Louise Hegarty's Fair Play is one of the most ingenious novels that we've recently had the pleasure of reading and we're thrilled to announce that we'll be welcoming Louise to our Stockport shop on Tuesday 8th April. Fiendishly clever, extremely witty and incredibly poignant, what starts off as a playful satire on detective novels and locked room mysteries soon reveals itself to be so much more. Louise will be in conversation with Jon McGregor (Reservoir 13, Lean Fall Stand)

The talk will be followed by an audience Q&A and booksigning.

Tickets are £5.00 each or £16.99 including a copy of Fair Play. Light refreshments are included in the ticket price.

Event starts at 6:30pm (doors at 6pm)

About the book:

A puzzle-box story of two competing tales that brilliantly lay bare the real truth of life - the terrifying mystery of grief.

Abigail and her brother Benjamin have always been close. To celebrate his birthday, Abigail hires a grand old house and gathers their friends together for a murder mystery party. As the night goes on, they drink too much and play games. Relationships are forged, consolidated or frayed. Someone kisses someone they shouldn't, someone else's heart is broken.

In the morning, everyone wakes up – except Benjamin.

Suddenly everything is not quite what it seems. An eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin's killer. The house now has a butler, a gardener and a housekeeper. This is a locked-room mystery, and everyone is a suspect. As Abigail attempts to fathom her brother's unexpected death in a world that has been turned upside down, she begins to wonder whether perhaps the true mystery might have been his life.

''Dazzling, formally subversive, brimming with compassion, Fair Play explodes the conventions of a mystery in order to confront us with the genuinely mysterious. An emotional ambush of a novel, this book will delight readers – then it will haunt them" - Colin Walsh, author of Kala

"Clever, confident, and always surprising, a mystery story that ingeniously escapes the locked room of the genre to take on the biggest questions of life and death" - Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting

About the author:

Louise Hegarty's stories have appeared in Banshee, The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review and have been featured on BBC Radio 4. She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize and recently her story 'Now, Voyager' was produced as part of A City and A Garden, a new state-of-the-art sonic experience commissioned by Sounds from a Safe Harbour in association with Body & Soul and presented as part of Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh. Fair Play is her debut novel.

Jon McGregor is the author of five novels and two story collection. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham.