The Common Press are delighted to welcome Yael van der Wouden and Dr Diarmuid Hester for an in conversation event on the 24th of June. They will be discussing their gorgeous new books, The Safekeep and Nothing Ever Just Disappears.
The Safekeep:
It's 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her
brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season...
Eva is Isabel's antithesis: sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn't. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house-a spoon, a knife, a bowl-Isabel's suspicions spiral out of control. In
the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel's paranoia gives way to desire - leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva - nor the house in which they live - are what they seem.
Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher. She currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’, has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. The Safekeep is her debut novel and was acquired in hotly-contested nine-way auctions in both the UK and the US. Rights have sold in a further twelve countries.
Nothing Ever Just Disappears
At the turn of the century, in the shade of Cambridge's cloisters, a young E. M. Forster conceals his passion for other men, even as he daydreams about the sun-warmed bodies of ancient Greece.
Under the dazzling lights of interwar Paris, Josephine Baker dances her way to fame and fortune and discovers sexual freedom backstage at the Folies Bergère. And on Jersey, in the darkest days of Nazi occupation, the transgressive surrealist Claude Cahun mounts an extraordinary resistance to save the island she loves, scattering hundreds of dissident artworks along its streets and shorelines. Nothing Ever Just Disappears brings to life the stories of seven remarkable figures and illuminates the connections between where they lived, who they loved, and the art they created.
It shows that a queer sense of place is central to the history of the twentieth century, and powerfully evokes how much is lost when queer spaces are forgotten. From the lesbian London of the suffragettes to James Baldwin's home in Provence, to Jack Smith's New York, Kevin Killian's San Francisco and the Dungeness cottage of Derek Jarman, this is a thrilling new history and a celebration of freedom, survival and the hidden places of the imagination.
Dr Diarmuid Hester is a radical cultural historian, activist, and author of the critically acclaimed books Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper and Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Irish Times, n+1, the New Inquiry, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Diarmuid is a BBC New Generation Thinker and regularly contributes to BBC Radio. He teaches at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and is a research associate of Emmanuel College.
Event details:
- Doors open from 6:30
- Event begins 7pm
- Book signings from 8pm