We are thrilled to be hosting Meet the Author: Kate Mildenhall, acclaimed author of The Mother Fault, for the launch of her latest novel, The Hummingbird Effect. Kate will be in-conversation with Pip Williams, award-winning and best-selling author of The Bookbinder of Jericho and The Dictionary of Lost Words, at 630pm on Wednesday August 23, in the very lovely setting of Matilda Bookshop. Please join us for what promises to be an enganging and questing conversation between two exceptional writers, as they discuss women's stories, composition, and the hummingbird effect.

The Hummingbird Effect is an epic, kaleidoscopic story of four women connected across time and place by an invisible thread and their determination to shape their own stories. One of the lucky few with a job during the Depression, Peggy’s just starting out in life. She’s a bagging girl at the Angliss meatworks, a place buzzing with life as well as death, where the gun slaughterman Jack has caught her eye – and she his. How is her life connected to Hilda’s, almost a hundred years later, locked inside during a plague, or La’s, further on again, a singer working shifts in a warehouse as her eggs are frozen and her voice is used by AI bots? Let alone Maz, far removed in time, diving for remnants of a past that must be destroyed? Is it by the river that runs through their stories, eternal yet constantly changing – or by the mysterious Hummingbird Project, and the great question of whether the march of progress can ever be reversed? Propulsive, tender and engrossing, this genre-bending novel is a feast for the heart as well as the mind and senses.

Kate Mildenhall is a writer and teacher. Her debut novel, Skylarking, was named in Readings Top Ten Fiction Books of 2016 and her bestselling The Mother Fault was longlisted for the 2021 ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year and shortlisted for the 2020 Aurealis Awards. Kate teaches creative writing and co-hosts The First Time podcast – which features conversations with Australian writers – and is currently undertaking a PhD in creative practice at RMIT University. Kate lives in Hurstbridge on Wurundjeri lands, with her partner and two children.

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia with her family and an assortment of animals. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher, studying what keeps us well and what helps us thrive, and she is the author of One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family’s travels in search of the good life, which was published by Affirm Press to wide acclaim. Her first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives, was published in 2020 and became an international bestseller. The Bookbinder of Jericho is her second novel and again combines her talent for historical research and beautiful storytelling.

Tickets are $15 (includes a glass of SC Pannell wine on arrival) or you can purchase Ticket + Book for $33 (The Hummingbird Effect is normally $33 just on its own) with the book to be collected at the event. The Hummingbird Effect will be on sale for the night for $33. 

If you are unable to attend the event on the night, but would love a copy of the signed book delivered or posted to your South Australian address (free postage) after the event, please select Book Only ($33).

Location

Matilda Bookshop
1/8 Mt Barker Rd, Stirling South Australia 5152

Contact Details

08 8339 3931 or books@matildabookshop.com.au