THE OSCAR OF MOUNTAINEERING  12.15-1.45pm     LIBRARY

Sunday 9th October

In Some Lost Place by Sandy Allan, who hails from Newtonmore, is an exhilarating and harrowing account of his ascent with Rick Allen of one of the last great challenges of Himalayan mountaineering: Nanga Parbet’s Mazeno Ridge. Both climbers were awarded the 2013 Piolet d’Or, the Oscar of mountaineering, for their unique achievement.

Chair: Larry Foster

In the summer of 2012, a team of six climbers set out to attempt the first ascent of one of the great unclimbed lines of the Himalaya – the giant Mazeno Ridge on Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth highest mountain. At ten kilometres in length, the Mazeno is the longest route to the summit of an 8,000-metre peak. Ten expeditions had tried and failed to climb this enormous ridge. Eleven days later two of the team, Sandy Allan and Rick Allen, both in their late fifties, reached the summit. They had run out of food and water and began hallucinating wildly from the effects of altitude and exhaustion. Heavy snow conditions meant they would need another three days to descend the far side of the ‘killer mountain’. ‘I began to wonder whether what we were doing was humanly possible. We had climbed the Mazeno and reached the summit, but we both knew we had wasted too much energy. In among the conflicting emotions, the exhaustion and the elation, we knew our bodies could not sustain this amount of time at altitude indefinitely, especially now we had no water. The slow trickle of attrition had turned into a flood; it was simply a matter of time before our bodies stopped functioning. Which one of us would succumb first?’ In Some Lost Place is Sandy Allan’s epic account of an incredible feat of endurance and commitment at the very limits of survival – and the first ascent of one of the last challenges in the Himalaya.

FAMILY SAGAS, FAMILY SECRETS  11.00am-12.30pm    LIBRARY UPSTAIRS

Sunday 9th October

Mairi is an Edinburgh based writer whose first novel, Ursula’s Secret, was published by published last November by Black & White Publishing after winning the Sunday Mail Fiction Prize, and was in the Kindle top 100 for three months at the beginning of the year.

Shelley has been a litigation lawyer, a psychology lecturer and a research professor. These days she mainly writes fiction.  Her debut, The Confession of Stella Moon, was published on 7 July 2016 by Saraband. The novel won the Andrea Badenoch Award, was long-listed for the Bath Novel Award, and shortlisted for the Charles Pick Fellowship and the Dundee International Book Prize.

Both these debut authors will talk about their different approaches to creating vivid and exhilarating explorations of the impact of secrets which span generations in a family. They discuss what is said and what is left unsaid as mysteries are uncovered. The authors will be in conversation with Anne Loughnane, whose second novel, A Clarewoman’s Journey, has been published recently.

In just a few heartbreaking days, Lexy Shaw’s world has fallen apart. After her mother is killed in a tragic hit-and-run, her mother’s childhood guardian, Ursula, also dies suddenly, leaving everything to Lexy. But as Lexy reads through Ursula’s hidden papers, what she discovers raises doubts about her own identity and if she really is now all alone in the world.

Desperate to find out if she has any surviving family, Lexy travels to Africa hoping she can unravel the mystery she’s now tormented by, only to find that she’s stumbled into a past full of lies and deceit and that her life is in grave danger.

You can read a review on Portobello Book Blog here

1977: A killer is released from prison and returns ‘home’ – a decaying, deserted boarding house choked with weeds and foreboding. Memories of strange rituals, gruesome secrets and shame hang heavy in the air, exerting a brooding power over young Stella Moon. She is eager to restart her life, but first she must confront the ghosts of her macabre family history and her own shocking crime. Guilt, paranoia and manipulation have woven a tangled web. All is ambiguous. What truth and what lies are behind the chilling confession of Stella Moon?

You can read a review of this book on Portobello Book Blog here

NORTH EDINBURGH NOIR   4.30-6.00pm    LIBRARY UPSTAIRS

Saturday 8th October

Lesley Kelly, author of  A Fine House in Trinity, has worked in the public and voluntary sectors for the past twenty years, dabbling in poetry and stand-up comedy along the way. She has won a number of writing competitions, including the Scotsman’s Short Story award in 2008. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband and two sons.

