Past Participle. Jane Labous in Conversation with Paula Harmon

This event is part of our festival crime writing day on 15th June.
Talks can be booked individually or a special price day ticket is available via ticketsource.

Dakar, Senegal, 1987: On a rainy night after a wild party, the British ambassador’s wife, Vivienne Hughes, is involved in a car crash. Her vehicle hits the motorbike of a young Senegalese doctor, Aimé Tunkara, killing him. Pleading diplomatic immunity, Vivienne and her husband flee to England.
Three decades later, Aimé’s little sister, Lily Tunkara, now a high-flying lawyer in Dakar, finds a photograph that compels her to investigate what really happened that rainy night. As Lily faces increasing hostility from the local community, she turns to Vivienne Hughes, the only remaining witness, but is either woman prepared for the truth to emerge?
PAST PARTICIPLE is the story of two women bound together by the fault-lines of the past, a study of love and guilt, power and desire, retribution and forgiveness.

Jane Labous is an award-winning author, journalist and broadcaster known for her work covering human rights and gender issues, always telling the powerful human stories behind the headlines. Jane’s novels include Past Participle, published by Afsana Press in 2023, and The Chameleon Girl, published in Nigeria by Farafina Books in 2022. Her newest novel, Oh, Sugar, will be published in October 2024, also by Afsana Press. Jane’s credits span a vista of international outlets, including The Times, Voice of America, the UN and Radio 4’s flagship programme, From Our Own Correspondent. She has won the BBC Radio 4 and Royal Geographical Society Documentary Award; the Merck More than a Mother Media Recognition & Film Award for Francophone African Countries; and a European Journalism Centre Development Reporting Grant. Her fiction has been longlisted for the Bath Novel Prize and the Santa Fé Writers’ Project Literary Award. Jane lives in Dorset with her daughter, who is half-Senegalese. www.janelabous.com