Mary Costello & Linda Grant

Two critically acclaimed novelists tackle the search for the meaning of home. 

In Mary Costello’s The River Capture, Luke O’Brien has left Dublin for a quiet life by the River Sullane, where the serenity of this riverside retreat in West Cork is soon unsettled. A Stranger City by Linda Grant is immersed in the clamour and calamity of contemporary London, when a dead body found caught in the chains of HMS Belfast on the Thames begins the search for a missing woman.

Mary Costello’s short story collection, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street (2014), won the Irish Novel of the Year Award and Irish Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. It was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime.

Linda Grant won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysees Prize for Literary Reportage in 2006, and was shortlisted for the Man Book Prize in 2008 for The Clothes on their Backs. 2017’s The Dark Circle was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Chaired by John Self.

Supported by No Alibis.