Val McDermid & Jo Sharp: This Door of the Seas

Val McDermid and Jo Sharp are coming to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Wednesday 11 November to talk about their new co-authored novella, This Door of the Seas. It's part of the Aye Write! programme, so it's one of the literary events running across the hall that autumn.

The book itself looks back at the Darien Venture, Scotland's only trading colony at the end of the seventeenth century. It started as a dream of prosperity and ended as a disaster that bankrupted the nation, a collapse that helped push Scotland towards political union with England. McDermid and Sharp have written it as an epistolary tale—a series of letters home from the expedition scientist, Dr James Wallace, addressed to his wife Eliza and to Sir Robert Sibbald, the first Geographer Royal. The letters trace the forces that doomed the whole thing.

It's a bit of an odd-couple pairing on paper, too: McDermid is the internationally bestselling crime writer, and Jo Sharp is the Geographer Royal for Scotland. They'll be discussing the novella together on the night, so you'll get both the writer's and the geographer's take on the story. The conversation is part of the Aye Write! programme, which runs throughout the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

It's in the Strathclyde Suite, 2 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow City Centre G2 3NY. The evening starts at 7:00pm, with the talk itself beginning at 8:00pm. Tickets are £14.94 for the entry alone, or £25.69 if you want the ticket and the book, which you collect at the event.