At the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2013

On Thursday 22 August I’ll be in conversation with bestselling author Neil Gaiman about his new novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane and its themes of childhood memory, the line between fantasy and reality, and a child’s discovery of the secrets of the adult world. The event, which is a sell-out, forms part of the series ‘Reshaping modern fantasy’, for which Neil has acted as Guest Selector. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a deceptively simple and endlessly surprising novel full of mythic echoes, deep psychological resonances and some pretty scary monsters, and I’m hugely excited about discussing it with him.

On Friday 23 August I’ll be speaking to the journalist Susannah Cahalan about My Brain on Fire, her extraordinary memoir about her brush with the brain disease, encephalitis. One of the things I love about this book is the author’s painstaking efforts to reconstruct this lost period of her life by pulling together a whole range of documents and sources of information, and I’m looking forward to asking her quite how she did it.

And on Saturday 24 August I’ll be reading from and talking about my novel A Box of Birds with the Canadian author Colin McAdam, who will be talking about his new book A Beautiful Truth. You can book for the event here.

Hope to see some of you there.