Wells Festival of Literature is honoured that one of the country’s most highly acclaimed novelists opens our Festival this year. Sebastian Faulks will be talking about his latest work, a book that provides not just a unique perspective on the author’s life and career, but also a delightful and entertaining collection of nostalgia, memoir, fact, and fiction. Fires Which Burned Brightly presents the reader with a sweeping variety: information and ideas, politics, psychiatry, tales of childhood, escapades from boarding school, insights of family life. In short, this powerful compendium provides a long view into the author’s core but also succeeds in that finest of ambitions – ‘a desire to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’.

Gems abound throughout, bringing to life a world that has changed inordinately, and continues to do so. A post-war rural childhood witnesses cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range whilst a glittering career leads to the delirium of a jetlagged American book tour.

Snapshots, all of them, in an album of a life in progress.