Literature Festivals
I love literature festivals. As a reader, there's always a handful of authors I want to see. As a writer, I enjoy the variety of workshops with experts in their field. And of course, as someone who loves to meet interesting people, it's great to get on stage for an in-depth Q & A.
I had a great chat with Simon Mayo at Ilkley Literature Festival recently. As well as dicussing his excellent new thriller, Tick Tock, we talked about his long career in broadcasting, his route into writing and how he felt when he met Prince William to collect his MBE.
Tick Tock
It starts quietly enough. A tick tick ticking you can hear in your ear. Tinnitus, you think. It will pass. But it doesn't. It gets worse. And then you pass it on...
Before you know it, it spreads. Elsewhere across the globe, it emerges: small outbreaks at first, but then suddenly it's a plague - and only days later it is already killing people.
In an increasingly affected north London school, teacher Kit Chaplin is struggling to understand what he is witnessing. Even Lilly Slater, his partner and an eminent vaccinologist, can't work out what's happening. As it spreads, little by little, they are inexorably drawn into the mystery behind the illness. And what they discover will change the world as they know it...
Exciting and urgently contemporary, this piercingly insightful novel tells the story of a global catastrophe through the eyes of the three people at the heart of the storm.
