Susan Barker, author of Old Soul, and member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies will be in conversation Elaine Castillo and discussing her novel, MODERATION.

Blackwell’s Bookshop, Manchester

Doors: 6.30pm, starts: 6.45pm

Tickets are £4. Admission is free when purchasing a copy the book.

About the author:

Elaine Castillo, named one of “30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People” by the Financial Times, was born and raised in the Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, was a finalist for numerous prizes including the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Public Library.

About Susan:

Susan Barker is the author of four books. Her third novel,The Incarnations, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book, a Kirkus Reviews’ Top Ten Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. An excerpt from her fourth novel,Old Soul,won a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction in 2020. Susan currently lives in Manchester, where she is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

About the book:

Girlie, a thirty-something Filipinx-American, works a day job at a social-media moderation centre, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She’s good at it, too – dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to cauterise all her emotions when she was still a kid – so it’s no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big pay rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, stunning simulations of civilizations long-since dead.

Despite the isolation that virtual reality requires from colleagues, friends, and family, the unbelievable perks of her new job mean she can solve a lot of her family’s problems with money and mobility. She doesn’t have to think about the childhood home they lost back in the Bay Area, or history at all—she can just pay any debts that come due. But when she meets William Cheung, Playground’s wry, reticent co-founder (now Chief Product Officer) and slowly unearths some of his secrets, and finds herself somehow falling in love, she’ll learn that history might be impossible to moderate and the future utterly impossible to control.

“Castillo is a literary firecracker… Reading her is like pressing your finger on a bruise just to feel the thrill. If you liked Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and/or The Circle by Dave Eggers, you’ll like this.” – Pandora Sykes