An evening with Patrick Langley

Join us on Tuesday 26 September at 7pm to celebrate the publication of THE VARIATIONS, the latest novel from Patrick Langley.

Patrick will be in conversation with David Hering, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and co-director of the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool, before taking questions from the audience and signing copies of THE VARIATIONS.

About THE VARIATIONS:

‘A skilfully told story about inheritance and inspiration, music and time. Langley has a fine eye for detail and scene-making, and The Variations is full of startling observations and images.’ -MARTIN MACINNES

‘The Variations is a passionate meditation on how past and present meet and annihilate one another in the flare of individual human experience. Music is presented as a kind of weather, blustery and changeable, unlimited by its own time. It takes you up, puts you down, whirls you away. Langley’s prose, lyrical and accurate, enlivens and illuminates. A tremendous, seriously ambitious novel.’ -M. JOHN HARRISON

‘If Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black were written by John Banville channelling M. John Harrison, the result would look something like this. And yet Langley has made something new and unexpected about how the present is, necessarily and always, an echo corridor of the past. Beautifully written, powered by a wonderfully intelligent conceptual dynamo, and deftly sprung with surprises, The Variations is an utterly original book about haunting. It is strange, resonant, and, yes, haunting.’ – NEEL MUKHERJEE

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift – an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past. When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, THE VARIATIONS is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty – or impossibility – of living with the past.

About PATRICK LANGLEY:

Patrick Langley’s first novel, ARKADY, was longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Deborah Rogers Writers Prize. THE VARIATIONS is his second novel.

This event is being held at The West Kirby Bookshop, 6 Grange Road, CH48 4HA.

Tickets are £17 including a copy or the book, or £5 standard admission. Both include drinks on arrival. Copies of THE VARIATIONS will be available to purchase on the night. Tickets are non-refundable, and if you can’t make the event but would like a signed/dedicated copy of THE VARIATIONS, please do get in touch, @westkirbybooks on Instagram & Twitter or by emailing hello@thewestkirbybookshop.com.