Rachel Billington and Alex Preston Chaired by Triona Adams

Novelists Lady Rachel Billington and Alex Preston discuss their latest novels and how they go about reimagining the past in contemporary fiction.

Billington’s latest work is War Babies, the story of three sisters and their paths through life between the 1950s and the present day. Millie, Di and Cleo grow up in a world hungover from war and struggle to leave their mother behind and build their own lives. Millie turns to marriage, motherhood and God, Di to life as a war correspondent in Vietnam, and Cleo to successfully writing novels as a defence against the world. Cleo, the youngest and wildest, smashes the pattern they had all settled into and the question becomes who will adapt, survive, and find peace? Billington throws a spotlight on human nature and its flaws and virtues. Billington is author of more than 30 books including the recent novels Glory: A Story of Gallipoli and Clouds of Love and War.

Preston’s Winchelsea is an historical novel set in 18th-century Sussex. It follows the story of Goody Brown, an adopted child who grows up in the smuggling town of Winchelsea after being saved from drowning when a baby. The murder of her father at the hands of men he thought were friends leads her and her brother Francis into the cut-throat world of rival smuggling gangs. She finds herself on the high seas among desperate villains and discovers a taste for danger and a life without constraints. Preston is author of the novels This Bleeding City, The Revelations and In Love and War, and of a book of non-fiction, As Kingfishers Catch Fire.