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Double author event
Authors (and siblings), Ben & Holly Pester, in conversation
Monday 1st September 2025
Talking about their respective novels
6.30pm at PATCH
£7.00
Granta published authors Ben and Holly Pester are siblings which we believe will lead to an interesting conversation. Join Holly and Ben, discussing their respective novels at the wonderful Patch Cafe, 6.30pm
The Expansion Project by Ben Pester
‘Few other writers can seamlessly blend the hyper-real and the humane, or make the allegorical hit home with this emotional depth. Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life. Mordantly funny but never cynical – it delivers on every expectation. Ultimately revitalising, and heralds what I hope might be a new direction in UK
fiction’ Luke Kennard
A dizzying, haunted satire of the late-capitalist workplace in which nothing is quite what it seems. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee at Capmeadow Business Park, experiences an unravelling when his eight-year-old child, Hen, goes missing during bring-your-daughter-to-work day. But despite mounting evidence she was never really there, Tom does not fully believe Hen is safe at home and continues to search for her in the maze of corridors that make up his place of work. Meanwhile, the Capmeadow Business Park expansion is in full swing and the park is growing in unpredictable ways with the addition of unexpected buildings, years-long business days, multi-dimensional spaces, cursed farmers’ markets and corridors of the mind. Years pass, and Tom remains convinced his daughter is somewhere in Capmeadow, but has he judged it correctly? Can anything go back to the way it was? Time, space, contracted working hours – nothing can be relied upon in the Capmeadow expansion.
‘Brilliant and strange. It sneaks around the border of horror, like an anxiety dream but in the best way.
I loved it’ Evie Wyld‘Ben Pester’s vertiginous and stunningly weird stories are acts of inversion: office life is rendered terrifying and
strange, while elements of cosmic horror possess an eerie banality. A funny and disturbing experience that I won’t
soon forget’ Chris Power‘A funny, sad, sharp and beautifully disarming collection of stories: a place where the world of the quotidian with
its train commutes, work lanyards and office emails, becomes dreamlike, absorbing and wonderfully strange’
Wendy Erskine
Ben Pester is the author of the short story collection Am I in the Right Place?. The Expansion Project is his first novel.
The Lodgers by Holly Pester
‘What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.
‘A woman returns to the small English town she grew up in, to live in a new-build sublet flat overlooking her mother’s house. Anticipating a visit from the mysterious other resident, she is always on edge, and her thoughts keep returning to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigation within the house become her obsession. The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in this irreverent, experimental and boldly stylish novel which examines a life lived in other people’s spaces.
A subtly political story about dislocation in contemporary Britain, this is a stunning debut from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.
