SoA launches book club to celebrate literary estates

The Society of Authors will launch a bi-monthly book club on Twitter next month, to celebrate a selection of favourite titles from works in its literary estates.

The Dead Good Lit Book Club will introduce one book every two months, launching on Twitter in January 2020, with the hashtag #DeadGoodLit. Starting with Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (Virago), the first session is on Monday 27th January 2020 between 8 p.m and 9 p.m.

The SoA acts as the literary representative of the estates of more than 40 writers, including John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, George Bernard Shaw, Compton Mackenzie, Harley Granville Barker, St John Ervine and T S Eliot.

Lisa Dowdeswell, head of literary estates at the SoA, said: “We wanted to share our passion for the authors whose estates we represent, and what better way to showcase their work than with a book club? Though you will see some well-known classics in our selection, this is also a celebration of the backlist and some long-forgotten literary gems.”

In March, the book club will discuss Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare (Wildside), followed by What Not by Rose Macaulay (Wentworth) in May. Maurice by E M Forster (Penguin) has been selected for June, and the book club will return after the summer in September to read Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw (Penguin) before finishing the year with Eustace and Hilda by L P Hartley (New York Review of Books) in November. 

To take part, readers can join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #DeadGoodLit.