Hobbies & Special Interest
Ice Shock: A Love Story with Elleke Boehmer - Hatchards, Piccadilly
Join Elleke Boehmer, author of Ice Shock: A Love Sory, in conversation with Kate Kennedy, author of Cello.
About the Book
An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Overhead, the skies are severely blue. Leah Nash and Niall Lawrence, twenty-somethings in love, grow strangely restless. They set out on different but parallel pathways. He takes on work at an Antarctic polar station and experiences the strange and lonely beauty of the precarious ice-world. She studies writing in England and struggles to find her way. They are both determined to stay together though separated by thousands of miles.
Elleke Boehmer’s Ice Shock is a love-story set against the backdrop of the melting ice-caps. The novel asks what it is to be close even when we are far apart—distant yet proximate. How do we go on loving each other when the environment around us is changing catastrophically by the day?’
We hope you can join us for what is sure to be a fascinating discussion!
About the Author
Born in Durban, South Africa, Elleke Boehmer writes fiction, history, criticism and biography. She is the author of five novels, including Screens against the Sky (shortlisted for the David Higham Prize), Bloodlines (shortlisted for the Sanlam Prize), Nile Baby and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize), and two collections of short stories. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. Since 2008, she is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.
Dr Kate Kennedy is a biographer, cellist, and broadcaster. She is one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music, and lectures in Music and English at Oxford University. Her newest book Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound was published in August 2024 with Head of Zeus / Bloomsbury. It is a group biography that weaves together four narratives of cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury, and misfortune.
