Kim Sherwood
Wednesday 29th March 2023
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7.10pm
7.30pm
Award-winning author Kim Sherwood joins us this March to celebrate her latest novel, A Wild & True Relation, a feminist adventure story of smuggling and myth-making. Praised by Hilary Mantel as 'Remarkable' and by Emma Stonex as 'Tremendous', we can't wait to hear all about it from Kim herself!
A Wild & True Relation opens during the Great Storm of 1703, as smuggler Tom West confronts his lover Grace for betraying him to the Revenue. Leaving Grace's cottage in flames, he takes her orphaned daughter Molly on board ship disguised as a boy to join his crew. But Molly, or Orlando as she must call herself, will grow up to outshine all the men of Tom's company and seek revenge - and a legacy - all of her own.
Woven into Molly's story are the writers - from Celia Fiennes and George Eliot to Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens - who are transfixed by her myth and who, over three centuries, come together to solve the mystery of her life. With extraordinary verve, Sherwood remakes the eighteenth-century novel and challenges women's writing and women's roles throughout history.
Kim Sherwood is an author and creative writing lecturer. Born in Camden in 1989, she has taught at the University of Sussex, UWE, and in schools, libraries and prisons, and now lectures at the University of Edinburgh, where she lives in the city. Her first novel, Testament, published in 2018, won the Bath Novel Award and the Harper's Bazaar Big Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Author's Club Best First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. In 2019, Kim was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Kim is currently writing a new trilogy of James Bond novels for the Ian Fleming Estate, expanding the universe with a cast of Double O agents for the 21st century.