Historia Live, the HWA’s series of author events showcasing historical fiction and history writing, is back at the Wheatsheaf in London on Tuesday, 16 April, 2024. The theme this month is Bad reputations: fortune-tellers, fraudsters & fallen women.
On our panel are Laura Shepherd-Robinson, whose The Square of Sevens is out in paperback on 28 March, Stacey Halls, whose new novel, The Household, is published on 11 April, and Beezy Marsh, author of Queen of Diamonds, published on 29 February.
The chair is AJ West, who won the 2022 HWA Debut Crown for The Spirit Engineer. His next novel, The Betrayal of Thomas True, will be out on 4 July.
The event starts at 7pm and stays open until 10.30. After the panel discussion there will be time for questions and afterwards everyone is welcome to stay and meet the authors, get books signed or just mingle and talk.
Space is limited, so please book your ticket in advance through Eventbrite to avoid being disappointed; our last London event sold out within days. Tickets are £5 per person.
Join us in our usual room upstairs in the Wheatsheaf pub at 25 Rathbone Place, London W1T 1JB. It’s on the north side of Oxford Street, about three minutes’ walk from Tottenham Court Road station. Be there a little earlier than 7pm if you want to get a drink from the bar downstairs.
The authors
Laura Shepherd-Robinson
Laura worked in politics for nearly 20 years before taking an MA in Creative Writing at City University.
Blood & Sugar, her first novel, won the 2019 HWA Debut Crown Award and the Specsavers’ Debut Crime Novel award, was a Waterstones thriller of the month, and a Guardian and Telegraph novel of the year.
Her second, Daughters of Night, was shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards including the 2021 HWA Gold Crown, and was a book of the year in The Times, the i, and the Guardian. The Square of Sevens is her third novel.
She lives in London with her husband.
The Square of Sevens
Red’s fortune telling, using the Square of Sevens method, delights Georgian Bath.
But she is tormented by questions: who was her mother? How did she die? And who were her father’s mysterious enemies?
Her search for answers takes her around England, mingling in high and low society — and puts her in grave danger.
Stacey Halls
Stacey grew up in Rossendale, Lancashire.
She studied journalism at the University of Central Lancashire and has written for publications including the Guardian, Stylist, Psychologies, The Independent, The Sun and Fabulous.
Her first book, The Familiars, was the bestselling debut novel of 2019 and was longlisted for that year’s HWA Debut Crown Award. It’s just been reissued in a new five-year-anniversary edition. The Household is her fourth novel.
The Household
In 1847 Urania Cottage offers refuge for prostitutes, petty thieves and destitute women. But do they want it?
In Piccadilly, millionairess Angela Burdett-Coutts, a benefactor of Urania Cottage, discovers that her stalker has been released from prison.
As the women’s worlds collide, they discover that freedom always comes at a price.
Beezy Marsh
Beezy is an international and Sunday Times top ten best-selling author and award-winning journalist of more than 20 years’ standing.
As health correspondent for the Daily Mail she was nominated for a National Press Award for her investigations.
Her Queen trilogy is based on the true story of the Forty Thieves, a London-based all-female gang which scandalised the nation with their criminal shoplifting antics, creating national headlines throughout the early part of the 20th century.
She grew up in the north-east of England and now lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and two sons.
Queen of Diamonds
In the third of her Queen novels it’s 1922 and Alice Diamond forms a criminal gang, the Forty Thieves, which is soon in conflict with the gang led by Kate Felix.
But Alice — known as the Bob-Haired Bandit — and Kate make some powerful enemies, and Alice must sacrifice more than she ever imagined if she is to become the gangland queen.
AJ West
AJ is an award-winning former BBC journalist, radio broadcaster and voice artist from Buckinghamshire.
The son of primary school teachers, he grew up reading books to escape his shyness at school and discovered an early talent for writing which took him across the world working on scripts for popular radio programmes and documentaries.
He won the HWA Debut Crown 2022 with his first novel, The Spirit Engineer, which has just been optioned for the screen by Canderblinks Film & Music, a Belfast-based production company.
AJ lives in London with his husband.
The Spirit Engineer
Belfast, 1914, and two years after the sinking of the Titanic, high society has become obsessed with spiritualism, attending séances in the hope they might reach their departed loved ones.
William Jackson Crawford is a man of science and a sceptic, but one night with everyone sitting around the circle, voices come to him – seemingly from beyond the veil – placing doubt in his heart and a seed of obsession in his mind.
Could the spirits truly be communicating with him or is this a parlour trick gone too far?
Meet our authors
The discussion and Q&A session lasts about an hour, and the authors will be staying afterwards to sign their books. They all love meeting readers, so do go and say hello. Indie bookseller Primrose Hill Books will be there to supply copies of their books if you haven’t got them yet.
Get your tickets via Eventbrite.
If you’d like to see other books by HWA authors — and there are over 140 of them being published this year — we’ve got a round-up of books coming out in 2024 to browse. Historia’s Latest releases column also has information about the newest books, updated every publication day.
We’re hoping to start Historia Live events in other parts of the UK. If you’d like to get involved, please contact Gill Paul.
Dublin
Historia Live returns to Dublin in March with two acclaimed authors, Aoife Fitzpatrick and Anya Bergman, discussing historical fiction set beyond Ireland’s shores with Hazel Gaynor at the Pearse Street Library on Wednesday, 6 March, from 6.30 to 8pm. Get your ticket — free!
Past events
Our standing-room-only event in January, with Nikki Marmery, Costanza Casati, Elodie Harper and Jennifer Saint, and Liz Fremantle in the (high) chair
