Join us for an exciting autumn event with Borderlines and Bookends as Cumbrian writer and journalist Hunter Davies returns to his hometown of Carlisle to discuss ‘Letters to Margaret’, his new book featuring a selection of the letters he pens to his late wife Margaret Forster every evening.
This event is organised by both Bookends and Borderlines, the Carlisle book festival which boasts Hunter Davies as president. Borderlines is aiming to return as a full weekend event in October 2025.
Thursday the 24th of October, 7:30pm, at Tullie House Lecture Theatre.
Tickets are £10 and are available in store at Bookends or via our website.
At the end of almost every day of their fifty-five years of married life, the publicity-shy author Margaret Forster would ask her naturally gregarious and outgoing husband Hunter Davies to describe to her the highlights of his working day spent in the worlds of journalism and publishing. In the six years that have elapsed since Margaret’s death, Hunter has continued these conversations with his wife, regaling her with accounts of the events and developments in his life – domestic, social, romantic, book-related, health-related and others – through a sequence of ‘Letters to Margaret’. Whether recounting adventures in online dating, the pleasures and pitfalls of buying a new house by the seaside, the trauma of major operations on his heart and gall bladder, a chance encounter at a book-signing session that led to a new romantic attachment, or a visit to A&E when he was supposed to be watching the World Cup final, these twenty-three letters weave together strands of confession, self-mockery, anecdote and touching remembrance of married happiness with Margaret. Letters to Margaret reveals Hunter Davies raging happily against the dying of the light in his late eighties, and seeking consolation for life’s frustrations and disappointments through a sustained conversation with the woman he shared his life with for more than half a century.
