Hungerford Bookshop

THE KNACKERED MOTHER’S WINE CLUB: **wine tasting and book signing evening**

~ Tuesday 4th June ~

7.30pm in The Magistrate’s Room of Hungerford Town Hall

Do you:  Frequently panic in the wine aisle and end up reaching for the same old thing every single time? Simply pick the bottle with the nicest-looking label? Automatically pick the second-cheapest wine on the wine list?  Feel it may be time to extend your wine horizons beyond Pinot Grigio? If this is you, then you need to join the Knackered Mother’s Wine Club. Come and explore the wonderful world of wine. From throwing a children’s party (because adults need something fizzy too), planning a wedding or matching wine with food, this book will help you make the right wine choice every single time.

Go beyond the discount deals and discover the can’t-go-wrong crowd-pleasers, perfect reds to go with your Sunday roast, the best wine to drink with chocolate, plus some unexpected suggestions for your next girls’ night in. This is the one wine guide that every woman should own. Because life’s too short to drink bad wine.

Helen McGinn spent best part of a decade travelling the globe sniffing out wines for a living as a wine buyer for a big supermarket. Then spent most of the next half-decade pregnant. Now she runs her own wine business and wants to share wine knowledge in the hope that other knackered mothers are interested in what’s in her glass at the end of the day. 

To read her funny and informative blog see here).

She will be coming to Hungerford to guide us through some wines, supplied by our excellent independent wine merchant Caviste, and signing copies of her book.

**Please note you do not have to be knackered or a mother to attend!**

Tickets £6 from The Hungerford Bookshop

Call 01488 683480

**Gill Hornby talks about her novel The Hive**

~ Friday May 24th at 7pm ~

We are very excited that just a day after the official publication of ‘The Hive’ we are holding an event with Gill Hornby. This book is the publisher’s most important new author they are launching this year. It’s already causing a stir in the media with the Sunday Times Style Magazine heralding it as the start of a new wave of fiction.

The Hive is an irresistible, brilliantly observed novel.  Wickedly funny, it is also a fascinating and subtle story about group politics and female friendship.  From the joys and perils (well, mainly perils) of the Lunch Ladder, to the military operation that is the Car Boot Sale, via the dos and don’ts of dressing your child as a dalek, all human life is here. This novel is a must for anyone that has children!

Hive press release

Gill Hornby is a writer and journalist.  She lives with her husband, Robert Harris, and their four children in Kintbury, Berkshire.  The Hive is her first novel. Gill will be talking to Emma about her book and will look forward to answering questions and signing copies of the book – which will be available for the special price of £10 with your ticket.

Tickets £5 from The Hungerford Bookshop

01488 683480

Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing

Talk and book signing with author Jane Dunn

Tuesday March 12th at 7pm at The Bear Hotel, Hungerford

Celebrated novelist Daphne Du Maurier and her sisters, eclipsed by her fame, are revealed in all their surprising complexity in this riveting new biography. The middle sister in a famous artistic dynasty, Daphne du Maurier is one of the master storytellers of our time, author of ‘Rebecca’, ‘Jamaica Inn’ and ‘My Cousin Rachel’, and short stories, ‘Don’t Look Now’ and the terrifying ‘The Birds’ among many. Her stories were made memorable by the iconic films they inspired, three of them classic Hitchcock chillers.

But her sisters Angela and Jeanne, a writer and an artist of talent, had creative and romantic lives even more bold and unconventional than Daphne’s own. In this group biography they are considered side by side, as they were in life, three sisters who grew up during the 20th century in the glamorous hothouse of a theatrical family dominated by a charismatic and powerful father. This family dynamic reveals the hidden lives of Piffy, Bird & Bing, full of social non-conformity, love, rivalry and compulsive make-believe, their lives as psychologically complex as a Daphne du Maurier novel.

About the author:

Described by the Sunday Times as ‘one of our best biographers’, Jane Dunn writes about women and their relationships, and sisters in particular. Her books include a biography of the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the bestseller Elizabeth & Mary, which looks at the lives of the cousin queens Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Bath with her husband the writer and linguist, Nicholas Ostler.

