Join us for an evening with bestselling author Kate Atkinson as she returns with a brand new Jackson Brodie novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook

The stage is set. Marooned overnight by a snowstorm in a grand country house are a cast of characters and a setting that even Agatha Christie might recognize – a vicar, an Army major, a Dowager, a sleuth and his sidekick – except that the sleuth is Jackson Brodie, and the ‘sidekick’ is DC Reggie Chase.

The crumbling house – Burton Makepeace and its chatelaine the Dowager Lady Milton – suffered the loss of their last remaining painting of any value, a Turner, some years ago. The housekeeper, Sophie, who disappeared the same night, is suspected of stealing it.

Jackson, a reluctant hostage to the snowstorm, has been investigating the theft of another painting: The Woman with a Weasel, a portrait, taken from the house of an elderly widow, on the morning she died. The suspect this time is the widow’s carer, Melanie. Is this a coincidence or is there a connection? And what secrets does the Woman with a Weasel hold? The puzzle is Jackson’s to solve. And let’s not forget that a convicted murderer is on the run on the moors around Burton Makepeace.

All the while, in a bid to make money, Burton Makepeace is determined to keep hosting a shambolic Murder Mystery that acts as a backdrop while the real drama is being played out in the house.

A brilliantly plotted, supremely entertaining, and utterly compulsive tour de force from a great writer at the height of her powers.

Tickets: £12 without book (Admits One, ticket redeemable against a signed copy of Death at the Sign of The Rook) or £22 with book (Admits One, includes a signed copy of Death at the Sign of The Rook)

Join us for an evening with Amy Jeffs, the Sunday Times bestselling author of Storyland and Wild as she talks about her new book Saints, delving deep into the history of Britain’s past through the tales that captured the medieval imagination.

Numerous saints were held to have lived, breathed and performed miracles across Britain, from only decades after Christ’s death, up to the eve of the Reformation, with all of its consequent destruction.

In medieval narratives these saints are given nature’s blessing: a salmon finds Cadog’s handbook, the Thames parts for Alban, geese fill the sky to converse with Werbaugh. Moreover they fit the medieval view of British history at large. St Cadog and King Arthur are contemporaries; St Mungo meets Merlin in the woods; St Alban is implicated in the Roman persecution of Christians. And while there was no single history accepted across its islands and diverse populations, these stories do enable us to reconstruct a long, obsolete view on Britain’s deepest past.

Through passages of narrative, deeply researched explanation and beautifully illustrated by the author with thirty paper-cutouts, Saints retells stories that enjoyed centuries of popular appeal among medieval Christians but were suppressed when their shrines were destroyed. These stories embraced the darkness of their heroes: sinister saints who sacrificed their followers and women who communed with geese, saints whose decapitated heads spoke to wolves.

Tickets: £12 without book (Admits One, ticket redeemable against a signed copy of Saints) or £30 with book (Admits One, includes a signed copy of Saints)