What We’re Reading: Durham Book Festival 2024 Edition

Rebecca Wilkie

I’m so excited about this year’s Durham Book Festival programme, which seemed to come together very quickly this year. Each year we premiere new commissions at the festival and this year we’ll be working with Live Theatre on a dramatic live reading from Durham writer Pat Barker’s newest novel, The Voyage Home. This will be followed by an exclusive conversation between Pat and fellow writer Adelle Stripe. I’ve admired Pat Barker’s writing ever since reading her WW1-set Regeneration trilogy, nearly 30 years ago. Pat is one of our greatest writers of war and The Voyage Home completes a trilogy of books that returns to this theme with a fictional re-telling of the Trojan War from the female perspective. This book has been eagerly anticipated by readers (including me!) from across the world and I’m thrilled we can celebrate it alongside so many other brilliant books, at this year’s festival.

Helena Davidson

Tom Newlands’ novel Only Here, Only Now is such an exciting debut, full of fleshed out and flawed characters you can really empathise with. Set in Fife in the 90s, the novel follows teenage Cora Mowatt coming to terms with complicated family dynamics and why her brain keeps fizzing and she can’t keep still. She’s desperate to escape the world she’s grown up in but is caught in limbo – not old enough to leave school, not committed enough to do well in her classes, no positive role models to help her escape. Despite this, the book contains so much hope and warmth that you can’t help rooting for Cora.

Carys Vickers

You know when you end up deep down a Twitter rabbit-hole, rapidly losing hope in humanity but unable to stop the compulsive doomscrolling and look away? That’s what Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang feels like. It is a painful, trainwreck of a read in the best way, cleverly capturing the chaos and complexity of the online world and holding a mirror up to the publishing industry. It didn’t take long after finishing Yellowface before I permanently deleted Twitter from my phone.  

I’m so excited that Rebecca is coming to Durham this year, and clearly lots of other people are excited too as it’s looking to be a sell-out event! I’m also a big fan of her renowned historical fantasy Babel – which uses a fascinatingly unique translation-based magic system to highlight the corruption of colonial England – so don’t be surprised to find me in the book signing queue…

Margot Miltenberger

I’ve just started reading Determination by Tawseef Khan. The book follows Jamila, an immigration solicitor just barely holding onto sanity as she runs the family law firm. Working under the shadow of the government’s ‘hostile environment’, she fights for ‘determinations’ that will result in her clients being allowed to stay. Pulled between her family and her frantic clients on the cusp of deportation, Jamila’s life is spiralling out of control. A breakdown of sorts forces her to seek change and strike a balance between pursuing her own happiness and a career dedicated to helping others.

This book has been interesting to read whilst I make my own application for indefinite leave to remain in the UK, as the ‘hostile environment’ feels all too familiar, but it promises to be enlightening and puts the privilege of my own immigration experience into perspective. I’m looking forward to finding out where Jamila’s story takes her.

Will Mackie

Jackie Kay is one of my favourite contemporary poets. She’s tender, warm, funny, erudite and loving. I’ve found so many of her poems to be breathtakingly beautiful and compelling. Ahead of her appearance at Durham Book Festival, I can’t wait to read May Day, which spans several decades from the Glasgow of her childhood, through LGBTQ and anti-racist movements of the 80s, to the seismic events of this decade. Jackie Kay is a poet who speaks directly and intimately to her reader, embracing us affectionately through her words and her distinctly Scottish voice, as she asks us to think deeply and precisely. She’s a true one-off whose sublime poems are enriching and enlivening.

Anna Disley

I really enjoyed reading Andrew McMillan’s Pity: a skillfully spare yet multi-layered look at Northern identity and masculinity, told through the story of three generations of a Northern mining family. The central protagonist Simon is a working class gay man who is a call centre worker and drag artist developing a show about Thatcher. He is in a relationship with the more restrained Ryan, a security guard at the local shopping centre, who spends a lot of his time monitoring the public toilets for loitering men.

Pity movingly explores less accepting times when people – especially working class men – had to hide who they really were. lt questions who gets to tell the story about post-industrial Northern towns and the people living in them. I’ve been loving Sherwood on the TV recently, and this has many parallels in its ambition to tell nuanced stories about post-industrial places.

Grace Keane

Of all the books I’ve ever read, Bridget Jones’s Diary might be my favourite. As a child raised on Pride and Prejudice and Adrian Mole, I found Bridget Jones as a teenager and the rest was history. It’s almost certainly the book I’ve read the most in my life – I’d guess 15 times in as many years – and it has never let me down.

Bridget Jones’s Diary (and its sequels) has everything you need: it’s clever, it’s comforting, but most of all it is just so funny. I know it inside out and yet it still makes me laugh every time. Funny books are often left out of the conversation about great literature, but I think it’s harder to elicit laughter than sadness or fear. I am a proud BJD fanatic, and and I can’t wait to be surrounded by all the other clever people who agree with me at Helen Fielding’s Durham Book Festival event this year.

Tess Denman-Cleaver

I am currently reading Manya Wilkinson’s Lublin. Having enjoyed Wilkinson’s writing for stage and radio, I was interested to see her distinctive style, which encompasses fable and fairytale alongside very contemporary depictions of human emotion and relationships, in prose form. The novel follows the journey of three boys travelling on foot to sell their wares in Lublin. From the outset the narrator makes it clear, like all fairy stories, that this journey will be beset with danger and tragedy. The liveliness of the friendships between the three boys pushes the narrative on, but all the while I am wincing and hoping they might still turn back before it gets too dark…

I am also going to read Yeva Skalietska’s You Don’t Know What War Is in time for the Writing from Conflict event at Durham Book Festival. This book is the diary of a 12-year-old girl who left Ukraine with her grandmother in 2022. As part of the Young People & Communities team at New Writing North, we work with a lot of children and young people who have arrived in the North East as asylum seekers or refugees. I am a big fan of diaristic writing and often find I learn more about history through the stories of individuals than the big narratives of history books or mainstream media, so am looking forward to Skalietska’s book.