Salt Modern Fiction, With Jonathan Taylor and Kerry Hadley-pryce

Join us for our second Salt Modern Fiction event, featuring regional writers published by Salt.

Scablands and Other Stories: These are tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is. A starving woman sells hugs in an abandoned kiosk.

Yet sometimes, even in the twilit scablands, there’s also beauty, music, laughter. Sometimes a town square is filled with bubbles. Sometimes sisters dream they can fly. Sometimes an old man plays Bach to an empty street… And sometimes Gustav Mahler lives just round the corner, hoarding rare records in a Stoke terrace.

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His books include the memoir Take Me Home, and the novels Melissa and Entertaining Strangers, Jonathan teaches Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

God’s Country: Guy Flood, returns to the Black Country with his girlfriend, Alison, to attend his identical twin brother’s funeral. The reasons he left, and the secrets he left behind, slowly become clear. A chilling dark fiction, dominated by unknown and all-seeing narrator.

Kerry Hadley-Pryce was born in the Black Country. She worked nights in a Wolverhampton petrol station before becoming a secondary school teacher. She is currently a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University, researching Psychogeography and Black Country Writing. God’s Country is her third novel.

Tickets will be £4.00, including refreshments