Imagery supplied by Avid Reader
PLEASE NOTE: This event has been cancelled due to the current health concerns and advice provided by QLD Health around non-essential travel. At this stage, the only in-store events being cancelled are specific to authors travelling interstate. All other events will go ahead as planned unless Avid Reader notify otherwise.
Visit Avid Reader’s website to find out more about their events, or to find yourself something wonderful to read during this period of recommended social distancing.
A friendly reminder that this pandemic is beyond the control of any organisation or individual, and that cancellations and postponements are being made with everyone’s health and best interests in mind. Please be patient, and be kind to one another in these difficult times.
Thursday 19 March
6pm arrival for a 6.30pm start
Avid Reader Bookshop
Join a panel of emerging writers and Sean O’Beirne in conversation with Laura Elvery at the launch of Sean’s short story collection, A Couple of Things Before the End.
Sean O’Beirne is a bookseller and critic who grew up in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, and studied arts, law, and acting. This brilliant collection, O’Beirne’s first book, mixes the storytelling originality of George Saunders and Lydia Davis with a sensibility all of its own, taking the reader on an extraordinary tour of an old and a new Australia.
A woman on a passenger ship in 1958 gets involved with a young, wild Barry Humphries. A man looks back to the 1970s and his time as a member of Australia’s least competent scout troop. In 1988, a teenage boy recalls his sexual initiation, out on the tanbark. In 2015, two sisters text in Kmart about how to manage their irascible, isolated mum.
Then, in the near future, a racist demagogue addresses the press the day after his electoral triumph. As the cities heat up and lose their water, a lady from one of the ‘better suburbs’ makes every effort to get her family into an exclusive gated community.
Outstandingly original, bitingly satirical and written in a remarkable range of voices, A Couple of Things Before the End is a powerful vision of where we are – and where we may be headed.
For ticketing and further information, visit the Avid Reader website, call them on 3846 3422, or pop into the store at 193 Boundary Street, West End
Backstreet Brisbane 
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