Amanda Craig
DLS Lecture – The Three Graces

Amanda Craig is an award-winning journalist, critic and author. A novelist who often combines literary fiction with crime and suspense, Amanda will not only be talking about her latest enthralling, funny and generous book, The Three Graces, she will also discuss her love of Dorothy L Sayers’s fiction, “the marriage of true minds”, 1930s feminism and the Wimsey-Vane romance.

Witham Library, 18 Newland Street, Witham, CM8 2AQ
Tickets: £8 / £7
Box Office: Online or Mercury Theatre 01206 573948

About the book – The Three Graces

A trio of retired ex-pats in Tuscany have their lives thrown into chaos and confusion after one of their neighbours shoots an illegal migrant in this panoramic novel from the author of The Golden Rule, which tackles a variety of prescient themes.

When Enzo shoots an illegal migrant from his bedroom one night, it triggers a series of events that embroil old and young, rich and poor, native and foreign. His elderly neighbours Ruth, Diana and Marta are three friends who have retired to Tuscany. Ruth’s favourite grandson Olly is about to get married from her idyllic hillside farmhouse; however, the bride, Tania, seems curiously unengaged by anything but vlogging as a social media influencer.

Marta, preparing to give the annual music recital sponsored by a Russian oligarch in hiding from Putin, is increasingly unwell, and her grandson, Xan, is full of resentment at the inequalities he encounters. nursing her husband, Lord Evenlode, who is living with dementia, and looking back over a long and troubled marriage.

Over two weeks in May, all these characters will face challenging choices as they grapple with their own past and with present dangers. For although the Tuscan spring looks as ravishing as a Renaissance painting, the realities of modern life make it harder and harder to believe that there is more that unites us than what keeps us apart.

Brilliant, enthralling, funny and generous, this is an exploration of the indomitable human heart.

‘She’s such a skilful storyteller who vividly dramatises our lives with wit, wisdom and compassion’ – Bernardine Evaristo

About the author

Amanda Craig is an award-winning journalist, critic and the author of nine novels, most recently Hearts and Minds (long-listed for the 2009 Women’s Prize), The Lie of the Land (chosen by all national newspapers as a Book of 2017) and The Golden Rule (long-listed for the 2021 Women’s Prize).

Her new novel The Three Graces, about female friendship in Tuscany, is out June 2023.

Her love of Dorothy L Sayers’s fiction led to her reading English Literature at Cambridge, joining an advertising agency on graduation, and even (in the Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey) the plot in The Lie of the Land.

A novelist who often combines literary fiction with crime and suspense, she will be talking about “the marriage of true minds”, 1930s feminism and the Wimsey-Vane romance.

Follow Amanda on Twitter @AmandaPCraig

Photo of Amanda Craig © Charlie Hopkinson