2019 Highlights

Pam Ayres is a national treasure, beloved by audiences and readers alike since her first appearance on our televisions in 1975. This new collection, her first since her 2013 Sunday Times bestseller You Made Me Late Again!, shows Ayres at her absolute best, mixing her warm observational wit with a rich reflective tone. Up in the Attic is by turns side-splittingly funny, at others reflective and profound. From the dubious joy of being an exhausted, panic-stricken hostess in ‘The Dinner Party’ or feelings of unease about pub tableware in ‘Don’t Put My Dinner on the Slate!’, to a poignant reflection of war in ‘Down the Line’ and the bitter-sweet nostalgia of ‘Up in the Attic’, this new collection has the same magic that has enchanted her dedicated fans for more than four decades. With its adept blend of the everyday and the universal, and Ayres’ characteristic sharp, perceptive verse, Up in the Attic is an essential addition to Pam Ayres’ collection of work.

Pam Ayres has been a writer, broadcaster, and entertainer for over 40 years. She is the author of several best-selling poetry books, including The Works, Surgically Enhanced, You Made Me Late Again!, and The Last Hedgehog. Pam’s autobiography, The Necessary Aptitude, was a best seller when it was published in 2011. On radio she is a regular on Just A Minute, has made six series of her own Ayres On The Air, and has appeared twice on the legendary Desert Island Discs. Pam performs her sell-out solo stage show throughout the UK, and lives in the Cotswolds, where she is an enthusiastic gardener for wildlife.

Tuesday 12th November at 11am

Isabel Bannerman was born in Paddington in 1962, the youngest of five children. She began gardening when, as a university student, she met Julian Bannerman, owner of Bannerman’s Bar in Edinburgh. Together they moved to a derelict baroque mansion in Wiltshire and camped whilst restoring the house and starting to design gardens and garden buildings for a living. With a lot of luck and hard work they established a practice, winning Gold Medals at Chelsea and working for HRH The Prince of Wales and clients from the worlds of fashion and film. Isabel has taken photographs since she was at school and began making her particular style of botanical scans in 2003. She has had four solo shows of her work, which is in the collections of Jasper Conran and Richard E Grant. She wrote and photographed Landscape of Dreams (Pimpernel Press, 2016), describing fourteen gardens created by the Bannermans and their way of working together.

Widespread praise for Landscape of Dreams, included: ‘A beautifully illustrated and endearing part- biography, part-overview of the thinking behind their work . . .’ The Sunday Times Garden Book of the Year

‘An absolutely magical book. Such brilliant writing, vivid, engaged . . . a most potent record of true brilliance.’ Anna Pavord

‘I just gorged myself on this magnificent book. Utterly transporting. The first garden book I could not put down.’ Dominic West

For further information, or to speak to Isabel Bannerman, please contact: Emma O’Bryen, Publicity, emma@obryen.co.uk, 07505 659641

Monday 11th November

Imogen Edwards-Jones is an award-winning journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She is the author of the bestselling Babylon series of industry exposés, which sold over a million copies worldwide. The first book in the series was adapted into Hotel Babylon, the returning prime time BBC1 TV series. She is the editorial consultant on Julian Fellowes’ Belgravia. An honorary Cossack, she read Russian at Bristol University and has traveled extensively in the old Soviet Union, leading her to write the travel book, The Taming of Eagles: Exploring New Russia. She lives in London.

Tuesday 12th & Wednesday 13th November

The Manor House Stories are a series of 12 children’s books with over 500 exquisite illustrations.

Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday – All Day

Charlotte grew up in Gloucestershire and studied English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked in journalism and PR in London for 25 years before escaping to the countryside, where she now lives in Oxfordshire, with her husband, teenage twins as well as chickens, dogs, lizards, horses and ferrets. She wrote her first novel ‘Girls Like Us’ in 2012, a comedy based very much on her own experience of twenty something PR girls behaving badly in London. Her second novel ‘Forgiving Bernadette’ was published earlier this year. A comedy about friendship, forgiveness and getting a second chance at life.

Wednesday 13th November – All day

Fiona Walker is the author nineteen novels in a career spanning over two decades. Plucked out of the slush pile at twenty-three with her first novel, French Relations, Fiona’s unique brand of sharp- eyed romantic comedy and never-want-to-leave setting was an immediate hit, and her books have gone on to sell millions of copies worldwide. The naughty big sister of chick lit, dubbed ‘the Jilly Cooper of the Cosmo generation’, she’s grown up alongside her readers from nineties London party-animal to dog-walking country mum, and her knack for story-telling remains as compelling as ever.

Her most recent novel, Country Lover, is set in the Compton villages in the fictional Bardswolds where secrets, scandals, giggles and gossip abound, at least some of it on horseback.

Fiona lives in deepest Shakespeare Country with her partner Sam, a dressage coach, their two daughters and a menagerie of horses, dogs and other animals.

Monday 11th November