Blackwell's x Bad Language - Daniel Carpenter, Glen James Brown and friends

Join us for a very special one-off event with the much-missed spoken word night BAD LANGUAGE to celebrate the release of Daniel Carpenter's HUNTING BY THE RIVER and Glen James Brown's MOTHER NAKED. Daniel and Glen will be reading from and discussing their work plus there'll be support from Matt Hill (LAMB) and Abi Hynes (MONSTROUS LONGING). Compered by Joe Daly and Fat Roland.

This event is being held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.

Doors: 6.30, starts: 7.00

Tickets are £3.00 or free when ordering a copy of HUNTING BY THE RIVER or MOTHER NAKED. Copies will also be available to purchase on the night alongside MONSTROUS LONGING and LAMB and all four authors will be happy to sign their work. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.

About the books:

Hunting by the River - Daniel Carpenter

It feels like this whole place is infected, like someone buried something here and its roots were rotten and dead, and it's coming up, and it's growing. Soon enough it'll sprout, and then we'll be breathing it in.

A builder unearths a hand, buried on a building site; a woman with a unique way of speaking to the dead comes across her toughest client to date; a young man returns to his hometown, desperately searching for his missing sister.

In his debut collection, Daniel Carpenter explores places and the people who get lost in them. From Manchester to London, as well as the uncanny fringes of England, these are stories that span the breadth of the Weird.

Mother Naked - Glen James Brown

The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city's most powerful men. Mother Naked is his name, and the story he's come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the gruesome 'walking ghost' some say slaughtered the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier. But is this monster only a myth, born from the dim minds of toiling peasants? Or does the Wraith - and the murders - have roots in real events suffered by those fated to a lifetime of labour? As Mother Naked weaves the strands of the mystery - of class, religion, art and ale - the chilling truth might be closer to his privileged audience than they could ever imagine. Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham's Cathedral rolls, 'Modyr Nakett' was the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant's Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins, in a fury of imaginative recuperation.

About the authors:

Daniel Carpenter is a writer and editor. He grew up in Manchester and now lives in London with his family. Hunting by the River is his first book.

Glen James Brown was born and raised in County Durham. His first novel, Ironopolis, was shortlisted for the Orwell and Portico prizes.

Matt Hill grew up in Tameside, Greater Manchester, and now lives on the edge of the Peak District. His latest novel, LAMB, was published in October 2023 by Dead Ink Books. His previous novels are THE FOLDED MAN (2013), Philip K. Dick Award nominee GRAFT (2016), ZERO BOMB (2019) and THE BREACH (2020).

Abi Hynes is an award-winning screenwriter, playwright, and fiction writer. She wrote the first four episodes of historical audio drama DARK HARBOUR, and a major adaptation of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES starring Catherine O'Hara and Victor Garber and narrated by Sandra Oh, both for Audible. She won the Cambridge Short Story Prize in 2020, and her debut short story collection MONSTROUS LONGING came out with Dahlia Publishing in October 2023. She is currently developing a range of original dramas for TV, and her script LONG LOST was on the Brit List in 2022.

Bad Language is a live literature night that supports new voices in spoken word. Its open mic night, running in Manchester from 2010 to 2020, was twice voted the UK's best regular spoken word event. The comperes are Joe Daly and Fat Roland, neither of whom have been voted best hosts of anything ever. "There are two important events in history. Me landing on the moon, and that time Joe and Fats had an on-stage argument about Muller Rice" – Neil Armstrong