Author Nina Stibbe discusses her latest book Went to London, Took the Dog (publication date 2 Nov 23) chaired by freelance writer and former assistant editor of Guardian Review Nicholas Wroe
Twenty years after leaving London, Nina Stibbe is back in town with her dog, Peggy. Together they take up lodging in the house of writer Deborah (Debby) Moggach in Camden for ‘a year-long sabbatical’. It’s a break from married life back in Cornwall, or even perhaps a fresh start altogether. Nina is not quite sure yet.
Debby does not have many demands – only to water the garden, watch for toads, and defrost the odd pie – so Nina is free to explore the city she once called home. Between scrutinising her son’s online dating developments, navigating the politics of the local pool, and taking detergent advice at the laundrette, this diary of a sixty-year-old runaway reunites us with the inimitable voice of Love, Nina, as the writer becomes, as she puts it, ‘a proper adult’ at last. Hilarious, irreverent, joyful as well as poignant, Stibbe’s ear and eye are as uniquely sharp as ever on friendship, motherhood, independence, the menopause, branching out and growing up.
“I loved this book. Stibbe’s joyful midlife observations, her nods to the wonders and absurdities of the everyday, are so life-affirming. I felt bereft when I turned the last page” Lucy Atkins
Nina Stibbe is the author of seven books. Love, Nina won the Non Fiction Book of the Year Award at the 2014 National Book Awards, was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, and adapted by Nick Hornby for BBC Television. She is the author of four novels, all of which have been shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Her third novel, Reasons to Be Cheerful, is the only novel to date to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award for comic fiction.