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An evening with debut novelist Emily Usher

June 12, 2024 @ 18:30 21:00

We are delighted to welcome debut novelist, Emily Usher, to the shop to talk about her first release ‘Wild Ground.’

In this tender and moving debut, Emily presents an aching love story impossible to forget. Braiding together past and present, Wild Ground introduces us to a young woman both coming of age and coming to terms with herself.

As a child, it was always Neef and her mother, Chrissy—troubled, beautiful, at the mercy of addiction and a revolving door of bad boyfriends. When Neef turns twelve, it is Neef and Chrissy and Barry, the much-older man who moves them from their derelict council estate in Leeds to a small Yorkshire town where he runs the local pub. On her first day in her new home, it becomes Neef and Danny, the boy who captures her attention planting flowers in the pub garden.

Neef and Danny, Danny and Neef.

Despite absent parents and small-town bigotry directed at Danny for the colour of his skin, they find solace in each other. They dream of a different life together, convinced that Neef’s stories and Danny’s near-magic touch with plants will get them there. But as they grow older, their relationship is beset by the same forces that hold their families hostage: substance abuse, poverty and racism.

But then, finally, it is just Neef. Sober, living in London, trying to tell herself she never knew a boy called Danny, never loved him, never had him wrenched away from her. That is, until Danny’s father appears looking for his missing son. Submerged in the memories she fled from, Neef is forced to reckon with her great love and loss, with what she and Danny did to each other and what others did to them.

Emily Usher grew up in West Yorkshire, and lived in Salford, Sheffield, and London before relocating to Australia. She was a winner of the Grieve Writing Competition (Hunters Writing Centre, NSW) for her short story ‘Heartbeat’. Wild Ground is her first novel.

Doors open 6:30pm event starts 6:45pm

£8.00
95 Town Street
Farsley, Leeds, LS28 5HX
01138056019
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