Saturday 9 October
Bridge House Theatre
8.00pm

We are delighted to welcome James Ellroy, America’s greatest living crime writer whose new book, The Hilliker Curse is a raw, explicit memoir as high-intensity and riveting as any of his novels – about his obsessive search for “atonement in women.”

Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. He hated and lusted after his mother and “summoned her dead.” She was murdered three months later.

The Hilliker Curse is a predator’s confession, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all a cri de coeur. Ellroy single-mindedly seeks ‘atonement in women’. He unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, a nervous breakdown and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. It is a layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest. And all of it is reported with a gut-wrenching and heart-rending candour.

A layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self. It is unlike any memoir you have ever read.

James Ellroy is the author of the acclaimed ‘LA Quartet’: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz. His most recent novel, Blood’s a Rover, completes the magisterial ‘Underworld USA Trilogy’ – the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times bestsellers.

Tickets: £12.00
(£10.00 concessions)

Photo credit: Franny Freeman