John Boyne the Weight of Angels in conversation 13th October

We are thrilled to welcome back to the Wirral John Boyne.

. The winner of four Irish Book Awards, including Author of the Year, he is the author of eighteen novels for adults, six for younger readers, a picture book, and a collection of short stories. The international bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was made into a Miramax feature film and has sold more than eleven million copies worldwide. His novels are published in sixty languages. He lives in Dublin.

The Weight of Angels is his NEW book!

Tickets £22 book and ticket

Couple ticket £32.00

Access only £15

The Weight of Angels is a marvellous conceit – a word Oscar himself might employ – a richly inventive multi-media novel of literary might-have-beens. Boyne is at the very tip-top of his form, and the book is at once highly readable and an intellectual treat for Wildeans and the wide world besides.

– John Banville, Booker Prize winner of The Sea

‘John Boyne is one of our best authors writing today. The Weight of Angels is wise, imaginative, funny, and extremely moving.Art and Life, Tragedy and Love, you’ll find them all here in this rich and magnificent novel!’

Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?

When the Marquis of Queensbury left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite’. The famous playwright sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution and imprisonment. From then on, his gilded existence spiralled into public disgrace and an early death.

But what if he had simply ignored the insult?

Rather than dying impoverished in Paris at forty-six, what if he had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes at the start of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as celebrated, dramatic and tumultuous as the first?

Like Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet and Percival Everett's James, John Boyne explores one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the great Anglo-Irish playwright an opportunity to take an entirely different path.