Fiction

Spend a lively evening in the company of Alexander McCall Smith as he introduces the latest instalment of his series The Perfect Passion Company. In Looking For You, Katie Donald is eager to continue helping the lovelorn find connection, and with news of her expertise spreading, she’s inundated with people seeking her advice.

McCall Smith is author of the highly successful No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has sold over 25 million copies. He’ll take us through his inspirations, share stories of his research into the world of matchmaking, and offer a look at his writing career. He’ll also discuss The Lost Language of Oysters, the latest novel in his hilarious von Igelfeld series, charting the mishaps of Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld and his colleagues at the University of Regensburg’s Institute of Romance Philology.

Joanne Harris returns to the world of Chocolat with the long-awaited story of Vianne. Twenty-five years after the publication of the Whitbread-shortlisted novel – adapted for film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp – the author discusses her prequel, set six years before Vianne opens her scandalous chocolaterie in the small French village of Lansquenet.

Sylviane Rochas scatters her mother’s ashes in New York and lets the changing wind blow her to the French seaside town of Marseille. For the first time in her life, Vianne holds the future in her own hands. As she discovers the joy of cooking for the first time, making recipes her own with the addition of bittersweet spices, she realises that it possesses its own, dangerous magic in this town full of secrets…

What’s in a name? And can a name change the course of your life? It can in Florence Knapp’s debut novel The Names, which spans 35 years and follows three alternate versions of protagonist Cora’s life after she visits the registrar and names her infant son. The Names looks at the ripple effects of domestic abuse, the ties of family and what it means to heal.

Knapp talks to Chocolat author Joanne Harris about the inspiration for her debut novel, the process of writing it and how she came up with three versions of Cora’s life.

David Szalay introduces his propulsive and hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Flesh follows István, a shy 15-year-old who soon becomes isolated at school and whose only companion is his married neighbour, a woman close to his mother’s age. Their clandestine relationship causes István’s life to spiral out of control. As he grows and moves from Hungary to London, entering the world of the super-rich, competing impulses for love, wealth and more threaten to undo him completely.

Szalay is the author of five previous works of fiction including All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He talks to award-winning author and broadcaster Naomi Alderman.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author talks about her new novel, a genre-defying story about a character with her name. In conversation with the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, she discusses flipping the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head, playing with language, and poetry and art.

Death Takes Me sees a Professor Cristina Rivera Garza stumble upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and report it to the police. She becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.

Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many others. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer.

The International Booker Prize is the world’s most influential prize for translated fiction. It’s awarded annually for a single book translated into English and celebrates the vital work of translation with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between author and translator. In championing works from around the world that have originated in a wide range of languages, it fosters an engaged global community of writers and readers whose experiences and interests transcend national borders.

The prize will be announced on 20 May, and we present the winning author and translator in conversation with the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gaby Wood, and one of this year’s judges, author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator, Anton Hur.

Comic artist Dix launches his first solo graphic novel, The Idris File, a historical thriller that reads like The Banshees of Inisherin meets Raiders of the Lost Ark. A young teenager discovers that his quiet seaside Welsh village harbours Nazi horrors beneath its dreary, overcast skies.

Dix and actor Jim Broadbent collaborated on the acclaimed graphic novel Dull Margaret. They have reunited for ‘Wrong’, an exhibition of sculpture and painting at The Table, a gallery in Hay-on-Wye. Dix’s paintings on original 1970s wallpaper capture his comedic half-memories and influences from that time, coupled with often disagreeable verse. Jim’s creations are influenced by his life in film and stage. Odd characters challenge the viewer to make sense of their peculiar predicaments in surreal theatrical dioramas.

Join the pair in this event as they discuss their curious art and influences with writer and filmmaker Pete Jones.

Irish author Roisín O’Donnell was an Observer Best Debut Novelist of 2025. She speaks to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mexican author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Cristina Rivera Garza, about her urgent first novel Nesting.

Playwright Suzie Miller introduces Prima Facie, her book about a brilliant defence barrister at the top of her game who realises the rules might not be in her favour after a date goes wrong.

Miller’s book, an international runaway success, is based on her award-winning play of the same name, which starred Jodie Comer as barrister Tessa Ensler. The play itself led to changes in the legal profession regarding what juries are directed to consider when they deliberate on rape cases.

Miller is an international playwright, librettist and screenwriter. She has a background in law, and has won numerous awards, including the Australian Writers’ Guild, Kit Denton Fellowship for Writing with Courage and an Olivier Award.

