Henley Literary Festival 2024 Preview @HenleyLitFest

Henley Literary Festival is back for 2024 with a combination of in person and live-streamed events taking place from 28th September to 6th October. There is also a varied programme of events for children. Authors attending this year’s Festival include Lynda La Plante, Michael Palin, Alison Weir, Jacqueline Wilson, David Nicholls, Irvine Welsh, Kate Mosse and Jodi Picoult.

Here are the three events I’m going to attend. Links from the author names will take you to the event details on the Henley Literary Festival website where you can purchase tickets (subject to availability). Please note, I have no commercial relationship with Henley Literary Festival and buy my own tickets.

Elif Shafak – talking about her latest book, There Are Rivers In The Sky

Robert Harris – talking about his latest book, Precipice 

Gardening panel with Rachel de Thame, author of A Flower Garden for Pollinators, and Carol Klein, author of Hortobiography

Are you hoping to attend a literary festival this year? Are there authors you would love to see in person?

#WWWWednesday – 18th September 2024

WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!


Currently reading

PiranesiPiranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury) 

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house —a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

The GlassmakerThe Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier (Harper Collins via NetGalley)

It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers in Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass — but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.

Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure.


Recently finished

Terra Incognita by Simon Turney (Head of Zeus)


What Cathy Will Read Next

Shy CreaturesShy Creatures by Clare Chambers (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson) 

In all failed relationships there is a point that passes unnoticed at the time, which can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park.

Croydon, 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with a charismatic, married doctor.

One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen’s home. A mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. It is clear he has been shut up in the house for decades, but when it emerges that William is a talented artist, Helen is determined to discover his story.