As well as launching our books in bookshops, we often sell Handheld Press books at book fairs, conventions, conferences and AGMs.
Kate also gives talks about publishing and design to large and small groups, and runs workshops on how publishing works for aspiring authors (and publishers). If you’d like to book a Zoom talk (no fee), email us.
Wednesday 26 January 2022, 2-3pm: Rose Macaulay writes about London
This online event for the Guildhall Library, London, is a celebration of Rose Macaulay writing about London. When she won a literary prize in 1912 with her sixth novel, Rose Macaulay moved to London, where she lived and wrote for the rest of her long life. Her pacifist novel Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is set in the London suburbs and Upper Clapton. What Not (1918), her speculative satire that influenced Huxley’s Brave New World, is set in London government offices in Whitehall and in London’s many means of public transport. Potterism (1920) is set in Fleet Street. Many of her essays in Personal Pleasures (1935) describe the pleasures of London’s shops, cars, parties and churches.
Download the Guildhall Library events programme from this page, and book your free ticket!
Book launch! For Malcolm Saville’s Jane’s Country Year
Our book launch for Jane’s Country Year will be on Zoom, as this will be safer than an in-person gathering. It will be on 17 January 2022, at 19.30. Kim Spencer of the Malcolm Saville Society and Hazel Sheeky Bird, who wrote the Introduction to the Handheld edition, will be in conversation with Kate Macdonald of Handheld to celebrate our new edition of this marvellous novel of country life set after the Second World War.
The event will open at 19.30. Register for your free ticket here.
Book launch! Latchkey Ladies by Marjorie Grant
Anne Carey is drifting between jobs, bored of her fiancé, and longing for something to give her life meaning. Then she meets Philip Dampier, a married man whose plays she admires.
Petunia Garry, a beautiful teenage chorus girl with no background and dubious morals, is swept up by an idealistic soldier, who is determined to mould her into what he wants his wife to be.
Gertrude Denby, an Admiral’s daughter and an endlessly patient companion to an irritating employer, is so very tired of living out her life in hired rooms.
These latchkey ladies live in London at the end of the First World War. They are determined to use their new freedoms, but they tread a fine line between independence and disaster.
‘Fear woke her in the defenceless hour of dawn. She sat up in bed and faced it at last, shivering so that her teeth chattered, but valiant. She was certain that she was going to have a child.’
Kate Macdonald will be discussing the new Handheld Press edition of Latchkey Ladies with Sarah LeFanu in a hybrid book launch at the Guildhall Library, London, both in-person and by Zoom. Sarah LeFanu’s 2003 biography of Rose Macaulay revealed the existence of Marjorie Grant as one of Macaulay’s best friends. Her journal of writing that biography, Dreaming of Rose (2021), digs deep into the background to Latchkey Ladies, written when the unmarried Macaulay was also embarking on an affair with a married man.
Download the Guildhall Library events programme from this page and register for your free ticket.