The authors introduce their most recent novels. Clare Chambers’ Shy Creatures follows Helen, an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s, who finds her affair with a married doctor beginning to fray after a locked-away man is discovered in a nearby house. Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, also set in the 1960s, looks at a doctor keeping secrets from his pregnant wife and a troubled woman distanced from her farmer husband. When a cold December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.

Chambers’ Small Pleasures was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and won the British Book Award. Miller won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. His novel Pure was a Costa Book of the Year.

They discuss their writing, the ways of the human heart and how ordinary lives are built of delicate layers of experience.

The Bafta-winning co-creator of Gavin and Stacey, and the Richard & Judy Book Club author of Love Untold, brings her joyful and life-affirming new novel By Your Side to Hay Festival, in this conversation with journalist and former BBC correspondent Julia Wheeler.

Linda and Levi will never meet. But they’re going to change each other’s lives. Linda investigates the lives of those who’ve died alone and tracks down any living relatives. She’s been a friend to the friendless for the past 33 years, and now she’s looking forward to early retirement. But before she hangs up her lanyard, Linda must take on one last case – that of Levi, a Welshman who’d made his home on a remote Scottish island.

Meet Javier Cercas, one of Spain’s most renowned writers, as he discusses his crime trilogy Terra Alta. Cercas opens up the world of Terra Alta, and delves into the series’ final book, Fortress of Evil, where Melchor – who years before took revenge for his mother’s murder – finds his peace shattered when his teenage daughter Cosette discovers the truth behind her own mother’s death.

Cercas’ awards include the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Soldiers of Salamis, the European Book Prize for The Impostor, and the Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation for Even the Darkest Night, the first book in the Terra Alta trilogy. He talks to journalist Kirsty Lang.

Hear one of our great contemporary storytellers discuss her new book and inspirations. Elif Shafak talks to broadcaster Kirsty Lang about There Are Rivers in the Sky, the story of three lives throughout history – in Victorian London, 2014 Turkey and 2018 London – connected by a single drop of water.

Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist whose books include The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. Her work has been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize.

Join the novelist and screenwriter as she launches her haunting new novel. A boundary-pushing thriller told through the lens of a lyrical family drama, The House of Water is both unsettling and thought-provoking.

Placing that key in the lock was the last ordinary moment of her life. Iona returns home one evening to find her family murdered and her father missing. Her home is entirely submerged in water. An unnamed girl lies dead in her bed. As the police declare her father the main suspect, Iona is forced to confront how much she really knew about the man who raised her. Hidden in the fragments of her father’s final manuscript, recovered from the flood, an unimaginable secret slowly rises to the surface.

Catherine Airey discusses her debut novel, a mesmerising story of family, fate and survival, with feminist writer and activist Laura Bates. Moving from the windy wastes of 1970s Ireland to the burning lights of New York City and back, Confessions follows three generations of women in an expansive tale of secrets and revelation, departure and connection. Painting Ireland both as a place of belonging and as a place that makes a stranger of its women and girls, she examines the irresistible gravity of the past – how it endures through generations, pervasively present even when buried or forgotten.

Spend an evening with Strictly Come Dancing royalty Anton Du Beke as he introduces his new novel, the eighth in his Forsyth Family saga, Monte Carlo by Moonlight.

Anton Du Beke is one of this generation’s all-round entertainers. In 2018, he realised his boyhood ambition and published the first in a series of novels set in the 1930s world of the exclusive Mayfair hotel, The Buckingham. Seven bestselling books later, the Forsyth family arrive in 1960s Monte Carlo, a world of glitz, glamour, scandal and betrayal…

Exploring the art of literary collaboration, director and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, discuss taking Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk from book to screen.

The adaptation by Lenkiewicz of Levy’s Booker-shortlisted novel of the same name follows Rose (played by Fiona Shaw) and her daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey), as they wrestle with co-dependency and desire by the Spanish seaside.

This event is a collaboration between MUBI and the London Review of Books.

With whip-smart wit and a cavalcade of cads, dashing gents and fierce heroines, this is a legendary comedy experience for Austen fans and newcomers alike!

Austentatious is the improvised Jane Austen novel which has become a West End institution. Marking Austen’s 250th birthday this year, an all-star cast in full costume takes an audience suggestion for an unknown Jane Austen book, and then you watch it unfold before your eyes. Previous suggestions have included Mansfield Shark, Double O Darcy, Bend It Like Bennet and The Taking of Pemberley 123.

