Daniel Mason for Country People

Daniel Mason is coming to Topping & Company Booksellers on Wednesday 16 September, where he'll be talking about his new book, Country People. It's an author talk, so the evening is built around him discussing the new work rather than a reading alone.

If you're coming to this as a new reader, it's worth knowing where he's coming from. Country People follows North Woods, the bestseller that's been his most widely read book to date. Before that, he wrote The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, The Winter Soldier and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His work has been translated into 28 languages and adapted for opera and the stage, so he's far from a debutant.

There's a bit of a double life to him that explains some of the range in his writing: Mason is a doctor as well as a writer, and he's an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry. That medical background sits alongside a long list of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, plus two Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize.

The talk runs from 7:00pm to 8:00pm at Topping & Company Booksellers in York. If you need to get in touch with the shop beforehand, their number is 01904 313626.