Oxfam Bookfest

A View From The Foothills: riveting and wickedly funny political diaries from the maverick parliamentarian, author of A Very British Coup.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets available at the local Oxfam Bookshop:
8 Hood Street
Newcastle NE1 6JQ
Tel: 0191 232 2476

Around the World in 80 Trades: the economist sets out his Adventures in Economics, trading Sudanese camels for Zambian coffee, the coffee for South African red wine, and then off to China to buy jade with the proceeds.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
4/5 Lower Borough Walls
Bath BA1 1QR
Tel: 01225 469776

6.30pm–7.15pm
Howard Jacobson: The Act Of Love
The great comic novelist  pushes obsessional love to a crazy extreme in his outrageous novel (about a Marylebone High Street book dealer!). He discusses passion, neurosis and transgression.

7.30pm–8.15pm
Rosie Boycott: A Nice Girl Like Me
The journalist discusses her nakedly pitiless classic 1970s memoir of journalism and alcohol addiction.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop
91 Marylebone High Street
London W1U 4RB
Tel: 020 7487 3570

The garlanded biographer reveals her study of the pre-eminent C19th novelist George Eliot.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Books & Music Shop:
19 Market Street
Nottingham NG1 6HX
Tel: 0115 934 3497

Voodoo Histories: from moon landings to the Parisian underpass and the twin towers, the journalist probes and explodes The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
91 Marylebone High Street
London W1U 4RB
Tel: 020 7487 3570

Crime and Punishment. The passionate and politically engaged television dramas Law and Order, Judge John Deed and New Street Law question the bases of British justice.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Books & Music Shop:
36 Broad Street
Hereford HR4 9AR
Tel: 01432 279527

The best-selling author of The Map of Love, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999, talks about her writings, political, cultural and fictitious.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
3 Royal Well Road
Cheltenham GL50 3PB
Tel: 01242 526849

Darwin: A Life in Poems. With sympathy and grace, the poet moves deftly between vast processes of evolution and Darwin’s personal life; between science, love and family in this homage to her great-great-grandfather.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Shop:
20 Burleigh Street
Cambridge CB1 1DG
Tel: 01223 329841

In an Oxfam Bookfest exclusive, the cult author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Birds Without Wings and A Partisan's Daughter unveils his poetry with a reading and Q&A, chaired by Guardian journalist Anita Sethi.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
47 The Thoroughfare
Woodbridge IP12 1AH
Tel: 01394 385974

Fleet Street’s finest, the doyenne of women reporters, Damed for services to journalism, talks about her life and her memoir, Killing My Own Snakes.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
34 Gabriels Hill
Maidstone ME15 6JJ
Tel: 01622 753585

Academi presents both the big 2009 Welsh Prizewinners who join Hay Festival Director Peter Florence to celebrate their awards and discuss their work.

6.30pm–7pm
Deborah Kay Davies talks about her mesmerising story collection Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, published by Parthian, which won the Wales Book of the Year Award in June. Set in the eastern valleys of South Wales from 1970 to the present, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful tells the story of two sisters, Grace and Tamar, their volatile childhood, disruptive coming of age and dubious maturity. By turns moving, hilarious and terrifying and often all three at once, it is an unusual collection in that each story is complete in its own right, but also forms part of a continuous and powerful sequence. Part fantasy, part social history, these are dark, universal tales about how utterly strange it is to learn to be human.

7.15pm–8pm
Fflur Dafydd talks about her novel Twenty Thousand Saints which won the Oxfam Emerging Writers Award at the Hay Festival in May. 'Fflur Dafydd's first English-language novel is set during one hot summer on Wales's mystical Bardsey Island, as past and present intersect painfully when the resident community is joined by a medley of incomers. The poet Mererid seeks a tranquil writing space away from her controlling boyfriend. Local curiosity Sister Vivien apprehensively prepares to host a conference of fellow hermits. Deian, an archaeologist who spent his youth on Bardsey until the mysterious disappearance of his mother, needs urgently to uncover past secrets. Vivien's son Iestyn has recently been released from prison, straight into the arms of flirty ecologist Elin. Filming all of this is Leri, an ambitious documentary-maker, whose project has a double edge hidden from her assistant and lover, Greta. It's a wild, exhilarating read. Dafydd controls her troupe of players without once dipping into farce.' Guardian.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
36 St Mary Street
Cardiff CF10 1AD
Tel: 029 20 222275

