Top 4: Coolest library-based events this autumn ft. Portico Library, Working Class Movement Library & more

Check out the Portico Library for an evening of celebration over Lucy Burns’ debut book, Larger than an Orange. Part diary, part prose poem, part literary collage, Larger than an Orange is an uncompromising, intimate and original memoir. This is the story of an abortion. With raw precision and determined honesty, Lucy Burns carves out a new space for complexity, ambivalence and individual experience.

Dubbed as ‘Raw, tender and urgent’ by Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater and ‘Irreducible. Once read, it will never be forgotten’ by Helen Mort, author of Division Street, this book launch is sure to keep you gripped. Featuring readings and discussions, Lucy will be joined in conversation with writer and performer, Kate Feld and tickets also include a free drink to go nicely along with the entertainment.

Join in if you dare for an evening full of murder mystery at Bolton Central Library and Museum. Film company, High Noon Productions, are on location and filming their latest project… However, with the film running over budget and behind schedule, pressures are mounting on director Periquito Kerridge. Skeletons are tumbling from the closets of the cast and crew, not everyone is going to make it to the final reel…

A welcome drink and pasty and pea supper are included in the ticket price plus there will be a bar available to top up on refreshments all night!

Head down to the Working Class Movement Library for a brilliant Black History Month event titled, ‘Multiculturalism in northern England: history, issues and debates’. Hosted by two speakers, Shamim Miah and Mike Makin-Waite, the event will go through the diverse race relation history in northern England.

From the links between localised far-right successes and long years of deindustrialization to the ways the issues highlighted by the northern town riots of twenty years ago affected politics and identity more widely. This event is sure to get you engaged, active and spark a more intimate connection with the city’s past.

Celebrating a landmark new series curated by Booker Prize-winning writer, Bernardine Evaristo, Black Britain Writing Back re-introduces lost or hard-to-find books by Black writers who wrote about Black Britain and the diaspora across the 20th century.

Joining Bernardine is Jacqueline Roy whose novel The Fat Lady Sings tells the stories of Gloria and Merle, two women in adjacent beds in the ward of a mental hospital; Judith Bryan whose novel Bernard and the Cloth Monkey is a family psychodrama in which two sisters battle with a shared but suppressed history of secrets, tensions and betrayals that need reckoning; and Nicola Williams’ Without Prejudice, a thriller in which Lee Mitchell, a Black working-class barrister, is succeeding against the odds.