Waterstones Presents: An Evening with Maggie O’Farrell
Wed 10 Jun
Wednesday, 04 Mar
19:00
Scroll
Times
7:00pm
Running Time 0 hours
Venue Merchant Adventurer's Hall
A Waterstones Book of the Month in 2025, join us to celebrate Scarlett Thomas’s unconventional novel The Sleepwalkers.
With prose constructed of diary entries, letters and unreliable character narration, Thomas’ novel reads like a literary fever dream and confronts the boundaries of what we expect from literary fiction. Thomas will be in conversation about her writing process, how writing The Sleepwalkers surprised her, and what we could possibly expect next. Still reeling from the chaos of their wedding, Evelyn and Richard arrive on an idyllic Greek island for their honeymoon. It’s the end of the season and out at sea a storm is brewing.
They check into an exclusive hotel, the Villa Rosa, where the proprietor, Isabella — a strangely intense woman of indeterminate accent — flirts outrageously with Richard while treating Evelyn with a rudeness bordering on contempt. Isabella tells them the story of ‘the sleepwalkers’: a couple who stayed at the hotel the year before and drowned in a tragic and unexplained accident. It starts to feel like the entire island is obsessed with ‘the sleepwalkers’, but what at first seems like a fun tale to tell before bed quickly evolves into a living nightmare.
Caught in a web of deception and intrigue, where nothing and nobody is quite what they seem, Evelyn and Richard discover that their island paradise may in fact be hell on earth and that their only means of escape is to confront dark truths about themselves and those they love.
Scarlett Thomas was born in London. She is the author of highly acclaimed contemporary cult novels, including THE END OF MR. Y, which was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, THE SLEEPWALKERS, OLIGARCHY, THE SEED COLLECTORS, POPCO, and the WORLDQUAKE series of middle-grade books. Her novels have sold over half a million copies worldwide and been translated into 26 languages.
Scarlett is Professor of Creative Writing and Contemporary Fiction at the University of Kent. Find out more at www.scarthomas.com.
Please Note: This event is at Merchant Adventurer’s Hall, Fossgate, York, YO1 9XD
Part of York Literature Festival
