In years to come I expect rock & roll historians will record the date Saturday, 12th July 2025 as highly significant for being the fourth of a thousand much-anticipated reunion concerts by the bigger-and-better-than-ever Britpop giants, Oasis, the band’s triumphant, blistering second night performance at Heaton Park in their home city of Manchester securing them a place for all eternity in the racing hearts and buzzing ears of not just balding middle-aged men in too-tight Adidas, but the entire nation of Great Britain. Either that, or about three songs into their set Noel Gallagher will irreparably crown little bro’ Liam with his guitar following a remark about forgetting the chords to an old Slade tune, causing the rest of the tour to be abandoned.
So rather than look back in anger (sorry) on a dynamic pricing-marred trip to the northwest, you’d be better off doing what I’m doing and heading to this year’s Newark Book Festival on 10th – 13th July. The programme is bursting with dozens of brilliant events, talks and interviews with authors both national and local that you’ll already know and love, and just as many again who you might not yet but almost certainly will do once you’ve seen, heard and read them this summer.
I can’t tell you how honoured I am to be invited to appear at this year’s festival where, on Saturday 12th, in the beautiful location of Newark Town Hall, I’ll be talking to brilliant crime writer Nick Quantrill about my novel Pleasantly Disturbed, a comic coming-of-age tale about young love and musical obsession (with an unusual crime twist), largely set in Nottinghamshire, in a small town not unlike the one where I grew up, on the fringes of Sherwood Forest. I don’t know Nick Quantrill, but he has a stellar reputation among readers and writers alike, so I’m really looking forward to what promises to be a very entertaining evening with him and, I hope, some of you too.
Up to now, I’ve written only two books, so I’m hardly any kind of authority on these things, but almost certainly the most rewarding part of the experience, for me, has been the number of nice and fascinating people I’ve met and talked with at book events, and the many new friends I’ve made as a result. Of course, I like them a lot more if they also buy a book, even if it might be to just prop-up a wobbly dining table when they get home.
One of the most frequently trotted-out quotations about the business of writing is Samuel Johnson’s “Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, which makes me think he must either have sold more books than Richard Osman and J.K. Rowling put together, or he was very unlucky in the particular bookshops, libraries and festivals where he was invited to speak. I mean, you’d think a man reading every word of a dictionary out loud would have them rolling in the aisles of Ye Olde Booke Shoppe of London Town, but perhaps not. I mention this because most authors make very little money from their books (me included). Not enough that we can afford to do it full-time, and certainly not to enjoy a yacht and hand-rolled cigars as favoured by Ms. Rowling. I don’t know what Mister Osman spends his money on, but those big shoes won’t be cheap, and he must shell out an awful lot on repairs for all the damage his head inflicts on low bridges.
I’m lucky in that my two novels were written alongside my day job as a television comedy writer, although Pleasantly Disturbed came about unexpectedly when, with the Covid pandemic, all broadcast studios were shut down overnight and suddenly there was no television to write comedy – or anything else – for. Pleasantly Disturbed begins with an opening scene I’d had in my head for a while, starring a cocky 16-year-old soon-to-be school leaver and his exasperated careers adviser. The world being miserable and terrifying as it was in April 2020, I wanted to write a story that was as funny and uplifting as I could manage, filled with the pace and joyous comedy of favourite books like Billy Liar and Jeeves and Wooster, and the dreams of youth captured in films from Gregory’s Girl to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and, initially, for no other purpose than to give myself some sort of distraction and purpose amid this sudden, depressing chaos, something that would keep me smiling – better still, laughing – until things returned to normal, whatever that might now mean.
I’m pretty sure I’d have completed the novel under my own steam, but what made me absolutely certain that I would do so was, after keeping it secret for several weeks, I let my wife read what I’d written so far. She loved it (or so she said) and insisted I keep going and try to finish it, which was a huge and much-needed boost, except she also now expected to be allowed to read it after every two or three new chapters. It became a serial novel, published like great classics by Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald in regular, titchy instalments, only in my case the number of readers awaiting my latest effort was always just the one, seated at the other end of the sofa. Thankfully, my reader continued to love it, and I continued to write it – and rewrite it – until it was finished.
I hope more than just one person will come to my event with Nick Quantrill at Newark on 12th July. There’ll be a lot more people at the Oasis concert, of course, tens of thousands, but they’ll all be squashed and uncomfortable in a miserable field in miserable Manchester, where it’ll probably rain anyway. I don’t know exactly what Nick and I will talk about, but it will probably involve books, music, comedy and Nottinghamshire. I might even read aloud in a silly voice. What I can promise you, though, is that it should be a lot of fun, the tickets won’t cost you your life savings, and at absolutely no point do I expect myself or Nick to disagree to the extent where we crown each other with an electric guitar.
Lee Stuart Evans is a full-time TV comedy writer from Nottinghamshire. He will be talking about his novel Pleasantly Disturbed with Nick Quantrill at Newark Book Festival on Saturday 12th July. Tickets available now from What’s On – Newark Book Festival Events Programme
Pleasantly Disturbed is available now from all good bookshops including Five Leaves Bookshop and Waterstones in Nottingham, and The Bookcase, Lowdham.
