Deb Olin Unferth and Ben Pester in conversation - Islington

Join us with Deb Olin Unferth and Ben Pester to discuss their latest books, Earth 7, an exhilarating, wildly inventive tour de force, of love, humanity and the end of the world as we know it, and Sail Away Land, a collection of dizzying stories that feel both undeniably real and disarmingly uncanny, from the acclaimed author of The Expansion Project.
EARTH 7Two women, one raised in near solitude in a research pod in the depths of the ocean and one a luxury-resort bartender who may or may not be a robot, fall in love, cross deserts, gaze at the stars – and try not only to hold onto one another but together, possibly, salvage some trace of planet Earth.
Heartbreaking, mind-expanding, soaring with beauty, Earth 7 is at once a love letter to the world and a portrait of its slow disappearance. It’s about love and grief, microbiology and astrophysics, robots and planet Mars, and humanity in all its greatness, absurdity and distress. Welding the deeply human to the thrillingly strange, fizzing with intelligence and profoundly moving, it is the novel we need right now, and for all times.SAIL AWAY LAND
Sail Away Land is the space where we might go when we're no longer alive (sometimes only temporarily). In this uncommon and disarming collection, the characters go 'there' with or without knowing it. Maybe they have been living there all along without noticing - just like they hadn't really noticed that everyone is carrying a shiny black suitcase.These stories are about normal things - losing the people we're closest to, forgiving them, finding love and managing to hold onto it - but also about going to parties through a door in the back of a colleague's head, housebreaking in search of a sister's ghost, and asking the strangers in the kitchen to resurrect you at midnight.Like brilliant and strange anxiety dreams in prose, the stories in Sail Away Land are full of temporal weirdness, life and non-being, psychological acuity, imagination and wit, all while being effortlessly, seductively readable and incredibly moving.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including Barn 8 and Wait Till You See Me Dance. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
Her work has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, McSweeney’s and the Paris Review.
Ben Pester is the author of the short story collection Am I in the Right Place? and the novel The Expansion Project. He lives in London.

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