Join Serenity Booksellers for an evening with Christie Watson and Sarah Vaughan as we celebrate the release of Killing Me Softly and Based on a True Story – two brilliantly smart and suspenseful psychological thrillers.

Christie and Sarah will be chatting to bookshop owner Kelly at our Stockport branch on Tuesday 24th March and the talk will be followed by an audience Q&A and signing.

About the Books:

Killing Me Softly by Christie Watson:

Unexpected deaths and untoward incidents are becoming alarmingly frequent at City Hospital’s Emergency Department. A&E Senior Sister, Aoife, begins to question whether her new nurses are incompetent – or worse.

Earnest recruit Eden cares deeply for her patients and carries the Code of Conduct around in her pocket, reporting everyone whose views don’t align with hers. But despite her self-righteousness, Eden keeps making mistakes. Is she dangerous?

It is Sophie who worries Aoife the most. Acerbic, over-confident and seemingly lacking in empathy, how Sophie ever became a nurse is beyond her. When Sophie begins an affair with Aoife’s best friend, Michael, a man twenty-five years her senior, tensions escalate further, threatening to eclipse the fact that lives are at stake.

Aoife is the nurse we’d all want. Compassionate to the core. She’s the nicest, kindest nurse in the world. Until she is tested to the limit . . .

Fearless, fast-paced and darkly funny, Killing Me Softly is a jaw-dropping novel about the hidden extremes of nursing and three complex women who hold the lives of their patients – and each other – in their hands.

Based on a True Story by Sarah Vaughan

A lavish 70th birthday party. A body found on a storm-lashed beach. And a secret that someone is dying to tell…

Famed children’s author Dame Eleanor Kingman has summoned her family and friends to her exquisite manor house on the cliffs. They’re celebrating her birthday – and her latest number one bestseller in her series of books based on a mother fox and her cubs.

But the night before the party, Eleanor receives an email: an email that threatens to expose the lie she’s kept up for over half a century.

Someone knows her secret. Is it her estranged literary agent? Is it her ex-husband, to whom she no longer speaks? Is it the nanny she fired all those years ago, who always did have a knack for storytelling? Or is it one of her three daughters, all of whom have a stake in the publishing empire she has built…

With a TV crew arriving to film a documentary of her life, Eleanor needs to find out who sent the email – and preserve her multimillion-pound career.

But when push comes to shove, and it’s time to tell the truth – will anyone actually believe her?

But will knowing her secret be enough to stop her?

About the Authors:

Christie Watson is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and Professor of Creative Writing at UEA. She has written eight books including her first novel Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, which won the Costa First Novel Award, and nursing memoir, The Language of Kindness, which was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and spent five months in the Top Ten Bestseller list. Christie is a contributor to the Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Telegraph and TEDx. Her work has been translated into twenty-three languages and adapted for theatre.

Brought up in Devon, Sarah Vaughan read English at Oxford and went on to become a journalist. After training at the Press Association, she spent eleven years at the Guardian as a news reporter, political correspondent and health correspondent, before leaving to freelance and write fiction. Her previous novels include Anatomy of a Scandal, an instant international bestseller translated into 22 languages and adapted for a major Netflix series in 2022. Sarah’s fourth novel Little Disasters has recently come to screen starring Diane Kruger, airing on Paramount+ in 2025. Based on a True Story is Sarah’s sixth novel, publishing in March 2026.

Event Details:

Tickets are £5.00 each, £20 Includoing a copy of Killing Me Softly, £16.99 including a copy of Based on a True Story, or £35 for a ticket and a copy of both books (saving you £1.99 off the RRP). Light refreshments are included in the ticket price.

Event starts at 6:30pm (doors at 6pm)