The Grand Connaught Rooms, 61-65 Great Queen Street, London WC2B 5DA
Speakers: Sophie Haydock & Ilona Bannister
ONLY 3 PLACES REMAINING!! Join award winning writers, Sophie Haydock and Ilona Bannister, at the London Gliterary Lunch - a sparkling combination of good food, good books and good company. Perfect for client entertaining and meeting up with friends.
Madame Matisse Sophie Haydock
The Author
Sophie Haydock is an author, editor and journalist (Sunday Times, Financial Times, Guardian), based in Folkestone, Kent, where she is curator of Folkestone Book Festival. Her debut, The Flames – about the women who posed for the scandalous artist Egon Schiele in Vienna a century ago – was named by the Times as one of the Best Historical Fiction Books of 2022. It was longlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Award, and the Italian translation, Le Fiamme, won the Premio Letterario Edoardo Kihlgren for debut novels.
She worked for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and is associate director of the Word Factory. Her Instagram @egonschieleswomen has 110,000 followers.
The Book
This is the story of three women – one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a father she adores.
Amelie is first drawn to Henri Matisse as a way of escaping the conventional life expected of her. A free spirit, she sees in this budding young artist a glorious future for them both. Ambitious and driven, she gives everything for her husband’s art, ploughing her own desires, her time, her money into sustaining them both, even through years of struggle and disappointment.
Based on a true story, Madame Matisse is a stunning novel about drama and betrayal; emotion and sex; glamour and tragedy, all set in the hotbed of the 1930s art movement in France. In art, as in life, this a time when the rules were made to be broken…
Praise for Sophie Haydock
“Sophie Haydock delivers another sizzling story of the art world, where sidelined women take centre stage. It’s an immersive tale of muses, betrayal, sex and bad behaviour” Daily Mail
Five Ilona Bannister
The Author
Ilona Bannister is a New Yorker who now makes her home in Brighton with her husband and sons. She is a dual qualified US lawyer and UK solicitor and practiced immigration law in the UK before she started writing fiction.
Her family’s history of migration to the US, her experience as an American mother raising children in the UK, and her work as a lawyer have led her to write stories about otherness, belonging, and what it means to be on the outside of a place looking in. Her first book When I Ran Away was longlistedfor the First Novel Prize in 2021.
The Book
Five passengers. Five minutes until the next train … five minutes until someone dies.
In this gripping tale narrated with a sharp tongue, the five main characters – a child, a mother, a businessman, an old woman, and a gambler – will draw you in with their stories as the clock ticks down. As the train gets closer and closer, we fall in love with the beautiful Sonny who is on the verge of gambling his life away. We pity the furious old Mrs Worth who grew up in a macabre household and so failed at being a mother. We look away from the demonic child Gideon. We judge his mother Emma who must surely be to blame? And we are curiously compelled by the successful and damaged businessman Liam.
Five stories. Five minutes until a life ends. In this tense, intriguing drama that explores fate, sacrifice, and the real meaning of life, you will frantically turn the page to see who will survive, and who will be lost…
Praise for Ilona Bannister
“Original. Urgent. Disturbing. Brilliant. Quite unlike anything I’ve ever read. Don’t miss this one – Ilona Bannister is a major talent.” Shari Lapena, author of The Couple Next Door and Everyone Here is Lying.
If you would like tickets for a Gliterary Lunch, just click the Book Now button and select the number of places you want to reserve. For a whole table, order 10 places. If you are booking on behalf of an organisation and need a vat receipt or want an invoice rather than using a payment card, contact [email protected].
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 on 07525 791454 or email [email protected]
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