DARK SOCIETIES: Best of the Best

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Dark Societies – Best of the best.

Thursday 27th August. 6.30pm

Waterstones Piccadilly

The Post-Apocalyptic Book Club and Waterstones Piccadilly are very proud to present five authors whose books wowed the critics and excited the fans.

Join Emily St John Mandel (Station Eleven) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1447268970/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1447268970&linkCode=as2&tag=posapobooclu-21&linkId=TUTNHZNXMH6FAWXJ), Frances Hardinge (Cuckoo Song) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0330519735/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0330519735&linkCode=as2&tag=posapobooclu-21&linkId=KEHSSUVTSFEJTVGD), M. R. Carey (The Girl with All The Gifts) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0356500152/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0356500152&linkCode=as2&tag=posapobooclu-21&linkId=HYZ6XVL2465VYCDQ), Emmi Itäranta (Memory of Water) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0007529945/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0007529945&linkCode=as2&tag=posapobooclu-21&linkId=GUNX2P24D7AUUOAG) and Dave Hutchinson (Europe In Autumn) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1781081956/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1781081956&linkCode=as2&tag=posapobooclu-21&linkId=HWO4AVPHHHPSH2FK) as they discuss their novels and inspirations so that we can take a closer look at some of the best books of the last year.

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Tickets £5/£3 PABC members and Waterstones Cardholders available in store, via 02078512400 or email Piccadilly@waterstones.com

Waterstones Piccadilly, 203-205 Piccadilly, London, W1J 9HD

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Emily St. John Mandel (https://twitter.com/EmilyMandel) is the author of four novels, most recently Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award. A previous novel, The Singer's Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She is a staff writer for The Millions. She lives in New York City with her husband.

Frances Hardinge (https://twitter.com/FrancesHardinge) is a writer who wears a black hat and she is rumoured to be made entirely out of velvet. Sources close to Frances who prefer not to be named suggest that she has an Evil Twin who wears white and is hatless. This cannot be confirmed.

Her sixth book, Cuckoo Song, was released in May 2014. This changeling tale set in the 1920s featured in The Sunday Times as their Children's Book of the Week, and was selected for the Booktrust Best Book Guide 2014 (12–14 years category). It was also chosen as one of the Sunday Times 100 Modern Children's Classics, and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the James Herbert Award, the British Science Fiction Association's Best Novel Award and the British Fantasy Awards 2015.

M. R. Carey (https://twitter.com/michaelcarey191) is a pen name for Mike Carey, an established British writer of prose fiction and comic books. He has written for both DC and Marvel, including critically acclaimed runs on X-Men and Fantastic Four, Marvel’s flagship superhero titles. His creator-owned books regularly appear in the New York Times graphic fiction bestseller list. He also has several previous novels (Felix Castor series) and one Hollywood movie screenplay to his credit. The Girl with all the Gifts, published January 2014, has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, James Herbert Award and is currently being adapted into a film starring Gemma Arteton, Glenn Close and Paddy Constantine.

Emmi Itäranta (https://twitter.com/emmi_elina) was born in Tampere, Finland, where she also grew up. She holds an MA in Drama from the University of Tampere and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Kent, UK, where she began writing her debut novel Memory of Water. She later completed the full manuscript in Finnish and English. In 2011, the novel won the Fantasy and Sci-fi Literary Contest organised by the Finnish publishing house Teos and in 2015 it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction and the Kitschies Gold Tentacle award for debut novel. Itäranta’s professional background is an eclectic blend of writing-related activities, including stints as a columnist, theatre critic, dramaturge, script writer and press officer. She lives in Canterbury, UK, and is currently writing her second novel.

Dave Hutchinson (https://twitter.com/HutchinsonDave) is a UK writer who published four volumes of stories by the age of twenty-one – and then moved into journalism. After a decade of nonfiction, Hutchinson returned to the field, His latest novel, Europe in Autumn, is an sf thriller involving espionage, takes place in a highly fragmented and still fragmenting Near-Future Europe, one of whose sovereign mini-nations is a transcontinental railway line; over the course of the central plot – which seems to reflect some aspects of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) – the protagonist becomes involved in the Paranoia-inducing Les Coureurs des Bois, a mysterious postal service which also delivers humans across innumerable borders. This novel was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award and the BSFA Award for best novel.