No Alibis Bookstore

Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong - Book Event
2023-08-17 18:00 - 19:30 (Europe/London) | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Join us in No Alibis for an evening to celebrate the launch of Sheila’s acclaimed debut novel, Falling Animals, in conversation with Michael Magee.
About Falling Animals:
On an isolated beach set against a lonely, windswept coastline, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea. His hands are folded neatly in his lap, his ankles are crossed and there is a faint smile on his otherwise lifeless face.
Months later, after a fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave. But the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake. From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores.
Told through a chorus of voices, Falling Animals follows the crosshatching threads of lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present. Slowly, over great time and distance, the story of one man, alone on a beach, begins to unravel. Elegiac and atmospheric, dark and disquieting, Sheila Armstrong’s debut novel marks her arrival as one of the most uniquely gifted writers at work in literary fiction today.
About the author:
Sheila Armstrong is a writer from the northwest of Ireland. She spent ten years in publishing and now works as a freelance editor. Her first collection of short stories, How To Gut A Fish, which was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, was published in 2022. Falling Animals is her debut novel.
While admission is free, is a ticketed event. To reserve a spot please use the link below.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-sheila-armstrong-tickets-665276910147

Book Launch: Grapefruit Moon by Shirley Anne McMillan
2023-08-10 18:00 - 19:30 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Join us for an evening with Shirley-Anne McMillan to celebrate the launch of Grapefruit Moon.
About Grapefruit Moon:
Wealthy, popular Charlotte and quiet, working class Drew couldn’t be more different, but both face a common enemy at Cooke’s Academy in the form of the Stewards – an elite group of students whose power to manipulate school culture is feared by pupils and teachers alike. Drew, a newcomer to Cooke’s, must navigate the strict codes of masculinity laid down by the Stewards in order to have a hope of moving on to university, while Charlotte dreams of speaking freely about the constraints and abuses of the culture which is propelling her towards a life she’s not sure she wants. Through drag art and poetry the unlikely pair follow a dangerous trajectory which will lead them closer to one another and further away from the paths laid out for them.
About the author:
Shirley-Anne McMillan is a writer from Northern Ireland. She has worked as a teacher, an Online Writer in Residence for the Irish Writers Centre, a youth worker with LGBTQ young people and a creative writing tutor. She lives in Co. Down with her family and in her free time she loves playing the guitar and knitting.
Book your free spot here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-shirley-anne-mcmillan-tickets-673741788827?aff=oddtdtcreator

Book event: Jo Baker - The Midnight News
2023-08-04 18:00 - 20:00 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Join us for an evening with Jo Baker to celebrate the launch of her new novel, The Midnight News.
About The Midnight News: It is 1940 and twenty-year-old Charlotte Richmond watches from her attic window as enemy planes fly over London. Still grieving her beloved brother who never returned from France, she is working hard to keep her own little life ticking over: holding down a dull typist job at the Ministry of Information, sharing gin and confidences with her best friend Elena, and dodging her difficult father. She has good reason to keep her head down and stay out of trouble.
She knows what happens when she makes a nuisance of herself. On her way to work she often sees the boy who feeds the birds – a source of unexpected joy amidst the rubble of the Blitz. But every day brings new scenes of devastation, and after yet another heartbreaking loss Charlotte has an uncanny sense of foreboding.
Someone is stalking the darkness, targeting her friends. And now he is following her. She no longer knows who to trust.
She can’t even trust herself. She knows this; her family have told so her often enough. As grief and suspicion consume her, Charlotte’s nerves become increasingly frayed, and soon her very freedom is under threat…
Riveting and deeply moving, The Midnight News is a tour de force from Sunday Times bestselling author Jo Baker – a breathtaking story of friendship, love and war.
Book your free ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-event-jo-baker-the-midnight-news-tickets-663602682487?aff=oddtdtcreator

We Play Here by Dawn Watson: Book Launch
2023-08-03 19:00 - 20:30 | Great Hall, QUB, Great Hall, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, United Kingdom
Join us in the Great Hall at Queen’s for the launch of Dawn Watson’s much anticipated collection, We Play Here (Granta Books). Dawn will read from the book for the first time and audience members will have the chance to buy a signed copy on the night.
We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant north Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a backdrop of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspective of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, Watson paints an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect.
This is a graceful, lyrical and evocative rendering of history through the expansive and imaginative space of a working-class girlhood.
‘An extraordinary, enviably great debut. Watson has that rare ability to capture the ever-present strangeness of childhood and to use that to let us into a specific history with intellectual and imaginative generosity… a game-changing narrative long poem you’ll want to keep close’
– Luke Kennard
‘In We Play Here, Dawn Watson gives us a closely mapped, child’s-eye view of a North Belfast community in the mid-1980s, where everyday violence refracts along gender lines in a way little enough heard about. Watson’s sequences, in the voices of four twelve-year-old girls, record this broken world innocently, movingly and humorously – but, more than this, through their attention to beauty and wonder, they map these girls’ inner lives, where imagination and poetry itself survive’
– Leontia Flynn
Book your ticket here: https://www.qub.ac.uk/events/whats-on/listing/weplayherebydawnwatsonbooklaunch.html

