We are delighted to welcome Amanda Craig to the Authors’ Club talk about her latest novel High and Low.

Set over six hours High and Low is a novel about moral choices made in a situation which encompasses genuine danger and existential despair. Inside a local café, a small group of writers and bakers are under siege from a mob armed with weapons. Those inside have nothing but books and flour to defend not just themselves, but a child being hunted by a gang.

There is an asylum hotel, a furious anti-immigrant mob, shoplifting, strikes and violent riots in the capital and all over Britain. The temperature is dropping even as tempers and hostilities rise, both between the writers themselves, and the wider community, in a place where even the geology is unstable. High and Low depicts the rise of rage and disempowerment, through a vividly drawn and emotionally involving cast of characters.

Its climax is as propulsive and violent as any thriller, but it is also a novel of ideas. How can we save ourselves, and each other? What do people owe strangers, neighbours, or those they have reason to resent?

Amanda wrote this novel over fifteen months, before the riots exploded in Southport and elsewhere. As with Hearts and Minds (the 7/7 bombings) and The Lie of the Land (one of the first Brexit novels) her fiction is uncannily predictive. High and Low is both horrifying and darkly comic, being not just about the State of the Nation but about the Nation in a State.

‘Craig anatomises the state of the nation with wit and empathy’ Jonathan Coe

‘Amanda Craig is a delicious storyteller’ Rose Tremain

‘The most mischievous take imaginable on the way we live now’ Francis Spufford

Amanda Craig is a British novelist, short-story writer, and critic. Her novels Hearts and Minds and The Golden Rule were both longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and The Lie of the Land was chosen as book of the year by the Guardian, Observer, Telegraph, New Statesman, Evening Standard, Sunday Times and Irish Times. A TV adaptation of her novel, The Three Graces, is under development from Momentum Pictures and BAFTA Award-winning producer Alison Owen.

To book please contact the booking office at bookings@nlc.org.uk or call 020 7968 0912

The two-course lunch, followed by coffee, costs £39. It’s in the Lady Violet Room and we start with drinks at 12:30pm.  Please book early and inform the club of any dietary requirements.