Programs - Special Events - Author Talks
Author Talk: Amanda Hampson
Who: Adults
When: Thursday 8 May | 6.30-7.30pm
Where: Penrith City Library
Tickets: $5 per person. Bookings required.
Join award-winning Australian author Amanda Hampson to talk about her latest Tea Ladies mystery, The Deadly Dispute.
This delightfully intriguing series has captured readers around Australia, and we are thrilled Amanda is joining us at Penrith City Library.
About The Deadly Dispute
1967: Hazel’s new job at the docks quickly turns perilous when she stumbles into the criminal underworld that lurks beneath the surface. A million in gold coins has vanished from a cargo ship and a dead body washed up. Suddenly, she’s in over her head.
Disillusioned with her life, Betty is led astray by a charismatic new friend and finds herself exposed in more ways than one – until a crisis drags her back to reality.
Living in a high-class brothel, Irene gets wind of a threat that could destroy her livelihood. She takes on the Maltese mafia and becomes involved in a dangerously sticky situation.
When one of the tea ladies disappears, they face their greatest challenge yet, pushing their detective skills to the limit. It will take more than a glass of Hazel’s homemade wine to solve this one.
About Amanda Hampson
Amanda Hampson has been writing professionally for more than thirty years and is the bestselling author of nine novels.
A runaway bestseller, The Tea Ladies won the 2024 Danger Awards for Best Crime Fiction and was Shortlisted for the 2024 Davitt Awards - Best Adult Crime and the 2024 Ned Kelly Awards – Best Fiction.
Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be provided.
Purchase a book from our QBD Books pop-up on the night to have it personally signed by Amanda.
Please advise us on 4732 7891 if you have accessibility requirements for this session.
Click here to book now
Sydney Writers' Festival - Jock Serong: Cherrywood
Who: Adults
When: Wednesday 21 May | 6.30pm
Where: Penrith City Library
Tickets: $5 per person. Bookings required.
What connects an impulsive Scottish industrialist in 1916 Edinburgh and a frustrated lawyer dropping into the pub for a bottle of wine in 1993 Melbourne?
From multi-award-winning author Jock Serong comes Cherrywood, an imaginative, darkly playful and deeply meaningful delight; a novel about legacy, community, wonder, love and reinvention. Join Jock Serong in conversation with Amy Sambrooke.
About Jock Serong
Jock Serong is the author of seven novels. He is also the founding editor of Great Ocean Quarterly and his non-fiction work appears in publications from The Guardian and The Monthly to Surfing World and Patagonia's Roaring Journals. Jock writes for the screen and teaches writing to rooms that are sometimes filled with judges and sometimes prisoners. He is a board member of Melbourne's Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas. His latest novel is the urban fairytale Cherrywood.
About Amy Sambrooke
Amy Sambrooke is a creative producer and facilitator and manages the professional development masterclass program at Varuna, the National Writers' House. Formerly the Creative Director of Varuna and the Blue Mountains Writers' Festival (2017–2023), Amy has held senior roles in program leadership, education and communications in the arts and in public policy. Amy started her career as a producer at ABC Sydney and is a graduate of Macquarie University and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be provided.
QBD the Booksellers will be there. Purchase one of Jock's books to have it personally signed.
Please advise us on 4732 7891 if you have accessibility requirements for this session.
YA Author Talk - Tegan Bennett Daylight
Who: Ages 13+
When: Wednesday 28 May | 6pm
Where: Penrith City Library
Tickets: $5 per person. Bookings are essential.
Join local author Tegan Bennett Daylight in conversation discussing her latest young adult novel How to Survive 1985. How to Survive 1985 is the follow up to Tegan’s acclaimed YA novel Royals which was shortlisted for the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and named a ‘Best Book of the Year’ in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. Royals received glowing praise from Alice Pung, who described it as ‘A real page-turner of a book, full of vivid characters, intrigue and genuine warmth. The setting is so realistically unsettling, and the teenagers so likeable, that I was hooked from the beginning'.
How to Survive 1985 is a warm, life-affirming story that follows four friends who find themselves thrown back in time to 1985. This sure-fire family conversation-starter looks at how the teens of today would survive in their parents’ era – how do they manage the harsh attitudes and language, the lack of internet, and most importantly, their teenaged parents.
Optimistic and heartwarming, this is Up-lit for today’s teens. In the face of a lot of pessimism about Gen Z and the world they’re inheriting, Tegan explores the positive aspects of Gen Z: their care for each other, their moral fibre, their resilience, and resourcefulness. Gen Z is surrounded by so many dystopian visions of their world and future (in the news as well as books), How to Survive 1985 is a wonderful demonstration of the ways many things have improved. Most notably, sexism, racism and ableism.
Tegan Bennett Daylight is a writer, teacher and critic. Her books include the Stella Award shortlisted Six Bedrooms and the novels Safety and Bombora. She lives in the Blue Mountains with her husband and two children.
Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be provided.
Purchase a book from our Harry Hartog pop-up on the night to have it personally signed by Tegan.
Please advise us on 4732 7891 if you have accessibility requirements for this program.
Author Talk: Meg Bignell
Who: Adults
When: Tuesday 22 July | 6.30-7.30pm
Where: Penrith City Library
Tickets: $5 per person. Bookings are essential.
Callie March is fascinated by human absurdity, including the habits of the upper class. So when she pushes her screen-addicted teenage son to join a local rowing club, she is thrilled to discover a whole new world of odd behaviours, irrational obsessions and riverside rooting.
Meg's new novel is set in northern Tasmania. It contains profundity, profanity, heart-ache, bum chafe, terrible winners and very good losers.
About Meg Bignell
Meg Bignell is the bestselling author of The Angry Women's Choir. She was a nurse and a weather presenter on the telly before she surrendered to a persistent desire to write. Since then she has been writing almost every day – bits and pieces here and there, either to earn a crust, to get something off her chest or to entertain herself. She has written three short films, mostly because she wanted to do some acting and no one else would cast her. She sings a bit too, occasionally writes and performs cabaret, but is mostly very busy being a mother to three and a wife (to one). She lives with her family on a dairy farm on Tasmania’s East Coast.
Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be provided.
Books will be available for sales and signing.
Please advise on 4732 7891 if you have any accessibility requirements for this event.
Click here to book now