A.K. Blakemore - in conversation about The Glutton

A K Blakemore is an award-winning poet and novelist from London. Her first novel, The Manningtree Witches, won the Desmond Elliot Prize for Best First Novel and was shortlisted for a Costa Award. Her second novel, The Glutton, is forthcoming from Granta. Her work has been widely published, appearing in The London Review of Books, The White Review and The Guardian, among others.

Blakemore will be chatting about The Glutton, and about how she is navigating sucess after her brilliant debut novel, The Manningtree Witches. 

Tickets can include a copy of the The Glutton, and there will be a chance to get yours signed by AK Blakemore at the event.

THE GLUTTON

by A.K. Blakemore 

In this rich and absorbing tale of depravity, pleasure and class, the author of the former Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month The Manningtree Witches serves up another glorious evocation of the past, as a hungry peasant embarks on a curious crusade in revolutionary France.

Sister Perpetue is not to move. She is not to fall asleep. She is to sit, keeping guard over the patient's room.

She has heard the stories of his hunger, which defy belief: that he has eaten all manner of creatures and objects. A child even, if the rumours are to be believed.

But it is hard to believe that this slender, frail man is the one they once called The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon. Before, he was just Tarare. Well-meaning and hopelessly curious, born into a world of brawling and sweet cider, to a bereaved mother and a life of slender means.

The 18th Century is drawing to a close, unrest grips the heart of France and life in the village is soon shaken. When a sudden act of violence sees Tarare cast out and left for dead, his ferocious appetite is ignited, and it's not long before his extraordinary abilities to eat make him a marvel throughout the land.

Following Tarare as he travels from the South of France to Paris and beyond, through the heart of the Revolution, The Glutton is an electric, heart-stopping journey into a world of tumult, upheaval and depravity, wherein the hunger of one peasant is matched only by the insatiable demands of the people of France.