Join us for a conversation with the wildly inventive, genre-bending author Jasper Fforde at Southwold Arts Centre, as part of Southwold Literary Festival! Jasper will be talking to us about his career so far and his upcoming novel, Dark Reading Matter.

Tickets are £7.55 each (including booking fee). Available to book from Southwold Library, from Southwold Arts Centre, or online on TicketSource.

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Time Bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001. His 18th novel, Dark Reading Matter, will be published in the UK/USA in 2026. Fforde’s writing is an eclectic mix of genres, which might be described as a joyful blend of Comedy-SF-thriller-Crime-Satire. He freely admits that he is fascinated not just by books themselves, but by the way we read and what we read, and his reinvigoration of tired genres have won him many enthusiastic supporters across the world.

Red Side Story is a sequel to 2011’s Shades of Grey, set in a world where your position in society depended on what bit of the colour spectrum you could see. Eddie Russett (a Red) and Jane Grey (a lowly Grey) have been framed for murder and as they fight to survive, they uncover hidden truths about their society, challenge its rigid rules, and stumble toward the mystery of what really happened to the world centuries ago. Blending satire, romance, and dystopian adventure, it’s equal parts absurdly funny and sharply thought-provoking.

This event takes place at Southwold Arts Centre, St Edmund’s Hall, IP18 6JP.

Southwold Literary Festival has been organised in collaboration with Southwold Arts Centre, Friends of Southwold Library, and Suffolk Community Libraries.