Gearing up for Cove and Kilcreggan Book Festival

If you’re short if ideas for Christmas presents, there is still time to go to Cove and Kilcreggan Book Festival this weekend and pick up signed copies of a wide range of books.

The event in Cove Burgh Hall starts at 10.30 on Saturday morning and runs through until Sunday afternoon, with refreshments available.

A weekend pass costs £40, while tickets for individual events remain the same as last year at £6 they can be booked via the hall website.

The full schedule is:

• Saturday, 10.30: Angus Roxburgh, whose book Moscow Calling is an account of his time working in Russia and of his journalistic life before and since.
• 12 noon: Award-winning Scottish crime writer Alex Gray, whose latest book is Only the Dead Can Tell
• 2pm: Sally Magnusson, talking about her debut novel The Sealwoman’s Gift, woven around the legend of the 400 islanders kidnapped by Barbary Pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers
• 3.30: Andrew O’Hagan, nominated for the Booker Prize three times, his latest book The Secret Life is about to become a Netflix series
• 7.30: James Robertson and folk singer Rab Noakes will pay tribute to folk singer Michael Marra with songs, stories, letters and conversations
• Sunday, 10.30: Jackie Kay – Scotland’s third Makar, a novelist and poet who has won a Guardian Fiction Prize, and a Saltire First Book Award will be reading from her latest collection Bantam
• 12 noon: BBC correspondent Allan Little in conversation with Gavin Francis, the Edinburgh GP whose book, Empire Antarctica, was Scottish Book of the Year. Allan’s dispatches illuminated some of the major conflicts and political upheavals over several decades and he is chair of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Gavin’s Adventures in Human Being won the Saltire prize for non-fiction; his latest work is Shapeshifters, A Journey Through The Changing Human Body.
• 2pm: Queen of Scottish crime writing Val McDermid, whose 40 novels have sold worldwide in their millions and who pops up on Radio 4 in all kinds of guises.
• 3.30: The final speaker will be Jane MacKenzie, whose novel Tapestry of War  is  set partly on the Rosneath Peninsula, telling the tale of one woman whose life is turned upside down by the advance of Rommel in North Africa and another who lives on the Firth of Clyde but dreams of becoming a front line nurse. it features the French hospital in Knockderry Castle and the American base at Rosneath.