London Gliterary Lunch with Viv Groskop & Alan Murrin

One Ukranian Summer
Viv Groskop

The Author

Viv Groskop is an award-winning writer, comedian, playwright, broadcaster and former International Booker Prize judge. She is host of the hugely successful How to Own The Room podcast and author of the book of the same name.. Her other best selling books include The Anna Karenina Fix and Au Revoir, Tristesse. She appears regularly on BBC TV and radio, guest-presenting Saturday Live, Saturday Review and Front Row and appearing on Andrew Neil’s This Week on BBC1, Woman’s Hour, Today, Newsnight, This Morning, University Challenge and Sky News. She writes regularly for the Guardian and the Financial Times Her comedy show was a sell-out at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for six years.

The Book

One Ukrainian Summer, is a memoir about falling in love and coming of age in the former USSR. Summer 1994. Viv has just turned 21 and is on her year abroad, studying the language, and culture of a world that supposedly no longer exists: the Soviet Union. Instead, she finds herself studying the lead guitarist of a Ukrainian punk rock band. Utterly besotted, Viv follows him to festivals and bars around the country, travelling through a blur of wheat fields and valleys of sunflowers. At parties, Viv and her new friends argue about whose turn it is to buy cigarettes and the best places to find Levi’s jeans. No-one debates whether to speak Russian or Ukrainian, where the border is, or whether the future is bright. Of course it is: the Soviet Union is finished. Isn’t it?

Praise for Viv Groskop

‘A poignant and often comical account of coming-of-age in the time after the Cold War and before Putin…. a love letter to a unique moment in history.’ Bonnier books

The Coast Road
Alan Murrin

The Author

Alan Murrin is an Irish writer based in Berlin. His short story, The Wake, won the 2021 Bournemouth Writing Prize and was shortlisted for short story of the year at the Irish Book Awards. The Coast Road was shortlisted for the PFD Queer Fiction prize. Murrin is also the recipient of an Irish Arts Council Agility Award and an Arts Council Literature Bursary. He is a graduate of the prose fiction masters at the University of East Anglia, and writes for the Irish Times and the Times Literary Supplement, as well as Art Review and Art Agenda.

The Book

The setting is a small community in County Donegal in 1994, Ireland. The legalisation of divorce is just around the corner.  Everyone is talking about Colette Crowley – the writer and bohemian who left her husband and sons to pursue a relationship with a married man in Dublin.   But now Colette is back, and nobody knows why. Desperate to see her children, Collette enlists the help of Izzy, a housewife and mother of two, and the two women forge a friendship that will send them on a spiralling journey – one toward a path of self- discovery, and the other toward tragedy.

The Coast Road eloquently explores relationship dynamics, resistance to conformity, and a social system with expectations focussing on the importance of marriage, the church, and tradition.   It is a brilliantly observed debut novel about a closed community and the consequences of daring to move against the tide.

Praise for Alan Murrin

‘Alan Murrin has written a poignant, utterly truthful story of passions prejudice and tragedy in a small town. Brilliant.’  Gabriel Byrne, actor and author