We’re delighted to be welcoming Wendy Erskine to the shop for the Manchester launch of her latest short story collection DANCE MOVE. Wendy has invited a special panel of guests to read alongside her and they’ll be discussing Wendy’s work with host David Gaffney.

Wendy will be joined by:

Graham Caveney, who will be reading from his forthcoming book On Agoraphobia, an entertaining and moving mix of memoir and cultural history of agoraphobia, it’s history and it’s appearances in literature and art.

Writer and journalist Adelle Stripe will be treating us to an extract from Ten Thousand Apologies, her music biography inspired by the strange life and curious times of notorious UK band Fat White Family.

Author and host of First Graft podcast, Heidi James, who will be reading from her latest critically acclaimed novel The Sound Mirror.

About the book:

Meet Drew Lord Haig, called upon to sing the obscure hit from his youth at a paramilitary event. Or Max, who recalls an eventful journey to a Christian film festival. Meet Mrs Dallesandro, in the tanning salon on her wedding anniversary dreaming of a teenage sexual experience. And Sonya, who scours the streets of Belfast for the missing posters of her dead son.

In Dance Move, the new collection of stories from Wendy Erskine, we meet characters who are looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by the moment in their past that marked them.

In these stories – as in real life – the funny, the tender and the devastating go hand in hand. Full of warmth, the familiar and the strange, they are about what it means to live in the world, how far you can end up from where you came from, and what it means to look back.

About the author:

Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published by Repeater, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Faber & Faber, Tangerine Press, No Alibis Press and Rough Trade Books. Sweet Home, her first collection of stories, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. It was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and won the 2020 Butler Literary Award.

Doors: 18.30, event starts: 19.00

Tickets are £3.00 or free when pre-ordering a copy of the book. DANCE MOVE and books by all the readers will also be available to purchase on the night and Wendy, Graham, Adelle and Heidi will be happy to sign copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.