A mixture of big names and local writers will be in the county for this year’s Essex Book Festival.

Throughout March, a whole host of top authors and local writers will be appearing at various venues across the county. Tickets are still available for many of the events, including David Baddiel, the comedian turned novelist, in Colchester, and American Kim Edwards, author of the Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

Festival organiser Annastasia Ward says: “To have a big-name US author appear at the festival is great.

“The Memory Keeper’s Daughter was one of the most popular titles for reader groups in Essex last year and we expect her new novel, the Lake of Dreams, to be just as popular.”

Tickets for the Essex Book Festival are on sale now via the website www.essexbookfestival.org.uk or alternatively by calling the box office on 01206 573948.

Novel sells out on first day

WHAT if Germany had won the Second World War and colonised Africa?

That’s the intriguing premise behind the debut novel of Essex author Guy Saville.

After netting a two-book deal with leading publisher Hodder and Stoughton, he looks set to take the book world by storm.

Born and brought up in Billericay, Guy went to Brentwood School before studying literature at London University.

Now aged 37, he lives just outside Coggeshall with his partner Nicole. He says: “I’ve always wanted to be a writer, so when I left university I did that classic thing of doing all sorts of jobs just to bring the money in while writing in my spare time.”

Then one day Guy and his partner decided to up sticks and move to Brazil. She was a journalist working for the Observer at the time.

It was while in Brazil, he came up with the idea of the Afrika Reich.

“It was from a line in Philip K Dick’s the Man in the High Castle,” Guy says. “It’s a sci-fi classic in which the Nazis have conquered America and it was this one throwaway line about the ‘terrible experiment in Africa’ which got me started.”

From then, Guy found himself on a publishing rollercoaster. After moving to Eygpt for a year, and then back to Billericay, he soon completed the initial book and got an agent.

Guy adds: “The problem was, it wasn’t commercial enough and eventually I just put it in a drawer and forgot about it.”

That was until he saw a national on-line competition for new writers. He decided to put in the first three chapters and won. Two publishers then approached him on the back of the win, but again asked him to make it more saleable.

“I tried for six weeks, but it was too difficult,” he grimaces. “In the end I just wrote the whole thing again.”

That took Guy two and a half years, working in a bookshop in Chelmsford by day, and furiously writing at night.

“When I finished I sent it to my agent. He came back telling me ‘we’ve got a bestseller on our hands’,” Guy smiles. “I was so excited, but then there was this agonising wait.

“Then right at the end when I thought it was never going to happen, two publishers came back to us with offers.

“On the day it was published, Amazon sold out of their stock instantly, which Hodder said has never happened before, and now I’ve even got a film agent.

“How mad is that?”

Where to catch the authors

Andrew Ings Manningtree Library, High Street, March 9, 7.30pm, £4 and £3.

01206 573948.

Guy Saville Colchester Library, Trinity Square, March 16, 8pm, £4 and £3.

01206 573948.

Matthew Plampin Canvey Library, High Street, Canvey, March 31, 7.30pm, £4 and £3.

David Baddiel Lion Walk United Reformed Church, Colchester, March 10, 7.30pm, £7 and £5.

Andrea Levy The Helena Romanes School and Sixth Form Centre, Parsonage Downs, Great Dunmow, March 8, 7.30pm, tickets £7 and £5.

Robin Bayley Prettygate Library, Colchester, March 30, 2.30pm, £4 and £3.

Julian Stockwin Jaywick Martello Tower, the Promenade, March 4, 10.30am, £4 and £3.

Sarah Blake West Mersea Library, High Street, March 16, 2.30pm, £4 and £3.

Sara Paretsky St John’s Arc, St John’s Walk, Old Harlow, March 18, 7.30pm, £10.50 and £8.50.