Authors in Conversation: Holly Pester & Keiran Goddard

Wednesday 7th February, 6pm

Venue: Red Lion Books, High Street, Colchester

Tickets: £5 (ticket price is redeemable against either book, on the evening.)

Keiran Goddard grew up in Shard End, Birmingham. He is the author of two poetry collections, and two novels: Hourglass, which was widely acclaimed and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize, and I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which will be published in February 2024.

Holly Pester is a poet and writer. She has worked in sound art and performance, with BBC Radio, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection.

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

Five friends. Five lives. Countless hopes.

Patrick, Shiv, Rian, Oli and Conor grew up together. They played together, skipped school together, and dreamt of everything they’d do with their lives.

Now they are thirty, and only Rian has made it out of the estate and moved away to another city, but his money doesn’t stop him clinging to a vision of the past that is quickly slipping away. Oli is fading by the day, drinking and snorting his way through the endless boredom, while Conor has a baby on the way and a business plan he hopes will change everything. Patrick and Shiv are as in love as ever, but even they are rocked when an old secret opens up new wounds.

Bold, ambitious and stylistically striking, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning asks what happens when all the things we expect from our lives end up not happening. It lays bare the ways that place and circumstance shape us, explores the redeeming and transforming beauty of friendship and examines the true limits of hope and forgiveness

The Lodgers

A stunning first novel from Holly Pester – a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.

“What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.”

After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep an eye on her wayward mother, Moffa. Living in a precarious sub-let, she is always on edge, anticipating a visit from the landlord or the arrival of the other resident. But her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigations within the house and home become her fascination.

The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in Holly Pester’s irreverent reckoning with those who house us. This is a story about what it means to live and love within and outside of family structures.

Wednesday 7th February at 6pm
Venue: Red Lion Books, Colchester
£5 ticket price is redeemable against Holly’s book, on the evening.

Book tickets: redlionbooks.co.uk

Regrettably, the event space is not accessible to wheelchair users