Alison, author of Sewing the Shadows Together, was born in Yorkshire but has always felt Scottish. Her parents were both Scottish and she taught English at several High Schools in the Edinburgh area, including Portobello High School! She loves reading crime fiction, especially Scottish and Scandinavian, and going to crime writing festivals.

Lesley and Alison talk about the joys and pitfalls of setting crime stories in places they know really well. Come along to find out what inspired them and what the reaction has been to the places their crime novels are set: Portobello, Leith and Trinity!  

Chair: Caroline Dunford

Joseph Staines, an unemployed chef, has left Edinburgh with the tallybook of the late debt collector, Isa Stoddart. Her son Lachie thinks Stainsie killed her, but Lachie has apparently committed suicide. To his surprise, Stainsie is the sole beneficiary of Lachie’s will and has inherited a dilapidated mansion. Isa’s debtors and the local priest who paid Stainsie to leave town want him gone. A certain young mum, Marianne (whose uncle, Wheezy, is Stainsie’s drinking buddy) does too, and his old school-friend, Detective Sergeant Jamieson, wants to interrogate him about the deaths. Why are the lawyers lying to him, and who’s the bruiser asking about him down the pub?

Click to read Portobello Book Blog’s review of A Fine House in Trinity

Can you ever get over the death of your sister? Or of your best friend? More than 30 years after 13-year-old Shona McIver was raped and murdered in Portobello, the seaside suburb of Edinburgh, the crime still casts a shadow over the lives of her brother Tom and her best friend Sarah. “Shona had been gone for so long but the memories still came unexpectedly, sometimes like a video from the past, sometimes distorted dreams, but she was always there.” When modern DNA evidence shows that the wrong man was convicted of the crime, the case is reopened. So who did kill Shona? Sarah and Tom are caught up in the search for Shona’s murderer, and suspicions fall on family and friends. The foundations of Sarah’s perfect family life begin to crumble as she realises that nothing is as it appears. Dark secrets from the past are uncovered, and there is another death, before the identity of the real killer is finally revealed…

Click to read Portobello Book Blog’s review of Sewing the Shadows Together

MESSING WITH THE MIND  Saturday 8th October 2.45-4.15pm     LIBRARY UPSTAIRS

Mary Paulson-Ellis, debut author of The Other Mrs Walker,  joins Graeme Macrae Burnet, whose His Bloody Project has been short listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, to talk about what inspired them to write their novels. They’ll discuss how they got into the mysterious minds of their characters and the appeal of psychological thrillers and the exploration of secrets, lies and deception. 

Chair: Graeme Howard

Mary Paulson-Ellis is a writer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. She likes to write about what she call the ‘murderous’ side of family life – the dark, the quirky and the strange. Her debut novel, The Other Mrs Walker, about a woman who finds families for dead people, is published by Mantle/Pan Macmillan. You can read a review of The Other Mrs Walker on Portobello Book Blog by clicking here

Graeme Macrae Burnet was born and brought up in Kilmarnock and now lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His first novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, was called ‘a captivating psychological thriller’ by The Herald. His second novel, His Bloody Project, concerns a triple murder a crofting village in 1860’s Wester Ross. ‘A gripping crime story, a deeply imagined historical novel, and gloriously written,’ said The Sunday Herald Books of the Year, 2015. ‘A fine achievement from an ambitious and accomplished writer,’ said The National.

KNOW YOUR PLACE Saturday 8th October 2.45-3.45pm  

PORTOBELLO BAPTIST CHURCH CAFÉ

Sean Bradley is Chair of the Edinburgh Old Town Development Trust, publisher and editor of The Evergreen: A New Season in the North, a journal in four volumes based on polymath and urban planner Patrick Geddes’s 19^th century Evergreens. He will discuss the continuing relevance of Geddes’s work in urban renewal.

Chair: Bill Jameson

Saturday 8th October: 1.30-2.30pm, Library Upstairs

AN OLD LADY TALKING THE BLUES

Novelists Isla Dewar, Women Talking Dirty, and Catherine Simpson, Truestory, discuss their adventures while writing, the catharsis they’ve experienced and problems they’ve encountered. They exchange views on favourite books, favourite bits of books, books they’d wish they’d written and books they’d like to write. Find out about their heroines, both living and on the page, and about the characters they admire, fear, love and hate.

