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Event: Ben Pester and Keith Ridgway at Bàrd Books
2026-06-23 19:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Paris) | Bàrd Books, 341-343 Roman Road, London, E3 5QR
Join author Ben Pester and Keith Ridgway with Barry Pierce to discuss their new books

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).

Event: Sara Baume & Emily LaBarge discuss Opening Night
2026-07-01 19:00 - 20:00 | London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Pl, London, WC1A 2JL
Shortly after the pandemic lockdown Sara Baume came across a painting in a pop-up exhibition in a renovated West Cork shed. Fascinated by it, she became determined to make the painter’s acquaintance – although a native of North Dakota the artist Mollie Douthit was now living and working in rural Ireland. Bonded by a common love of nature and a commitment to their respective artistic practices, they began to meet regularly, to talk, to eat and to swim. What would it be like, Baume wondered, to write a book in the style of Mollie’s painting? Opening Night is the result. She will be in conversation with Emily LaBarge, author of Dog Days.

Event: Lucy Caldwell & Nell Stevens, Short Story Magic
2026-08-22 13:30 - 14:30
BBC National Short Story Award-winning Lucy Caldwell (author of Openings and These Days) and Nell Stevens (author of The Original and Somerset Maugham Award-winning Mrs Gaskell & Me) are both masters at catapulting you into characters’ lives, conjuring entirely new worlds in a matter of pages. In this conversation they discuss their new story collections, Devotions and The Good Time, talking stories of love, grief, haunted lives, emotional crossroads, and irresistible humour with Di Speirs.
