Join us at Blackwell's Bookshop as we welcome Paul Scraton to Manchester where he'll be talking about his latest novel Built on Sand with Gary Budden, author of Hollow Shores (Dead Ink). The evening will be hosted by David Cooper (Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy)

Built on Sand:

Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, youll soon hit sand. The stories of Berlin are the stories Built On Sand. A wooden town, laid waste by the Thirty Years War that became the metropolis by the Spree that spread out and swallowed villages whole. The city of Rosa Luxemburg and Joseph Roth, of student movements and punks on both sides of the Wall. A place still bearing the scars of National Socialism and the divided city that emerged from the wreckage of war. Built On Sand centres on the personal geographies of place, and how memory and history live on in the individual and collective imagination. This novel offers a portrait of a city three decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the legacy of that history in a city that was once divided but remains fractured and fragmented.

Hollow Shores:

Gary Budden s debut collection blends the traditions of weird fiction and landscape writing in an interlinked set of stories from the emotional geographies of London, Kent, Finland and a place known as the Hollow Shore. The Hollow Shore is both fictional and real. It is a place where flowers undermine railway tracks, relationships decay and monsters lurk. It is the shoreline of a receeding, retreating England. This is where things fall apart, waste away and fade from memory. Finding horror and ecstasy in the mundane, Hollow Shores follows characters on the cusp of change in broken-down environments and the landscapes of the mind.

This event is free. For more information, or if you would like a signed copy because you can't make it to the event, please contact the Blackwell's events team on david.coates@blackwell.co.uk or phone 0161 274 3331.