Malachy Tallack in conversation with Martin MacInnes - Trafalgar Square

Join us in welcoming Malachy Tallack in conversation with Martin MacInnes to celebrate the publication of their fifth book, a novel: That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz!1957. Sonny is working on a whaling ship in the South Atlantic, reckoning with the most vicious storms he has ever seen. It's a brutal way to make a living. When he finally returns to his Shetland home to build a life with his wife and young son, the legacy of his time at sea is felt by all of them.In present day Shetland, Jack is an old man, living alone in the cottage where he grew up, in the shadow of a hill. And it is here, one evening, that something appears on his doorstep. Something that throws off the rhythm of his solitary existence in the most profound way.This is a story of unlikely friendship, longing, the power of music and the pull of home. It is about a life revisited - and reimagined.

Malachy Tallack is the award-winning author of three books. His first, Sixty Degree North (2015) was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and short-listed for the Saltire First Book Award. His second, The Un-Discovered Islands (2016), was Stanford Travel Writing Awards' Illustrated Book of the Year, while his debut novel, The Valley at the Centre of the World, was shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize and longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. He received a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2014, and the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015. He is a founding editor of online magazine The Island Review and, as a singer-songwriter, he has released four albums and an EP, and performed across the UK. Malachy Tallack grew up in Shetland and currently lives in central Scotland.

Martin MacInnes is the best-selling and multi-award-winning author of three novels, most recently In Ascension (2023), which won the Arthur C Clark Award was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It has been optioned for film. He has been published in eleven languages, and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.