To launch the start of the festive season, Blackwell's is delighted to announce our annual Yule Fest event, featuring a line-up of superb authors who will be joining us across the weekend on Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th December. Our guest speakers will be introducing their books throughout the day in free 45 minute talks, followed by a signing after offering the opportunity to purchase a special signed book. Booksellers will be spreading the festive cheer with complimentary mince pies alongside offering support to help you find the perfect Christmas present.

For the full weekend programme, please scroll down to the bottom of this page.

2 pm - Christina Hardyment 'Novel Houses'

Novel Houses visits unforgettable dwellings in twenty legendary works of English and American fiction. Each chapter stars a famous novel in which a dwelling is pivotal to the plot, and reveals how personally significant that place was to the writer who created it.

We discover Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s powerful influence on the American Civil War, how essential 221B Baker Street was to Sherlock Holmes and the importance of Bag End to the adventuring hobbits who called it home. It looks at why Bleak House is used as the name of a happy home and what was on Jane Austen’s mind when she worked out the plot of Mansfield Park. Little-known background on the dwellings at the heart of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm emerges, and the real life settings of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and E.M. Forster’s Howards End, so fundamental to their stories, are shown to relate closely to their authors’ passions and preoccupations.

A winning combination of literary criticism, geography and biography, this is an entertaining and insightful celebration of beloved novels and the extraordinary role that houses grand and small, imagined and real, or unique and ordinary, play in their continuing popularity.

Christina Hardyment is a writer and journalist with a special interest in literary geography and domestic history. She is the author of Writing the Thames (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016).

This event is free to register. Please note, the talks may be taking place in our Philosophy Department which is only accessible via a small set of stairs. Seats are allocated on a first come first seated basis, to ensure you have a seat please arrive early, standing room only will be available once all seats have been taken. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Yule Fest Weekend 2019

Saturday 7th December

• 11am – Stephen Law

• 12:30pm – Kit Yates

• 1:30pm – Lara Maiklem

• 2:30pm – Chris Lintott

• 3:30pm – Jo Wood

• 4:30pm – Ned Palmer

• 5:30pm – Philip Gooden

Sunday 8th December

• 12pm – Bookseller Recommends

• 1pm – Gavin Prector-Pinney

• 2pm – Christina Hardyment

• 3pm – Mark Dredge

• 4pm – Mo Moulton