Austentatious took the Edinburgh Fringe by storm in 2012, and from those humble roots has continued to grow and grow, performing everywhere from the RSC in Stratford to Hampton Court Palace.

Grab a front row seat to an extraordinary conversation between two literary greats: Nobel Prize-winner Abdulrazak Gurnah and Booker-shortlisted Elif Shafak. The pair talk about their writing, the role of literature in presenting diverse perspectives, and the power of storytelling to bring hope in times of crisis and in a deeply polarised and fractured world.

Gurnah’s latest novel is Theft, in which he explores the intertwined lives of three young people as they come of age in postcolonial East Africa. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent.

Head into the dark with Chris Chibnall and Ragnar Jónasson, as they introduce their new noir novels.

Chibnall, the creator of Broadchurch and showrunner of Doctor Who, makes his crime fiction debut with Death at the White Hart, about a detective who moves back to Dorset. There, she finds a grisly crime scene in the picturesque village of Fleetcombe. Chibnall is a Bafta, Royal Television Society, Broadcasting Press Guild and Peabody award-winning screenwriter, executive producer and playwright.

Jónasson’s The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer sees young detective Helgi investigating the case of Elín S Jónsdóttir, a bestselling crime author who has gone missing, and left no clues about her disappearance. Jónasson is the award-winning Icelandic author of the international bestselling Hulda series and the Dark Iceland series. He is also co-founder and co-chair of the literary festival Iceland Noir, held in Reykjavík.

Family, friendships and love are the centre of new books by Holly Bourne (author of the Spinster Club series) and Lorraine Kelly (ITV’s Lorraine), and the two authors join forces to examine our love for fictional family dramas.

Bourne’s new novel So Thrilled for You is about four friends reunited at a baby shower on a sweltering hot summer day. When someone starts a fire at the house, everyone’s a suspect and the group’s relationship is changed forever.

Kelly’s The Island Swimmer follows Evie, who returns to Orkney after her father falls desperately ill. As she clears out her father’s neglected house to prepare it for sale, she is drawn to a group of cold-water swimmers led by her old friend Freya, who find calmness beneath the waves.

Nussaibah Younis discusses her darkly comic coming-of-age novel about a professor who accepts a job rehabilitating ISIS women in Iraq. In Fundamentally Nadia meets Sara, a precocious and sweary East Londoner who joined ISIS at just 15. When Sara confesses a secret, Nadia is forced to make a difficult choice.

Younis talks to broadcaster, journalist and filmmaker Bidisha about exploring love, family, religion and radicalism through comedy, writing, and what it’s like to be a first-time author.

Dr Nussaibah Younis is a peace-building practitioner and a globally recognised expert on contemporary Iraq. She was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, where she directed the Future of Iraq Task Force and offered strategic advice to US government agencies on Iraq policy. Bidisha is a critic and columnist for the Guardian and Observer and broadcasts for BBC TV and radio, ITN, CNN and Sky News.

French novelist Mathias Énard has won many international awards including the Prix Goncourt for his novels Zone, Street of Thieves and Compass. He talks to writer and Guardian literary critic Chris Power about his latest novel The Deserters, which vividly lays bare the devastations of war.

Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life.

Aboard a small cruise ship near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor and steadfast antifascist who remained loyal to his side of the Berlin Wall despite the collapse of the Communist utopia, unaware that a new era of violence is about to descend.

Out of the tension between these narratives, everything that is at stake in times of conflict comes to light: commitment and betrayal, loyalty and lucidity, hope and survival.

Join author Janice Hadlow (The Other Bennet Sister), screenwriter Sarah Quintrell (The Power) and executive producer and Bad Wolf co-founder Jane Tranter (His Dark Materials) as they discuss the challenges of adapting and reinterpreting Austen for modern audiences, in her 250th birthday year.

Following the announcement that Bad Wolf will adapt Janice Hadlow’s best-selling novel The Other Bennet Sister for the BBC, the trio will discuss their approach to reinterpreting Mary Bennet, the seemingly unremarkable and overlooked middle sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Described as a “fresh spin around the ballroom for one of Jane Austen’s most unassuming characters”, the ten-part drama is written by Sarah Quintrell and gives Mary Bennet the epic love story nobody predicted for her.

