author talk: Small - On Motherhoods by Claire Lynch

Thursday 25th August

in the shop - 6:30pm - author talk - free entry
Please register via Eventbrite if you wish to attend so we know how many people to expect.

Join Claire Lynch in the shop to hear about her dazzling literary debut exploring female loss, fertility and queer motherhood.

It begins with the smallest of life’s substances, the microscopic cells subdividing in a petri dish in a fertility treatment centre. She moves through her story in incremental yet ever growing steps, from the fingernail-sized pregnancy test result screen which bears two affirmative lines to the premature arrival of her children who have to wear scale-model oxygen masks in their life-saving incubators. Devastatingly poignant and profoundly observant – and funny against the odds – Claire considers whether it is our smallness that makes our lives so big.

Claire Lynch works as a university lecturer and author. Claire’s Four Thought talk ‘The Other Mother’ was first broadcast on BBC Radio Four this year and her first piece of narrative non-fiction took second place in the Spread the Word Life Writing Prize in 2017. She was a shortlisted writer on the Penguin Random House WriteNow scheme in 2018, and long-listed for the Hinterland non-fiction Prize in 2019. In 2020, her writing was shortlisted for the London Library Emerging Writer’s Programme.

Please register via Eventbrite for instructions to join and to help us with book ordering and to manage numbers on the shop floor.

We are operating with Covid caution here at October Books, so please respect your fellow attendees by maintaining some distance. We are requesting that people attending events/gatherings in the shop please wear a face covering - to ensure all people feel safe.

If you would like to reserve a copy of ‘Small: On Motherhoods’ to collect from the shop please email us at info@octoberbooks.org

If you would like a copy delivered directly to your door, you can! Here.

Find out more about Claire Lynch on Twitter: @DrClaireLynch and on instagram: @clairellynch