As part of a massive Jubilant June campaign – with three heart-warming, soul-soothing summer reads – Orenda Books is celebrating the launch of Katie Allen’s poignant debut Everything Happens for a Reason, Helga Flatland’s stunning One Last Time, translated from Norwegian by Rosie Hedger, and Louise Beech’s utterly beautiful, prejudice-busting, heartbreaking This Is How We Are Human.
A highly anticipated follow-up to her indie-favourite A Modern Family, Helga Flatland’s One Last Time, translated by Rosie Hedger, is an elegant, perceptive, warmly funny novel focusing on fractured family relationships that come under the spotlight when a woman – grandmother and mother – discovers she has terminal cancer. Winner of the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize and a number-one bestseller in Norway, this is an exquisitely moving book and a perfect example of why Joanna Cannon has dubbed Helga the ‘Norwegian Anne Tyler’.
Ex-Guardian columnist, Katie Allen’s immensely accomplished debut, Everything Happens for a Reason, was inspired by her own experience of still birth, and is both a profoundly moving portrait of grief and a quirky, laugh-out-loud story about a woman becomes obsessed with the idea that saving a young man’s life on the day she discovered she was pregnant is the ‘reason’ why her baby was born sleeping. Fans of Rachel Joyce and Eleanor Oliphant will love the zany characters, the moving themes and the gloriously uplifting messages.
Award-winning Hull author Louise Beech has written the searingly emotive and mesmerisingly beautiful This Is How We Are Human, sure to be her breakthrough novel with 100 five-star reviews on Goodreads before publication. In this breathtaking book, we meet Sebastian, an autistic young man who yearns for a relationship and all that this entails. Driven by love and a desire to make her son happy, his mother hires a high-class escort, whose own determination to get through the night, to pay for her father’s medical bills and her own nursing degree is absolutely heartrending. When these three lives collide, everything is changed. For everyone. This is a timely, thought-provoking story about love in its many forms. We are enchanted.
We are thrilled to announce that eminent broadcaster and journalist Alex Clark will be chairing the event.
This event is free to attend, however we do encourage you to support the authors in any way you can and all of the authors’ books are available in good bookshops and online now. Signed copies of ALL THREE BOOKS are available from our bookshop: HERE and from Dulwich Books at https://dulwichbooks.co.uk
Email cole@orendabooks.co.uk to book your place.
You will receive a confirmation email once you register, and on the day of the event itself will be sent details for attendance. Please ensure you have downloaded Zoom. We will be taking questions on the day of the event via the chat function.
Katie Allen
Everything Happens for a Reason is Katie’s first novel. She used to be a journalist and columnist at the Guardian and Observer, and started her career as a Reuters correspondent in Berlin and London. The events in Everything Happens for a Reason are fiction, but the premise is loosely autobiographical. Katie’s son, Finn, was stillborn in 2010, and her character’s experience of grief and being on maternity leave without a baby is based on her own. And yes, someone did say to her ‘everything happens for a reason’.
Katie grew up in Warwickshire and now lives in South London with her husband, children, dog, cat and stick insects. When she’s not writing or walking children and dogs, Katie loves baking, playing the piano, reading news and wishing she had written other people’s brilliant novels.
Follow Katie on Twitter @KtAllenWriting and on her website: katieallenauthor.com.
Louise Beech
Louise Beech is a prize-winning author, whose debut novel How To Be Brave was a Guardian Readers’ Choice for 2015. The follow- up, The Mountain in My Shoe, was shortlisted for Not the Booker Prize. Her next books, Maria in the Moon and The Lion Tamer Who Lost, were widely reviewed, critically acclaimed and number- one bestsellers on Kindle. The Lion Tamer Who Lost was shortlisted for the RNA Most Popular Romantic Novel Award and the Polari Prize in 2019.
Her novel Call Me Star Girl won Best magazine Book of the Year, and was followed by I Am Dust. Her short fiction has won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting for the Bridport Prize twice. Louise lives with her husband on the out- skirts of Hull and loves her job as a Front of House Usher at Hull Truck Theatre, where her first play was performed in 2012.
Follow Louise on Twitter @LouiseWriter and visit her website: louisebeech.co.uk.
Helga Flatland
Helga Flatland is already one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize. She has written four novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards.
Her fifth novel, A Modern Family (her first English translation), was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017, and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies. One Last Time was published in Norway in 2020, where it topped the bestseller lists.
Alex Clark
Alex Clark is a journalist and broadcaster, often seen in the pages of the Guardian, the Observer and the Times Literary Supplement, and heard on BBC R4 programmes such as Front Row and Open Book. An experienced chair of live events, she has also worked as an artistic director at the Bath Festival is a Patron of the Cambridge Literary Festival. The literary awards she has judged include the Man Booker Prize and the Orwell Prize. Alex lives in Kilkenny, Ireland.