The Booker-shortlisted author (Do Not Say We Have Nothing) shares her profound and adventurous new novel. The Book of Records questions how collective political moments can determine an individual’s future, and revels in the infinite joys of intellectual endeavour.

Lina and her ailing father have had to flee their home, and have taken refuge in a mysterious building known as the Sea, that dominates a staging-post for migrating people. With only a few possessions, including three volumes from the Great Voyagers encyclopaedia series, they find some rooms and wait for the rest of their family.

While they wait, Lina befriends her unusual neighbours – who resemble the radical 17th-century Dutch scholar Baruch Spinoza, the philosopher Hannah Arendt and the Chinese poet Du Fu – while her father struggles with the concept of leaving this supposed temporary home. As his health worsens, he finally recounts how he and Lina came to reside in the Sea, and what his betrayals cost their family and others.

Join the inimitable Ben Okri as he introduces his new work Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, an homage to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The novella tells the story of Viv, who throws a festival on the 20th anniversary of the day her first husband left her. There, the special guest is world-renowned clairvoyant and fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, not seen since the pages of The Waste Land.

Okri has won many prizes for his fiction, and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright and poet. In 2019 his Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

Irish novelist Ferdia Lennon discusses the runaway success of his first novel, Glorious Exploits, which won the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, and has been adapted for BBC Radio 4.

Ancient Sicily. Enter Gelon: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter Lampo: lovesick, jobless, in need of a distraction. Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads. They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food. And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry. It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of. What could possibly go wrong?

Emma Jane Unsworth is a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter as well as a bestselling novelist. With episodes of Apples’ The Buccaneers and Stephen Merchant’s The Outlaws under her belt, she’s also got film and TV projects of her own on the boil. The author of Animals and Adults talks to novelist and screenwriter Nussaibah Younis about her newest novel, a no-holds-barred, frank and heartfelt exploration of sisterhood, friendship and teenage obsession. In Slags, sisters Sarah and Juliette are going on a whisky-fuelled campervan road-trip across Scotland to celebrate Juliette’s birthday – and they’re going to dig up some demons from the past.

Michael Pedersen is Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Makar (Poet Laureate). His The Cat Prince & Other Poems won the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards Best Poetry and his first novel Boy Friends was a Sunday Times Critics Choice. He discusses his new novel Muckle Flugga with Hay Festival President Stephen Fry.

It’s no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence. The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper and his otherworldly son – just them, and the occasional lodger. When a new lodger arrives from Edinburgh, old and new ways collide...

Join comedian Julian Clary and broadcaster Susie Dent (Countdown) for a lively discussion about writing their new crime novels, and how they call on their careers and experiences for inspiration.

Clary’s Curtain Call to Murder follows dresser Jayne as she tries to solve a murder that takes place on stage at the London Palladium. She’s hindered by the cast, including an ageing lothario, a national treasure and an amateur psychic. In Dent’s Guilty by Definition an anonymous letter arrives at the offices of the Clarendon English Dictionary containing a challenge for the team of lexicographers. But the letter hints at secrets and lies…

They talk to writer and Guardian literary critic Chris Power.

Two women – one based on a real person, one imagined – are at the centre of Lucía Lijtmaer’s Cautery, a savage look at the cheap consolations of meme-ified faux feminism.

The novel follows a young woman whose life looks good from the outside, but who feels intensely unhappy and trapped in her relationship. Four hundred years earlier, another woman flees England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she finds her fortune but discovers independence doesn’t mean freedom from the dangerous vanities of men.

Lijtmaer is a writer and cultural critic, and the curator of the festival of guerrilla and feminist culture, Princesses and Darth Vaders. She codirects, with Isa Calderón, the award-winning podcast Deforme Semanal on Radio Primavera Sound. in conversation with the writer Emma Jane Unsworth.

A chance to hear novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi – who will join us digitally – speak about the devastating fall which left him without the use of his limbs, and the effect it had on his creativity. Kureishi fell at home on Boxing Day in 2022, and spent the subsequent year in hospitals in Italy, before he returned home to London.

Unable to hold a pen but compelled to write during his time in medical care, he dictated his words to family members, and authored a series of dispatches from his hospital beds. These were shared on social media and online, and form part of his book Shattered. The author (on screen via digital link) speaks to journalist Rosie Boycott (present in person) about his experiences, and how his time in recovery awoke within him new feelings of gratitude, humility and love.