D.E.A.R

Drop Everything And Read

Sunday 21st June

11:30 - 13:00

As part of our The Big Read ending festivities, come and join us for The Big Read with debut author Eden McKenzie-Goddard doing a live reading of his book Smallie hosted by poet Roy McFarlane. 

This event is a special one, because for just a £3 deposit you can come along to Jubilee Square, pick up your FREE hardback copy of Smallie, and after you will receive your £3 refunded. This is on the basis that you come and collect your copy. 

Sit down with us, and listen to Eden and Roy have an inspiring conversation about Smallie with your very own copy.

Smallie, 'In 1961, nineteen-year-old Lucinda Brown travels to England in search of her son’s father, Clarence Braithwaite, who left Barbados to join the British army. But aboard the ship to Southampton she meets a man named Raldo who offers her a glimpse of a new life, a freer life. Bound by the memory of her son waiting at home, she chooses Clarence – realizing too late that war has made a stranger out of him.

Nearly fifty years later, Lucinda receives a letter from the Home Office that threatens to tear her world apart. Her children rally together to prove her legal arrival, and to do so they must track down an elusive man from her past, a man she wanted to love but instead lost, a man who now holds the key to her family’s future. Raldo . . .

An exhilarating and expansive tale of a family thrown into collision with the Windrush scandal, Smallie shows just how easily the past can spill into our lives, even when – especially when – we think we’ve closed the door on it.'