Events, Book Launches and Talks

We offer these useful services:

If you’re interested, email us at enquiries@ handheldpress.co.uk

• talks, in-person and online (free)

• book stalls at fairs and conventions

• book launches

Coming up …

Join Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press and Kate Slotover of the Book Club Review Podcast in an online event for Westminster Libraries, talking about book clubs, how to run them, great and catastrophic book club reads, basic points of etiquette when tearing a book to pieces (like, not in front of its author), and whether those questions at the back are any good. The Kates will try to identify their top three Can’t Fail Book Club book choices: do tell them yours!

You can register for this free event here.

Join Handheld Press for an illustrated talk unpicking the mysteries of changing literary taste in twentieth-century British fiction, and hear some unfortunate truths about the publishing industry. The collapse of the three-decker novel, the rise of the cheap series, and the passion for escapism all affected what and how our grandparents and great-grandparents read for pleasure.

You can register for this free online event for the Guildhall Library now.

Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press will be giving two online talks, for Westminster Libraries on 17th January, and for the Guildhall Library London on 23rd January, about Ann Stafford’s 1942 novel Army Without Banners, now republished for the first time in eighty years. This autobiographical novel about the volunteer ambulance drivers in the Second World War, and the wider volunteer force in London during the Blitz is illustrated with sketches by the author that come straight from the bombsite and the night shelter.

You will be able to register for your free ticket for either event soon.

Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press will be in conversation with Esther Rutter, author of This Golden Fleece. A Journey Through Britain’s Knitted History, which traces the history of wool in the British Isles and how we’ve grown it, sheared it, spun it and knitted it.

You will be able to register for your free ticket for this Westminster Libraries event soon.

Join Kate Macdonald from Handheld Press and occasional book reviewer at www.katemacdonald.net for an online excursion through her bookshelf for the Guildhall Library London. This month we are looking at textiles, fabrics and threads. The books discussed will be: Kassia St Clair, The Golden Thread. How Fabric Changed History (2018), Clare Hunter, Threads of Life. A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle (2019), Esther Rutter, The Golden Fleece. A Journey Through Britain’s Knitted History (2019), and Claire Wilcox, Patchwork. A Life Through Clothes (2020).

You will be able to register for your free ticket soon.

Multi-award-winning novelist Nicola Griffith will be in conversation with Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press, to talk about her historical novels Hild (2013) and Menewood (2023). Both recreate the seventh-century world of a fracturing England, where warring kingdoms struggle to maintain land and dominance, and the Church is at war with itself. Nicola’s character Hild is a reimagining of the early life of Hilda of Whitby as a royal child, a seer, a king’s advisor and a landholder with political and military power. Join us!

Join Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press in two online talks, for the Guildhall Library London and Westminster Libraries, about the new Handheld Press edition of Rosemary Sutcliff’s beloved memoir of her childhood in naval dockyards, early disability, the family dogs and falling shatteringly in love. Blue Remembered Hills was first published forty years ago, and seventy years after Sutcliff’s most well-known novel The Eagle of the Ninth. As one of the most influential historical novelists in British children’s literature she formed the imaginations of generations of children with her stories of Roman and Saxon Britain. Hear where it all came from.

You will be able to register for either event soon.

Join Kate Macdonald from Handheld Press and occasional book reviewer at www.katemacdonald.net for an online excursion through her bookshelf for the Guildhall Library London. This month we are looking at Kate’s favourite books in her fashion history reference shelf: Catherine Horwood, Keeping Up Appearances. Fashion and Class Between the Wars, Claire Wilcox (ed.), The Golden Age of Couture. Paris and London, 1947-57 (2007), Nicholas Storey, History of Men’s Fashion. What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing (2008), and Linda Grant, The Thoughtful Dresser (2009).

You will be able to register for your free ticket soon.