The BridLit team is looking forward to welcoming journalist, screenwriter, film and book critic Olivia Glazebrook to this year’s festival.

She’s one of Dorset’s rich seam of talented writers. Her debut novel, The Trouble with Alice, met with great critical acclaim. Kate Saunders from The Times described it as ‘a wise, humorous and humane first novel about the nature of real love’.

Olivia comes to BridLit to talk about her latest book, The Frank Business.

After Frank drops down dead in Heathrow Arrivals on Christmas Eve, his estranged daughter Jem is called in to identify the body. When Jem travels back to Frank’s house in France – a house she hasn’t been in since she was a child – she realises that Frank had a son too.

Frank has died of a congenital heart defect, a defect he may have passed on to his daughter – or on to his son. Jem must warn her brother. But in finding herself a family, she risks ripping another apart.

Shrewd, witty and poignant, The Frank Business is a vivid tale of love and other battlefields. The novel is attracting a great deal of interest:

‘A talented, witty writer with a sharp eye for social observation’ Daily Mail

‘Olivia Glazebrook’s writing has a lovely, fluid rhythm, and she writes with insight and candour’ Laura Barnett

Says the Irish Times: ‘Secrets and lies work well in stories of family fractures and affairs of the heart, and Glazebrook extends this to the false narratives we often need to tell ourselves to make our actions more palatable – truths we bury or expunge from our memories.

‘There are some gleaming moments of dark humour and droll dialogue, with an undercurrent of fatalism like an invisible director, as characters are forced into certain roles: an absorbing, psychologically agile novel.’