Events at the Shop

Over its six years, the London Review Bookshop has hosted an outstanding events programme, with readings, debates and conversations heard by packed houses. Nearly all these events have been recorded for the Bookshop by archivists Common Custom, and we are delighted to be able to make a small selection of these recordings available on this site.

This list will continue to grow over time. If you find you’ve missed another sell-out event, do check back here to catch up.

In conversation with the novelist Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem read from Chronic City and discussed, inter alia, Manhattan’s virtuality, the inspiration behind the character of Perkus Tooth, the price of things, and talking animals.

With his new play about Auden and Britten, The Habit of Art, playing to packed houses at the National Theatre, Alan Bennett visited the Bookshop to read from his introduction to the play and to answer an eclectic range of questions from the audience.

LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, and contributors Jeremy Harding and John Lanchester, discussed the pleasures and pitfalls of writing family histories, under the chairmanship of LRB publisher Nicholas Spice.

Sarah Dunant and Hilary Mantel read from Sacred Hearts and Wolf Hall, their respective latest novels, and discussed the particular challenges of writing historical novels and the importance of research with Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck College.

The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti discusses translation, home and homelessness, here and away, language and landscape, self and other with British poet Ruth Padel, as part of the Bookshop's inaugural World Literature Weekend.

Faïza Guène discussed immigration in France, her success as a writer and what the French papers made of it all, the pleasures of writing in the first person and much more with her translator Sarah Ardizzone at the Bookshop’s inaugural World Literature Weekend. Interpreter: Carine Kennedy.

A few days after the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Ma Jian discussed his Tiananmen novel Beijing Coma with the Independent’s literary editor Boyd Tonkin, interspersed with extracts from the novel read by his translator Flora Drew.