Tickets £5 (redeemable against the book on the night).

Call 01488 683480.

A bar will be available

~  JOANNA TROLLOPE  ~

**Tuesday February 26th**

7pm in Hungerford Town Hall

Joanna Trollope is the author of seventeen highly acclaimed bestselling novels including A Village Affair, The Choir and The Rector’s Wife. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s daughters and several other novels. Joanna was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Joanna will be talking about her book The Soldier’s Wife which was published last year and will be out in paperback in time for the event.

About The Soldier’s Wife:  The soldiers are coming home – after six months in Afghanistan. Surely being reunited with their wives and girlfriends and families will be heaven, after the hell they have been through. When Dan Riley returns to his adored wife, Alexa, and their children, his Army life still comes first.
Alexa thought she was prepared to help him, and the whole family, to make the transition to normal life again – but no-one had told her how lonely and near impossible the task would be. Does marrying a soldier always have to mean that you are not marrying a man, but a regiment?

Listen to Joanna introduce the book here

Tickets are £5 from The Hungerford Bookshop. Call 01488 683580 to book or if you can’t make it on the night we can arrange for a book to be signed for you.

An Evening of Poetry with

Jo Bell and Martin Malone

~  Saturday February 9th at 7pm in the bookshop  ~

Tickets £4 (includes a glass of wine and nibbles)

Jo Bell is a poet working all over the UK. She is director of National Poetry Day, programmer for Ledbury Poetry Festival and is the the UK’s Canal Laureate, appointed by the Poetry Society and the Canal and River Trust. She appears regularly at festivals, and in the media, most recently on Radio 4′s ‘The World Tonight discussing ‘poetry by heart’. She lives locally on a narrowboat, and her first book ‘Navigation’ drew on that life, as well as on her archaeology work.

Martin Malone is an award-winning poet whose recent prizes include the 2011 Straid Poetry Award for new collections, the 2012 Mirehouse and the 2011 Wivenhoe Poetry Prizes. Carol Ann Duffy called his first book, ‘The Waiting Hillside’ ” breathtakingly assured..every word alert to the elements without and their emotions within”. He is currently working on his second collection and upon a collaborative collection, ‘Fireships’, with the poet Jo Bell.

Jo and Martin will also be joined by poet Simon McCormack.

Each poet will read from their work for ten minutes each, and then Jo and Martin will spend 20 minutes performing a joint reading. Customers will have the opportunity to ask questions and buy copies of their books.

**please note this event is standing room only! **

Call the bookshop on 01488 683480 to book tickets, available at £4 each

Book Signing in the bookshop

10.30 – 12.30

with local author

Keith McCloskey

THIS SATURDAY! 15th DECEMBER

Airwork Ltd/Airwork Services, now owned by VT group plc, has a long and distinguished history. It’s co-founder lived in Stype Grange, near Hungerford. It played an important role in defence support services to the RAF, Fleet Air Arm and overseas air forces, as well as in the development of civil aviation. Created at Heston in 1928, it maintained Whitley bombers and de Havilland Tiger Moths in the 1930s and established the precursors of the post-WW2 airlines of Egypt, India and Rhodesia. Post-war it was the first airline to be awarded a troop flying contract and expanded into civil aviation, developing flights to Africa and the US. The main independent airline in the 1950s, it became part of British United Airways in 1960, also establishing many airlines around the world, including Deutsche Flugdienst (Condor), Misr-Airwork (Egyptair), and the Sudanese National Airline. Here Keith McCloskey presents the first history of this important airline and reveals its impact on aviation history.

Keith will be signing copies of his newly published book

Airwork: A History

in the bookshop between 10.30 – 12.30

Free Event

CATHERINE BAILEY

The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery

At 6 am on 21 April 1940 John the 9th Duke of Rutland, and one of Britain’s wealthiest men, ended his days, virtually alone, lying on a makeshift bed in a dank cramped suite of rooms in the servants’ quarters of his own home, Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire. For weeks, as his health deteriorated, his family, his servants – even the King’s doctor – pleaded with him to come out, but he refused. After his death, his son and heir, Charles, the 10th Duke of Rutland, ordered that the rooms be locked up and they remained untouched for sixty years.

