CHIPLITFEST 2020
STATEMENT RE CORONAVIRUS, 16 March 2020
We have had to make the wretched but inevitable decision to cancel ChipLitFest 2020. We'll be contacting our authors, audience, sponsors, partners, volunteers very soon. All customers will be due a full refund.
We are heartbroken not to be able to deliver the Festival, we had been so excited about the fantastic range of brilliant authors, speakers and illustrators due in Chipping Norton but we couldn't risk the health of those authors, the audience, the volunteers and the community.
THE VEGETARIAN KITCHEN by Prue Leith + Peta Leith
CELEBRATING THE BOOKS WE WOULD HAVE BROUGHT YOU:
The definitive vegetarian cookbook from the founder of Leiths School of Food and Wine, ChipLitFest patron and Bake Off judge, Prue Leith, and pastry chef and lifelong vegetarian, Peta Leith, Prue’s niece.
This gorgeous cookbook features simple, meat-free family dishes that bring delight to the extended Leith family table, time and time again. Recipes include Black Bean Chilli with Lime Salsa, Blackberry and Lemon Pavlova and Lemon and Bing Cherry and Almond Cake. Forty-two of these recipes can be made vegan.
"These plant-based recipes are homely, hearty and delicious. They have the virtue to be simple and embrace all the rules of provenance and best cooking ethics." Raymond Blanc
THE HOUSE BY THE LOCH by KIRSTY WARK
CELEBRATING THE BOOKS WE WOULD HAVE BROUGHT YOU:
A setting to fall in love with – Loch Doon and the surrounding Galloway hills – is the starting point and real centre of this family novel. Two A-framed holiday houses on its shore, gifted by a father to his two children, immediately reveal family differences. One, used by illustrator Elinor and teacher Patrick, is messy, worn and cosy. The other is being refashioned into a trendy eco-house by architects Fiona and Roland, who are successful in their careers but struggling in their marriage. Kirsty Wark's plot pivots on the children. The consequences of the events on the water one summer morning keep this novel rippling in all directions and through all generations. Like a Scottish loch, it’s placid on the surface but has hidden depths and long reflections. This is no vanity novel by a journalist who likes to scribble in her spare time. It’s an assured piece of writing, elevated by her delicate handling of the intricacies of grief and growing up. It’s also fully and immersively Scottish, with real life details that anyone familiar with the south of Scotland (me) will savour with a pang of delight and homesickness.
Review by Laura Parker
GROWN UPS by Marian Keyes
CELEBRATING THE BOOKS WE WOULD HAVE BROUGHT YOU:
Don’t read this novel. Listen to it instead. The audio book is narrated by the author herself, and her addictively light and lilting voice is perfectly suited to her Irish cast of characters. She loves them all, and you will too, in spite of their gradually revealed flaws and battles. These begin to unravel from the first chapter: a set-piece set-to at a family dinner party. From that starting point we are led through a year of family gatherings in a variety of locations, including a hilariously disastrous murder mystery weekend in Northern Ireland. The central links are three brothers, but this story is really about their wives. With seven children and step-children of all ages, plus a small tangle of divorces, widowhoods and some tragic hinterlands, we are drawn into a complex familial web. The dialogue is warm, witty and sweary (feck!) but it also contains subtle revelations. The menfolk are straightforward but there’s far more to the women: the bossy capable one, the warm funny one, and the beautiful arty millennial, than meets the eye. The women’s stories braid together as we discover the imperfections and self-deceptions behind their ‘grown up’ and superficially successful lives. Marian Keyes skewers and explores the obsessions and addictions of our times. At once both underrated and successful, she is a delightful companion and story-teller.
Review by Laura Parker
