Jennifer Belle and Rose Ruane in conversation with Naomi Booth

We're delighted to be welcoming Jennifer Belle and Rose Ruane to Manchester to celebrate the release of their stunning new books SWANNA IN LOVE and BIRDING - two beautifully written, darkly funny and profoundly moving novels about unhealthy relationships from two of our favourite authors. Jennifer and Rose will be in conversation with Naomi Booth (Exit Management, Animals at Night).

Doors: 6.30, starts: 6.45

Tickets are £3.00 or free when ordering a copy of either book. SWANNA IN LOVE and BIRDING will also be available to purchase on the night and both authors will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or [email protected] and we can arrange this for you.

About the books:

Swanna in Love by Jessica Belle

It's the summer of 1982 and fourteen-year-old Swanna Swain is the only one left at camp.

The place is a ghost town by the time her mother Val finally shows up six hours late- stoned and radiant- in a Ford pickup driven by Borislav, her new young Russian lover.

Assuming she is headed home to her air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment, Swanna and her lovable younger brother Madding are instead dragged to Vermont: to an artist colony where kids are not welcome and they are forced to sleep in the back of the truck, while Val is cosy inside the house with the Russian.

Then Swanna meets Dennis, a handsome married father of two, at a bowling alley, and, knowing a thing or two about seduction from Judy Blume, her best friend at camp, and her own parents' many affairs- she sets out to convince Dennis to help her. But love seldom obeys rules, and even a tough, smart, city girl like Swanna might not be able to handle falling in love.

Best-selling novelist Jennifer Belle returns with her first novel in fifteen years with a kind of inverse Lolita that explores adolescent desire from the girl's point of view. In turns hilarious and wildly shocking, Swanna In Love is the most unmissable book of the summer.

Birding by Rose Ruane

In a small seaside town, autumn is edging into winter, gulls ride winds over the waves, and two women pass each other on the promenade, as yet unaware of each other's existence.

In the nineties Lydia was a teen pop star, posed half naked on billboards everywhere with a lollipop between her lips and no idea how to live, letting the world happen to her. Now, three decades later, Lydia is less and less sure that what happened to her was in the least bit okay. The news cycle runs hot with #MeToo stories, and a famous former lover has emerged with a self-serving apology, asking her to forgive him. Suddenly, the past is full of trapdoors she is desperately trying not to fall through.

Joyce, in middle age, has never left home. She still lives with her mother Betty. With their matching dresses, identical hairdos and makeup, they are the local oddballs. Theirs is a life of unerring routine: the shops, biscuits served on bone china plates, dressing up for a gin and tonic on Saturday. Nice things. One misstep from Joyce can ruin Betty's day; so Joyce treads carefully. She has never let herself think about a different kind of life. But recently, along with the hot flushes, something like anger is asserting itself, like a caged thing realising it should probably try and escape.

Amid the grey skies, amusement parks and beauty parlours of a gentrifying run-down seaside resort, these two women might never meet. But as they both try to untangle the damaging details of their past in the hope of a better future, their lives are set on an unlikely collision course.

With mordant wit and lyrical prose, Birding asks if we can ever see ourselves clearly or if we are always the unreliable narrators of our own experiences. It is a story about the difference between responsibility and obligation, unhealthy relationships and abusive ones, third acts and last chances, and two women trying to take flight on clipped wings.

About the authors:

Jennifer Belle burst onto the literary scene with her critically-acclaimed debut novel Going Down, which was translated into many languages and optioned for the screen, first by Madonna, for whom she wrote the screenplay, and currently by Das Films. Belle was named Best New Novelist by Entertainment Weekly, profiled in New York Magazine and People, and compared to Dorothy Parker, Lorrie Moore, and J.D. Salinger. Her second equally-praised novel, the national bestseller High Maintenance, took on the cutthroat world of Manhattan real estate, and was also optioned for film and television. In 2007, Belle published her third novel Little Stalker, another sharp and funny look at life in New York City.

Rose Ruane is an author and artist who lives in Glasgow with her ever-expanding collection of Twentieth Century kitsch.

Naomi Booth is a fiction writer and academic. In 2018 she was named in the Guardian's 'Fresh Voices: 50 Writers to Read' and was long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Naomi's first novel Sealed was shortlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2019. Naomi was born in West Yorkshire and now lives in York.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Blackwell's Bookshop, 146 Oxford Road, Manchester, United Kingdom