Denise Mina in Armagh
2023-07-26 13:30 - 14:30 | Market Place Theatre, Market Place Theatre, 9 Market Street, Armagh, Co. Armagh, BT61 7BW, United Kingdom
In association with the John Hewitt International Summer School, we would like to invite you to the Market Place Theatre in Armagh for an event with Denise Mina in conversation with Brian McGilloway.
Denise Mina in Conversation with Brian McGilloway
Denise Mina is a Scottish crime writer, playwright and comic book writer. A former university tutor in criminology and criminal law, it was during her PhD studies at Strathclyde University that she penned her first novel: Garnethill (1998).The prize-winning author of fifteen crime novels, she received the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award twice. In 2019 she was awarded the MacIlvanny Prize for Scottish Crime for her thriller, Conviction, a New York Times Bestseller, while The Less Dead was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Book Awards best novel category. In her latest book, The Second Murderer, a smart, atmospheric and witty mystery (published July 2023), she delivers a clever and timely new take on Raymond Chandler’s infamous detective, Philip Marlowe. denisemina.com/
“…one of the most original voices in the notably expanding field of Irish crime fiction.” The Irish Independent.
“Denise Mina is crime-writing royalty.” Val McDermid
“Denise Mina is the cream of the crop, an author who pushes the crime novel in new and exciting directions.” Ian Rankin
Brian McGilloway is the author of the Inspector Benedict Devlin Mysteries and Lucy Black series. His most recent standalone novel, The Empty Room, was published in March 2022.
Tickets can be purchased here: https://marketplacearmagh.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873637167

Lee Child and Andrew Child in Armagh
2023-07-24 20:30 - 22:00 | Market Place Theatre, Market Place Theatre, 9 Market Street, Armagh, Co. Armagh, BT61 7BW, United Kingdom
In association with the John Hewitt International Summer School, we would like to invite you to the Market Place Theatre in Armagh for an evening with Lee Child and his brother Andrew Child, in conversation with Stuart Neville.
The annual highlight of the JHISS, multi award-winning Armagh writer Stuart Neville invites two of the most popular and critically acclaimed international crime writers to join him for this JHISS Crime Fiction Special.
Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He is the creator of the iconic Jack Reacher Series, a global phenomenon. Having written over 24 Jack Reacher novels and numerous short stories, his books have consistently achieved the number one slot on bestseller lists around the world, with book sales of over one hundred million. Now resident in the USA he grew up in the Midlands, and after an extraordinary writing career he has announced his retirement from writing.
Andrew Child, his brother, is a highly successful thriller author in his own right and has taken on the daunting task of continuing the Jack Reacher Series. Lee and Andrew have collaborated on three thrillers to date, with the most recent, No Plan B, having been described by Karin Slaughter as “perfectly plotted … with bigger twists than ever before”.
“Lee and Andrew Child nail it again with No Plan B.” Richard Osman
‘It’s no wonder Jack Reacher is everyone’s favourite rebel hero.’ Karin Slaughter.
Stuart Neville is a critically acclaimed best-selling crime writer whose Jack Lemon and DCI Serena Flanagan series have won him many awards.
Tickets can be purchased here:
https://marketplacearmagh.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873635901

Challenging the Narrative - Cahal McLaughlin - Book Launch
2023-06-20 17:30 - 19:00 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Book launch of ‘Challenging the Narrative: Documentary Film as Participatory Practice in Conflict Situations’

The book addresses the role of filmmakers in creating platforms for survivors of political violence to tell their stories in order to challenge marginalizing narratives and injustices. Reflecting on films produced in the North of Ireland, South Africa, Haiti and Brazil, the challenges and limitations of participatory practice as a form of public acknowledgement are addressed.

Book your FREE space below
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/challenging-the-narrative-book-launch-tickets-635440308067
Order the book here
https://chaptersbookstore.live/product/challenging-the-narrative/

Aaron Edwards - A People Under Siege - Book Launch
2023-06-15 18:00 - 19:30 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
In Northern Ireland’s centenary year, military and political historian Aaron Edwards, a native of Belfast, explores the profound challenges facing Unionists, as extraordinary uncertainty hangs over the future of the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
In doing so he confronts the narrow, sectional beliefs and prejudices of unionists and loyalists, as well as outlining their more positive and forward-thinking aspects. By embracing these, Edwards explains how divisions could be healed and a position reached of mutual acceptance, tolerance and understanding that will benefit the entire population.
Pre-order your copy here
https://chaptersbookstore.live/product/a-people-under-siege-the-unionists-of-northern-ireland-from-partition-to-brexit-and-beyond-pre-order-may-2023/
Reserve your Free place here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/aaron-edwards-a-people-under-siege-book-launch-tickets-639732797017

Alexander Poots - The Strangers' House Book Launch
2023-06-08 18:00 - 19:30 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Join us for a Book Launch.
Alexander Poots will be in discussion with Malachi O’Doherty
A penetrating study and celebration of Northern Irish literature—telling the region’s story through the extraordinary novels and poetry produced by decades of conflict.
Northern Ireland is one hundred years old. Northern Ireland does not exist. Both of these statements are true. It just depends on who you ask. How do you write about a place like this? THE STRANGERS’ HOUSE asks this question of the region’s greatest writers, living and dead. What have they made of Northern Ireland – and what has Northern Ireland made of them?

About the Author
Alexander Poots was born in London in 1985. After studying at the University of Manchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, he worked as a bookseller. The Strangers’ House is his first book. He lives in Belfast.
Book you free place here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/alexander-poots-the-strangers-house-book-launch-tickets-639343001127
Order your copy here
https://chaptersbookstore.live/product/the-strangers-house-writing-northern-ireland/

An Evening With Steve Cavanagh, Claire Allan & Brian McGilloway
2023-06-01 18:00 - 20:00 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
No Alibis in association with The Crime Writers’ Association invites you to an Evening of Criminal Chat.
To celebrate National Crime Reading month in June and the 70th anniversary of the Crime Writers’ Association we welcome you to an evening with three of the finest Crime Writers writing today, Steve Cavanagh, Claire Allan and Brian McGilloway.
Steve, Claire and Brian will be chatting about their work and the importance of the crime genre within the literary world.
Book your space here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-steve-cavanagh-claire-allan-brian-mcgilloway-tickets-630696469117
