Anthony Ferner’s Winegarden London Launch at Spiro Ark

Spiro Ark and Holland Park Press are delighted to invite you to the London Launch of Winegarden by Anthony Ferner.

Have you ever come across a novella that features a Jewish, yet agnostic, professor in theoretical physics who heads a department of thought experiments, located above the local branch of the (Schrodinger) Cats Protection League? Well, that’s exactly what Anthony Ferner does in Winegarden, a witty satire of (academic) life.

Central to the story is the relationship between Jacob Winegarden, an unworldly academic, and his determinedly practical, though beautiful and enigmatic, wife Miriam. Winegarden’s eccentric-seeming experiments involving cats, zombies and golems, are his way of making sense of his world in all its uncertainty and contradiction and that’s how he copes with the burdens of love, grief and being Jewish.

Anthony Ferner will talk about why he wrote Winegarden, the writing process, and his own life and Jewish background. He will, of course, read from Winegarden and there will be time to ask him questions and get a signed copy of Winegarden.

Free refreshments will be provided at the event, and you can purchase a signed copy of Winegarden at a discounted price.

To whet your appetite you can read the opening pages of Winegarden on the Holland Park Press website.

Feedback from readers & reviewers

‘It has that great old Jewish quality of combining high seriousness with low playfulness, it is rich and ironic and not ironic, subversive yet curiously traditional: it holds one’s attention, it provokes one into thought.’ – Rick Gekoski, American Jewish writer, Man Booker judge, 2005, chair of International Man Booker judges, 2011

‘Ferner has created a figure who encapsulates so many of those common Jewish neuroses which we all know so well.’ – Richard Jaffa in the BPS Bulletin

Anthony Ferner was professor of international human resource management at De Montfort University and retired in 2014. He has been a member of the Tindal Street Fiction Group since 2010. His short story ‘The Cat It Is That Dies’ appeared in the anthology The Sea In Birmingham, in 2013. Winegarden is his debut novel.

Winegarden, 92 pages, ISBN 9781907320507, £8.99 is published by Holland Park Press.

A PDF version of this invitation is available from the Winegarden page under Information Downloads.