Hilary Mantel was awed by ‘an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue’ in My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s New York Times bestselling novel. Strout’s stellar career — Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became an Emmy Award-winning HBO miniseries — is full of similar praise.

We are thrilled to welcome her on publication of her new novel Anything Is Possible. Loved for her compassionate and assured writing, her ideal reader is ‘patient, but not too patient; someone who… may not read it if I do not write it honestly’. Could it be you?

The event is chaired by journalist and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson.