraordinarily lyrical: haunted, dreamlike and precise, reminiscent at times of Sylvia Plath…Fletcher’s words are undeniably beautiful and her themes are profound…a haunting novel.  Sunday Times

The Book

Provence, May 1889. An old monastery sits at the foot of Les Alpilles Mountains amongst wheat fields, herbs and olive groves. For years, the fragile have come here and lived quietly, finding rest behind the shutters and high, sun-baked walls.

There’s a new arrival at Saint-Paul-de Mausole, and with him comes tales of his savagery, his paintings, and his copper-red hair. From her small white cottage, Jeanne Trabuc can see him: how he sets his easel amongst the trees, the irises and the fields of wheat, and paints in the heat of the day.   As the Warden’s wife, Jeanne knows the rules; she knows not to approach the patients at Saint-Paul.  But this troubled and intense man, a mystery at every turn, can’t be ignored.  Despite the supposed dangers, Jeanne follows him; she watches and she waits.

Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew is a book about passion, adventure and the brevity of life. But it’s also a study of a marriage, and how love alters over time. Through Jeanne’s friendship with the painter at Saint-Paul she comes to know who she is, what she truly feels – and, at last and with certainty, what she wants for the rest of her life.

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Bookings

There is now a waiting list for this event so please check availability before completing the booking form and sending payment.  Confirmation of your booking will be sent out to you along with information about the menu, table planning and how to pre-order wine and books if required. If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to call us.

For more information or to confirm availability, call us on 07525 791454 or email [email protected]