Events

We are delighted to be welcoming Freya Bromley and Elizabeth O’Connor to The Heath Bookshop

Two debut novelists, two islands, two explorations of who has the right to tell a story. In Whale Fall, Elizabeth O’Connor’s Manod watches her tiny Welsh island community be reshaped and re-narrated by outsiders. In A Real Piece of Work, Nola returns to the remote island of Lundy for a fraught family reunion, only to find her own memoir—and her right to her sister’s story—under attack from her family. Join Freya and Elizabeth for a conversation about writing islands as both a setting and pressure cooker as they explore the way isolation forces secrets to the surface.

Freya Bromley is a writer living in London. Her work explores love, loss and the restorative power of nature. She’s written for titles including Condé Nast Traveller, Financial Times and National Geographic Traveller. Freya’s first book The Tidal Year was shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards 2023. In 2026 she released her debut novel A Real Piece of Work. She also has a podcast, Character Study, that explores how creativity shapes our lives.

Elizabeth O’Connor is an award-winning writer from Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes. Her debut novel, WHALE FALL, was published in 2024. It won the Chautauqua Prize and was nominated for the Ondaatje Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Dublin International Literary Award, the Prix Femina Etranger, and others. It was chosen as one of the Observer’s ten best debut novels of the year, and a book of the year in the New Yorker and the New York Times.