What lay behind this extraordinary set of circumstances? For the first time, in “The Secret Rooms”, Catherine Bailey unravels a complex and compelling tale of love, honour and betrayal, played out in the grand salons of Britain’s stately homes at the turn of the twentieth century, and on the battlefields of the Western Front. At its core is a secret so dark that it consumed the life of the man who fought to his death to keep it hidden.

Catherine Bailey read history at Oxford University and is a successful, award-winning television producer and director, making a range of critically acclaimed documentary films inspired by her interest in twentieth century history. She lives in West London.

~ VICTORIA HISLOP ~

The bestselling author of The Island, The Return and the The Thread will be talking about her latest book

The Last Dance: and Other Stories.

Victoria Hislop takes us through the streets of Athens and into the tree-lined squares of Greek villages. As she evokes their distinct atmosphere, she brings vividly to life a host of unforgettable characters, from a lonesome priest to battling brothers, and from an unwanted stranger to a groom troubled by music and memory.These bittersweet tales of love and loyalty, of separation and reconciliation, captured in Victoria Hislop’s unique voice, will stay with you long after you reach the end.

About the author:

Victoria Hislop read English at Oxford, and worked in publishing, PR and as a journalist before becoming a novelist. She is married to Ian Hislop and has two children.

Her first novel, The Island, held the number one slot in the Sunday Times paperback charts for eight consecutive weeks and has sold over two million copies worldwide. Her second novel, The Return, was also a Sunday Times number one bestseller, and her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A short story collection, One Cretan Evening, was published in September and her a third novel, The Thread is published  2011, is already a bestseller.

Victoria will be speaking about her new book at

John O’Gaunt Community College

on December 6th at 7pm

Tickets £5 from the bookshop (01488 683480)

Wine will be available to buy by the glass.

The hugely popular TV and Radio Broadcaster

CLARE BALDING

will be signing copies of her bestselling autobiography

My Animals and Other Family

on Thursday December 6th from 2 – 3pm

(Venue is probably the Town Hall – tbc)

This is a FREE EVENT but we encourage you to register your interest by collecting a voucher from the bookshop  which entitles you to £2 off the book on the day.

From her canine counterparts to the pony who knew her better than than her parents – Clare introduces us to the animal stars of her childhood (in Kingsclere, near Newbury). “I grew up in a rather unusual household,” Clare explains. “My father was a champion race horse trainer, so I grew up surrounded by 100 thoroughbreds, by mares, and foals, by a pack of Boxers and Lurchers, and to be perfectly honest, my brother Andrew and I came pretty near the bottom of the pecking order. Left to their own devices, they had to learn life’s toughest lessons through the animals, and through their adventures in the stables and the idyllic Hampshire Downs. But it was a magical childhood as well, and this is the story of that childhood… And most of all, it’s the story of the animals. It’s their story as much as it is mine.”

Meriel Larken

tells us about her incredible campaign to restore the “Yavari” steamship against the odds – a ship that is now celebrating its 150 year anniversary in 2012. In 1862 the English-built “Yavari” was taken to bits and shipped to South America. In an epic logistical feat it was carried in thousands of pieces, by mule, up the Andes to Lake Titicaca, 12,500 feet above sea level, the world’s highest navigable waterway.

She was reconstructed and for more than a century plied her trade up and down the lake, but by 1985 she was a sad rotting hulk until she was found by local lady Muriel Larken, who led the quest to project to restore and preserve the ship. The oldest single screw iron passenger ship in the world, this nautical and engineering jewel is now a major Peruvian tourist attraction.

Meriel will be talking about her book The Ship, the Lady and the Lake: the Extraordinary Life of a Victorian Steamship, answer questions from the audience and sign copies afterwards

at

The Three Swans Hotel at 7pm

Tuesday December 11th

Tickets £5

Call 01488 683480 to book or reserve a signed copy