About this Event
Doors 630pm, event start 7pm prompt
BEN PESTER is the author of the short story collection Am I in the Right Place? (2021) and the novel The Expansion Project (2025), which was shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards and the Goldsmiths Prize.
"Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life" LUKE KENNARD
Sail Away Land is the space where we might go when we’re no longer alive (sometimes only temporarily). In this uncommon and disarming collection, the characters go ‘there’ with or without knowing it. Maybe they have been living there all along without noticing – just like they hadn’t really noticed that everyone is carrying a shiny black suitcase.
These stories are about normal things – losing the people we’re closest to, forgiving them, finding love and managing to hold onto it – but also about going to parties through a door in the back of a colleague’s head, housebreaking in search of a sister’s ghost, and asking the strangers in the kitchen to resurrect you at midnight.
Like brilliant and strange anxiety dreams in prose, the stories in Sail Away Land are full of temporal weirdness, life and non-being, psychological acuity, imagination and wit, all while being effortlessly, seductively readable and incredibly moving.
"Moving deftly between corporate weirdness, the anxiety of rejection, and the warm haze of childhood memory, Sail Away Land is just how I like my short story collections: playful and particular. I feel lucky to have read it." SABA SAMS
Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner living in London. His novels include A Shock, which won the 2021 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize; Hawthorn & Child; and Animals. His first novel The Long Falling was filmed by Martin Provost as Où Va La Nuit in 2011. He has been awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger and Premier Roman Étranger, the O Henry award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Dooneen is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and by New Directions.
The astonishing Irish literary magician Keith Ridgway pulls from his hat the Great Dublin Novel for the 21st century
Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that—there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Home by invitation, he has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumor, with tunnels, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London.
An unraveling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices, and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, “one of Ireland’s best writers, in a country with no shortage of them” (The Times).
Ridgway's scintillating and dreamlike latest teems with big ideas about the complex legacy of the Troubles in a country transformed by immigration and wealth... Mew wonders if he's dead or dreaming, but Ridgway never abandons his marvelous fantastical conceit. It's a bracing and singular state-of-the-nation novel. Publishers Weekly (starred)
Barry Pierce is a critic and culture writer whose writing has appeared in the Sunday Times, the Big Issue, i-D, GQ and British Vogue. He is also a bookseller at Bàrd!
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bàrd Books, 341-343 Roman Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 6.13