Isla Dewar was born in Edinburgh but now lives in the East Neuk of Fife with her husband. Prior to writing and publishing her novels Isla wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. Her first novel, Keeping Up with Magda, published in 1995, has been followed by a string of bestsellers: Giving Up on Ordinary, It Could Happen to You, Women Talking Dirty, Two Kinds of Wonderful, The Woman Who Painted Her Dreams and Dancing in a Distant Place. Her most recent novel, A Winter Bride, is set in 1950s Edinburgh.

Saturday 8th October – 1-2.30pm – Portobello Baptist Church Cafe

Dangerous Women

Catherine Hokin is a Glasgow-based author with a degree in History from Manchester University. She started writing seriously about 3 years ago and her debut novel, Blood and Roses, was published in January 2016. Ajay Close is a Scottish-based dramatist and writer of literary fiction. Her novels explore the emotional flashpoints of place, politics and family.

They join us to talk about what inspired them to write about women who shaped history. Catherine explores the fascinating story of medieval Queen Margaret of Anjou in her debut novel Blood and Roses.  Ajay’s A Petrol Scented Spring follows the extraordinary exploits of Edinburgh suffragette Arabella Scott.

Chair: Viv Cree

Blood and Roses tells the story of Margaret of Anjou (1430-82), wife of Henry VI and a key protagonist in the Wars of the Roses. This is a feminist revision of a woman frequently imagined only as the shadowy figure demonised by Shakespeare – Blood and Roses examines Margaret as a Queen unable to wield the power and authority she is capable of, as a wife trapped in marriage to a man born to be a saint and as a mother whose son meets a terrible fate she has set in motion. It is the story of a woman caught up in the pursuit of power, playing a game ultimately no one can control…

‘When Donella Atkins meets ambitious doctor Hugh Ferguson Watson it is love at first sight, but the marriage is not happy. Donella thinks she knows why. Before she met him, Hugh force-fed several hunger-striking suffragettes. The redoubtable Arabella Scott he kept in isolation for five weeks, meeting her every day, talking together, touching… What really happened between Hugh and his prisoner patient? Did he fall for her idealism, or her looks? Was the battle of wills intoxicating and did she return his love? Cupid”s itch takes many forms. The one thing Donella knows for certain is it cannot be ignored. Based on real people and events, Cupid”s Itch is a riveting portrait of the women who dared to claim equality with men, and a fascinating exploration of passion, repression, jealousy and love.’

Saturday 8th October – 12.15-1.15pm – Library Upstairs

Filmish – Edward Ross

Edward Ross is a Portobello based comic artist and illustrator. A movie fan from a young age, he was always fascinated by the inner workings of his favourite movies. Pursuing this passion, Edward took his love of film and transformed it into comic form. He is recently back from success at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2016 and joins us to discuss his debut graphic novel Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film, an engaging look at the history of cinema and the fascinating stories behind our favourite films.

Chair: Stephen Goodall

Edinburgh-based cartoonist Edward Ross uses comics to illuminate the ideas behind our favourite films. In Filmish, Ross’s cartoon alter-ego guides readers through the annals of cinematic history, introducing us to some of the strange and fascinating concepts at work in the movies. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme – the body, architecture, language – and explores an eclectic mix of cinematic triumphs, from A Trip to the Moon to Aliens. Sitting within the tradition of bestselling non-fiction graphic novels like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and the Introducing…series, Filmish tackles serious issues – sexuality, race, censorship, propaganda – with authority and wit, throwing new light on some of the greatest films ever made.

Saturday 8th October – 11am-12noon – Library Upstairs

Michael Meighan has written widely about the local and industrial history of Scotland. From his book The Forth Bridges Through Time he talks about the history and heritage of the iconic bridges and other crossings that have spanned the river.

Chair:  Peter Ross

The River Forth is one of Scotland’s great waterways. It has a majestic history and heritage, part of which is the Forth bridges. Of these, the most iconic is the Forth Rail Bridge, which opened in 1890. But there is also the Kincardine Bridge, opened in 1936 and once the longest swing bridge in Europe, the Forth Road Bridge, opened in 1964, and the new Queensferry Crossing, due to be completed in 2016. In this book, Michael Meighan looks at all these bridges as well as the Clackmannanshire Bridge and the fords, ferries and smaller bridges which preceded these great crossings. The Forth crossings have a special place in the history and culture of Scotland, and in the hearts of all Scots, and Michael Meighan pays tribute to them in a wonderful mix of both old and new images.