Denise Mina & David Greig - The Darkland Tales
When: Saturday, May 3rd 2025, Start Time: 14:00, End Time: 15:30
Where: Victoria Hall High Street, Cromarty IV11 8YR
- Part of:
- Crime & Thrillers Weekend
Denise Mina and David Greig – The Darkland Tales
Together, this renowned author and one of Scotland’s leading playwrights will discuss their work for Polygon’s compelling Darkland Tales series. Rizzio (Mina) and Columba’s Bones (Greig) are two books in this series that see Scotland’s best writers re-imagining stories from the country’s history, myth and legend. The Darkland Tales reclaim history for a modern audience, with Scotland’s greatest contemporary novelists and storytellers taking on the challenge of producing Scottish history viewed through a modern lens and alive to modern sensibilities.
It's a Saturday night in 1566 and Mary, Queen of Scots, is six months pregnant. She's hosting a supper party, secure in her private chambers. She doesn't know that her Palace is surrounded – that, right now, an army of men is creeping upstairs to her chamber. They're coming to murder David Rizzio, her friend and secretary. Rizzio is a breathtakingly tense work is a tale of sex, secrets and lies, one that explores the lengths that men – and women – will go to in the search for love and power.
Denise Mina is the author of twenty one novels, six graphic novels, four plays and a bucket and a half of short stories. She has variously won the Creasey Debut Dagger, the Theakston’s, the CWA Short Story Dagger, the MacIlvanny and Gordon Burn Prize and was short listed for the Costa for Novel of the Year. She regularly presents radio and television documentaries, can run like the wind and lives and works in Glasgow.
Columba’s Bones is a comic thriller set on the Island of Iona in the year 825. Grimur, a middle-aged Viking, is accidentally left behind by his colleagues after a brutal raid on the monastery. Alone and in enemy territory he has to survive the summer till his crew come back again. Also left on the island are the one surviving young monk and the Mead Wife. The three become unlikely allies in a gently comic story of love, theology, beekeeping and slaughter. David Greig is a well-known Scottish playwright, and in that capacity his work has been performed around the world, as well as the West End and Broadway. Columba’s Bones is his first novel.
£15, booking with the booking form here, or email [email protected]
