17th June
6.30-9pm
Join us to celebrate Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin. Lauren will be in conversation with Xiaolu Guo.
‘Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…elegant, original and often very funny’ Kevin Barry, New Statesman Books of the Year
Two couples inhabit the same apartment in Paris, almost fifty years apart…
2019. When David takes a job in London, Anna is left alone in their Paris apartment. It’s August and the city is deserted but when Clémentine moves into the building, Anna finds herself drawn inextricably into the younger woman’s world…
1972. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology and contemplating pregnancy. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood and both have distractions outside their marriage…
As the two couples face the challenges of marriage and fidelity, the characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space.
‘Intelligent, sexy and brilliantly observed’ Stylist
‘Atmospheric and evocative’ Observer
Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.
Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002. Her books include: Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin. Her most recent novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, was published in March.