Shadow Child: there is no right way to deal with the loss of a beloved son. Against her husband’s wishes, Marion determines to find out more about her son’s life away from home. The broadcaster’s novel subtly and brilliantly explores a modern family in crisis.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Books Shop
8-10 Magdalen Street
Norwich NR3 1HU
Tel: 01603 665508

Little Dorrit Film Masterclass: the screenwriter analyses three key scenes from his recent TV adaptation of Dickens’ novel.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
74 Hertford Street
Coventry CV1 1LB
Tel: 02476 229684

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom: the best-selling historian introduces his latest great read, and talks to Fiona Lindsay.

'A mighty narrative of kings and popes, battles and massacres... A tremendously good read.' Sunday Telegraph Magazine
'At last, a book that sheds much-needed light on those 1,000 years between Roman Britain and the Norman conquest that we call the dark ages.' Sue Arnold, Guardian
'Holland tells a cracking tale, vividly bringing this neglected era of monks, popes, knights and serfs back to life.' David Sinclair, Tribune
'Holland is a vigorous, fluent, and selectively well-informed writer. He has gifts of imagination and sensitivity to text and mood.' Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Times
'A tremendously good read, which will no doubt gain more accolades and many more readers.' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
8 High Street
Reading RG1 2EA
Tel: 01189 393868

Do you know your kettlebell from your knork? Countdown’s cult language guru parses the patois in Words of the Year.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
86 High Street
Harborne
Birmingham B17 9NR
Tel: 0121 427 4784

Dead Tomorrow: the master of crime discusses his latest, Brighton-based thriller...

"Lynn gripped the sides of the armchair, trying to put aside her own inner terror. 'I can't believe I'm thinking this, Ross. I'm not a violent person, even before Caitlin's influence, I never even liked killing flies in my kitchen. Now I'm sitting here actually willing some stranger to die.'"

The body of a teenager dredged from the seabed off the coast of Sussex is found to be missing its vital organs. Soon two more young bodies are found. Caitlin Beckett, a fifteen-year-old in Brighton, will die if she does not receive an urgent liver transplant. When the health system threatens to let her down, Lynn, her mother, turns in panic to the internet and discovers a broker who can provide her with a black-market organ – but at a price. As Superintendent Roy Grace investigates the recovered bodies, he unearths the trail of a gang of child traffickers operating from Eastern Europe. Soon Grace and his team will find themselves in a race against time to save the life of a young street kid, while a desperate mother will stop at nothing to save her daughter's life.

'One of the most fiendishly clever crime fiction plotters.' Daily Mail.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
30 Kensington Gardens
Brighton BN1 4AL
Tel: 01273 698093

Esther Freud's novels include the acclaimed Hideous Kinky, The Wild, Gaglow and The Sea House. She reads her wonderful Ox-Tales story 'Rice Cakes and Starbucks', in which Londoners decamp for Los Angeles.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Books & Music Shop:
77 St John's Street
Bury St Edmunds IP33 1SQ
Tel: 01284 706613

The great novelist Beryl Bainbridge has written about her life in Liverpool in An Awfully Big Adventure, and has recently concentrated on historical fiction like the modern classics - Every Man For Himself, The Birthday Boys, Master Georgie, According to Queenie, and most recently The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress.

The superstar Welsh writer Fflur Dafydd won the 2009 Oxfam Emerging Writers Award at the Hay Festival this year for her remarkable novel Twenty Thousand Saints, a thrilling story set on the island of Bardsea.

They talk to the author and broadcaster Jon Gower.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Original Shop:
35–37 Bold Street
Liverpool L1 4DN
Tel: 0151 709 6739

Lodge discusses his career and fiction from the great Campus comedies of the 1980s and 90s – Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work – to the later novels Therapy, Thinks and Deaf Sentence, his Henry James adventure Author! Author! and his masterly writers' bible The Art of Fiction.

All profits go to Oxfam

Tickets also available by phone on 0870 990 1299
or from the local Oxfam Bookshop:
101 High Street
Worcester WR1 2HW
Tel: 01905 26967