Mar
25
7:00pm
Kitchenly 434 by Alan Warner
By The Portobello Bookshop
We’re very excited to be hosting an event with Alan Warner in conversation with Jenni Fagan to celebrate Kitchenly 434 – his first novel in six years.
Kitchenly 434 is set in a sprawling Tudorbethan mansion in Sussex, Kitchenly Mill Race, on the cusp of the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister – in some ways, the last days of an Age of Innocence. Marko Morrell, guitarist in Fear Taker, is one of the biggest rock stars in the world. His demanding lifestyle means he is frequently in absentia at Kitchenly, his idyllic country retreat, and so it is his butler (or ‘help’), Crofton Park, who is charged with the maintenance and housekeeping. When, one day, two young girls arrive looking for Marko clutching their copies of Fear Taker LPs, Crofton finds himself on a romantic misadventure which leads to the tragicomic unravelling of the fantasies he has been living by.
A novel about delusional male behaviour, opening and closing curtains, self-awareness, loneliness and ‘getting it together in the country’, Kitchenly 434 is a magnificent book about the Golden Age of Rock set in the bucolic English countryside.
Alan Warner is one of Scotland's best loved literary figures. His debut, Morvern Callar, is a contemporary Scottish classic and won the Somerset Maugham Award. His bestselling third novel, The Sopranos, has been adapted as a stage play, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, as well as a film, Our Ladies, directed by Michael Caton-Jones. Warner has been nominated for the Booker Prize and many other awards, and he currently teaches at the University of Aberdeen.
Jenni Fagan was selected as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists after the publication of her debut novel, The Panopticon, which was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. Her latest novel, Luckenbooth, is a genre-bending story set in an Edinburgh tenement and was met with rapturous praise on its publication in January.
The event will take place online with both Alan Warner and Jenni Fagan joining us from their homes via Crowdcast.
The ticket price includes a signed bookplate edition of Kitchenly 434. These will be hand-wrapped and posted out in the days following the event.
hosted by
The Portobello Bookshop
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