Cathy Rentzenbrink and Nina Stibbe – NOVELS AND FRIENDSHIP

Join best-selling authors Cathy Rentzenbrink and Nina Stibbe as they discuss their novels – linked by the themes of marriage, friendship, and finding humour in the absurdity of life.

Nina Stibbe’s novel One Day I Shall Astonish the World is the story of the wonderful and sometimes surprising path of friendship: from its conspiratorial beginnings, along its irritating wrong turns, to its final gratifying destination.

‘The true heir to Sue Townsend’ Caitlin Moran

Cathy Rentzenbrink’s debut novel Everyone is Still Alive is the story of several families who live on the same suburban street, all secretly struggling with the anxieties of the modern world whilst trying to maintain the illusion that everything is fine. It is about guilt, grief, working motherhood, the mental load, envy, fear and status, but it’s also about love, friendship, community and how we figure out what really matters.

Nina Stibbe was born in Leicester. She is the author of two works of non-fiction – Love, Nina and An Almost Perfect Christmas – and three previous novels:  Man at the Helm, Paradise Lodge, and Reasons to be Cheerful, which is the only novel to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award. Love, Nina won Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was adapted by Nick Hornby into a BBC TV series.

Cathy Rentzenbrink grew up in Yorkshire, spent many years in London, and now lives in Cornwall. She is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Last Act of Love, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize, and the acclaimed memoirs A Manual for Heartache and Dear Reader.