Live at Staffs – The Half-life of Snails novel Launch

Live at Staffs is a series of live public performances (music, theatre, spoken word) that take place across the campus during the academic year .

Philippa Holloway’s debut novel explores survivalism and the legacy of Chernobyl in a narrative split between North Wales and Ukraine during the Euro Maidan crisis.

Join us for a reading and Q and A with the author, as well as a book signing.

“Two sisters, two nuclear power stations, one child caught in the middle...

When Helen, a self-taught prepper and single mother, leaves her young son Jack with her sister for a few days so she can visit Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, they both know the situation will be tense. Helen opposes plans for a new power station on the coast of Ynys Môn that will take over the family’s farmland, and Jennifer works for the nuclear industry and welcomes the plans for the good of the economy.

But blood is thicker than heavy water, and both want to reconnect somehow, with Jack perhaps the key to a new understanding of one another. Yet while Helen is forced to face up to childhood traumas, and her worst fears regarding nuclear disaster, during a trip that sees her caught up in political violence and trapped in Ukraine during the 2014 Euro Maidan revolution, Jennifer too must discover that even the smallest decision can have catastrophic and long-lasting effects, both within the nuclear industry, and within the home.

And Jack isn’t like other five-year olds... as they will both discover with devastating consequences.”

Dr Philippa Holloway is an internationally published short fiction writer and academic, and a senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Staffordshire University. Her debut novel is drawn from extensive research in Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone and North Wales, and is ‘a careful, tender and arresting story that explores how we're formed by the places we think we own’ (Jenn Ashworth).

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