Newsletter - St Helen's Enterprises
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Events at St Helen's School

From Our Community

Particularly good for the family. The food was top quality and the service was really good. We’ll definitely come back!
Richard
Event Guest
The event was really fun! Such a nice atmosphere.

Event Guest
A good environment to be in. It’s the perfect place to be with your friends and family.

Event Guest

Past Events

March 2024

An Evening with Adele Parks

Adele Parks, author of 24 novels and counting, joined our March Book Club for an evening of delightful intrigue.

Showcasing her explosive new novel Just Between Us, Adele shared how the mysterious disappearance of her own grandfather decades ago is what spurred her on to want to write around a missing person’s case. Adele describes the missing person at the heart of this novel as the “complex and hard to like” Kylie Bingham – a bigamist, who now has two husbands trying to track her down.

A question from our audience prompted Adele to share her distinctive process for character building. Once a loose plot is in place, Adele will “interview and interrogate” each character in her head with deeply probing questions, and she won’t stop until she knows them inside out! Adele revealed how referring to these “interview notes” were often what helped her to become unstuck at tricky points in the writing process.

Adele ended her talk with an announcement about the imminent release of a feature film based on one of her previous novels The Image of You, which will be in cinemas soon!

We’d like to thank Adele for uplifting our audience with her fascinating talk.

February 2024

An Evening with Howard Jacobson

Esteemed author Howard Jacobson joined us for our first Book Club event of the year, and it did not disappoint! Howard has had a compelling career having written 18 books and achieving accolades ranging from the Booker Prize to the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award.

Our audience were treated to a closer look at the makings of his latest novel What Will Survive of Us – a slice of life story which poignantly tells the tale of love arriving in mid-life, and how this relationship opens unexpected new worlds for his main characters.

Howard shared that his own experience of being a sentimental boy growing up, often at odds with the expectations of society, is what inspired him to now want to write about and unashamedly explore love in this new novel.

During the audience Q&A, Howard shared that his favourite part of living a creative life was relishing not knowing where the words he writes come from – how his writing is formed by the authors he has read, but also a “mystical other place” where all art comes from.

A wonderfully entertaining evening with a literary legend!

December 2023

Non-Stop Intrigue with Janice Hallett and Elly Griffiths

We were joined for a very festive Book Club by best-selling authors Janice Hallett and Elly Griffiths, showcasing their latest works, The Christmas Appeal (Janice Hallett) and The Great Deceiver (Elly Griffiths).

The authors shared a love for “writing what you know”, with both pinpointing the personal experiences which shaped and influenced their writing choices for these novels, from the locations to the vulnerable traits of certain characters. Janice delighted in bringing to life her Christmas panto themed murder mystery story, which she could richly lace with funny and sinister nuances from her decades of experience in the world of amateur dramatics. Whereas Elly revealed that she had set the murder scene of her novel in the exact house she grew up in during the swinging sixties in Brighton.

Both authors were asked about whether the label of “cosy crime” resonated with them and their writing; and they agreed that while they consciously avoided gruesome descriptions, readers might be surprised by the darkness in some of their plot twists and characters.

A spectacular evening, where the conversation between the authors could have carried on long after the evening came to close!