The Knives, out for the night, at City Lit Talks Back

The City Literary Institute ('City Lit') in London's Covent Garden is one of the nation's great institutions for adult education, and I've been pleased to teach various short courses in Creative Writing there over recent years.

They also do a grand job of making a regular platform for their students to present work in a very public forum: namely the big Tottenham Court Road branch of Waterstone's, which plays host to a monthly City Lit Talks Back where tutors and learners alike can get up to read whatever they've been working on.

I took a turn there myself a few weeks ago, in a slot kindly created for me so as to mark the paperback publication of The Knives. I enjoyed myself, generally as a listener, and specifically when an MP's assistant told me she was buying a copy of the novel as he'd been told it was brilliant. But by whom? I'm still hoping for a chance to speak in the Commons, you see, even if it's only a meeting room...