We’re hosting a book festival! A week-long celebration of wild and wilful stories, organised and hosted by Falmouth Bookseller.
Falmouth is a vibrant and creative town with longstanding ties to nature and the arts. It is a uniquely diverse place that deserves to have all of these interests and more represented in the talks and speakers hosted here.
As a bookshop we pride ourselves on being able to find the perfect book for pretty much anyone, catering to a wide array of interests. The same should be true for the events that are offered in Falmouth, giving everyone the opportunity to discover, explore, and learn something new.
With Wayward, we hope to fill these gaps by championing authors, stories, and discussions that are subversive, headstrong, and commonly overlooked. From forgotten folklore to marine science, inspirational adventures to thought-provoking discussion about what a human life is worth: we have worked hard to curate a programme of brilliant minds and interesting speakers – and we hope you agree.
Monday 29th April
The Price of Life: Jenny Kleeman in conversation
We say that life is priceless. Yet the cost of saving a life, creating a life or compensating for a life taken is routinely calculated and put into practice. What do we lose and what do we gain by leaving the judgments that really matter up to cold, hard logic?
The Price of Life: In Search of What We’re Worth and Who Decides
$2-3,000 to save the life of a child in Africa. £15,180 to hire a hitman. $368,901 to pay the average ransom demand.
We say that life is priceless. Yet the cost of saving a life, creating a life or compensating for a life taken is routinely calculated and put into practice. In a world in love with data, it is possible to run a cost-benefit analysis on anything – including life itself.
For philanthropists, judges, criminals, healthcare providers and government ministers, it’s just part of the job. In The Price of Life, journalist, broadcaster and documentary-maker Jenny Kleeman takes us on an adventure to meet some of the people who decide what we’re worth. In a series of extraordinary encounters – with people who have faked their own death or lost a loved one to terrorism, with hitmen and with modern day slaves – she discovers more questions than answers.
What does it mean for our humanity when we crunch the numbers to decide who gets the expensive life-saving drugs, and who misses out? What do we learn about ourselves when philanthropic giving by the effective altruists in Silicon Valley is received by some, while others are left to suffer? Are some lives really worth more than others? And what happens when we take human emotions out of the equation? Does it make for a fairer decision-making process – or for moral bankruptcy?
Exploring the final frontier in monetization, Kleeman asks what we lose and what we gain by leaving the judgments that really matter up to cold, hard logic.
Earth is home to a huge story that is rarely told – that of our ocean. Not the fish or the dolphins, but the massive ocean engine itself: what it does, why it works, and the many ways it has influenced animals, weather and human history & culture.
Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World
All of the Earth’s ocean, from the equator to the poles, is a single engine powered by sunlight – a blue machine.
Earth is home to a huge story that is rarely told – that of our ocean. Not the fish or the dolphins, but the massive ocean engine itself: what it does, why it works, and the many ways it has influenced animals, weather and human history & culture.
In a book that will recalibrate our view of this defining feature of our planet, physicist Helen Czerski dives deep to illuminate the murky depths of the ocean engine, examining the messengers, passengers and voyagers that live in it, travel over it, and survive because of it. From the ancient Polynesians who navigated the Pacific by reading the waves to permanent residents of the deep such as the Greenland shark that can live for hundreds of years, she explains the vast currents, invisible ocean walls and underwater waterfalls that all have their place in the ocean’s complex, interlinked system.
Timely, elegant and passionately argued, Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet. The understanding it offers is crucial to our future. Drawing on years of experience at the forefront of marine science, Helen Czerski captures the magnitude and subtlety of Earth’s defining feature, showing us the thrilling extent to which we are at the mercy of this great engine.
The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar.
Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials
The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018.
In Witchcraft – a stunning hardback with 16 pages of beautiful illustrations – Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and witch-hunts. As well as exploring the origins of witch-hunts through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions.
It shows us how witchcraft was reimagined by lawyers and radical historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in Jazz Age Pennsylvania, the effects of colonialism and Christian missionary zeal on ‘witches’ in Africa, and how even today a witch trial can come in many guises.
Professor Gibson also tells the stories of the ‘witches’ – mostly women like Helena Scheuberin, Anny Sampson and Joan Wright, whose stories have too often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King James I and ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins, who hounded them.
Once a tool invented by demonologists to hurt and silence their enemies, witch trials have been twisted and transformed over the course of history and the lines between witch and witch-hunter blurred. For the fortunate, a witch-hunt is just a metaphor, but, as this book makes clear, witches are truly still on trial.
Join us in the shop for the launch of Botanical Short Stories, a curated celebration of contemporary writing about plants and flowers.
We’ll be welcoming both editor Emma Timpany and illustrator Sarah Jane Humphrey to talk about the collection and how it came to fruition.
Botanical Short Stories
A group of botanists in search of rare species dismiss local custom at their peril. Love in all its wildness and wonder is found clinging to crumbling chalk cliffs and growing through cracks on city streets. A scientist takes a radical step to understand her houseplant. A poet remembers her beloved flowers, and the longing for a magnificent tropical garden outlasts death.
From tokens of love to neolithic burial gifts, bridal bouquets to seasonal wreaths and healing potions to artistic masterpieces, flowers and plants have a multitude of meanings and a long and complex relationship with us.
They brighten our homes and delight us in garden and countryside, convey our emotions and symbolise the stages of our human lives. Throughout the anthology, interactions with the natural world bring opportunities for new beginnings, transformation, and a chance to heal.
This rich and wide-ranging collection celebrates the deep connection that exists between people and plants in fourteen short stories as varied, diverse, and global as the botanical world itself.
Falmouth Bookseller 6pm Free entry
Wayward Pub Quiz
How’s your general knowledge? Niche facts? Maybe some bookish trivia?
Join us for the Wayward Pub Quiz – a not-entirely-bookish quiz hosted by Above the Bookshop.
Tickets are per person with a maximum of 6 per team – each table will also be joined by one of our fabulous local authors. Bring your a-game and a punny team name!
Everyone on the winning team of the night will win a £10 book token to be redeemed at Falmouth Bookseller!
Save Me from the Waves is an inspirational story of physical and mental endurance which starts on the streets of London and culminates on top of the world, fuelled by song. It explores the redemptive power of music and mountains, how family and friends can be lost and found in the most unusual places, and encourages everyone to live big and bravely when life doesn’t go to plan – because sometimes we all need saving from the waves.
Save Me from the Waves: An adventure from sea to summit
An adventure story – with a difference. From sea to summit. Fully soundtracked.
Jessica Hepburn is an unlikely athlete – she was labelled the ‘arty’ not the ‘sporty’ one in school. She hates exercise and believes the only reason to do it is for food, booze and box-sets on the sofa. However, in her forties, following a succession of hard and sad life experiences she started to try and exercise her way out of heartbreak.
She has now become one of the world’s most extraordinary endurance athletes. The first and only woman (currently) on the planet to have completed the ‘Sea, Street, Summit Challenge’ – which is to swim the English Channel, run the London Marathon and climb Mount Everest (which she calls Chomolungma – the mountain’s original Sherpa name). And possibly the only woman (although this can’t be officially certified) to have listened to eighty years and over 3,000 episodes of her favourite radio programme – Desert Island Discs.
Save Me from the Waves is an inspirational story of physical and mental endurance which starts on the streets of London and culminates on top of the world, fuelled by song. It explores the redemptive power of music and mountains. How family and friends can be lost and found in the most unusual places.
And encourages everyone to live big and bravely when life doesn’t go to plan. Because sometimes we all need saving from the waves. And whether it’s high and far away or closer to home and in your head, an adventure will always change your life for the better.
Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet – gradually eroding, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also weathering: evolving and changing as we’re transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?
In a world shaken by physical, political, and medical disasters, Weathering argues for a deeper understanding of the ground beneath our feet to better serve ourselves and the world we live in.
Weathering
Rocks and mountains have withstood aeons of life on our planet – gradually eroding, shifting, solidifying, and weathering. We might spend a little less time on earth, but humans are also weathering: evolving and changing as we’re transformed by the shifting climates of our lives and experiences. So, what might these ancient natural forms have to teach us about resilience and change?
In a stunning exploration of our own connection to these enduring forms, outdoor psychotherapist and geologist Ruth Allen takes us on a journey through deep time and ancient landscapes, showing how geology – which has formed the bedrock of her own adult life and approach to therapy – can offer us a new way of thinking about our own grief, change and boundaries.
In a world shaken by physical, political, and medical disasters, Weathering argues for a deeper understanding of the ground beneath our feet to better serve ourselves and the world we live in.
Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today.
The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – a Hidden History
‘A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.’
So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?
In this vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.
We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’.
Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Treelifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today.
