For fans of The Kite Runner, Girl at War and The Cellist of Sarajevo, The Longest Winter is Kevin Sullivan’s inspiring and authentic debut novel about life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.

The Longest Winter is a portrait of a city and its people in a moment of enormous suffering and remarkable grace. In the aftermath of the assassination of a government minister, three life stories are intertwined in a dramatic quest for redemption.

Kevin Sullivan covered the siege of Dubrovnik as a journalist in 1991 and the war in Bosnia from 1992. The descriptions of fighting around Sarajevo and conditions inside the city are taken from his own first-hand reporting. Kevin was seriously wounded in a land-mine explosion in early 1993. While recovering, he wrote an early draft of The Longest Winter. He now lives in Sarajevo and manages communications at ICMP, the international organization established in 1996 to account for the missing from the conflict in former Yugoslavia.

The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.

Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet – aurelie.bourguet@www.beta.frontlineclub.com

The Mayor of Mogadishu tells the story one family’s epic journey through Somalia’s turmoil, from the optimism of independence to its spectacular unravelling. Mohamud ‘Tarzan’ Nur was born a nomad, and became an orphan, then a street brawler in the cosmopolitan port city of Mogadishu – a place famous for its cafes and open–air cinemas. When Somalia collapsed into civil war, Tarzan and his young family joined the exodus from Mogadishu, eventually spending twenty years in North London. But in 2010 Tarzan returned to the unrecognisable ruins of a city largely controlled by the Islamist militants of Al-Shabaab. For some, the new Mayor was a galvanising symbol of defiance. But others branded him a thug, mired in the corruption and clan rivalries that continue to threaten Somalia’s revival.
The Mayor of Mogadishu is an uplifting story of survival, and a compelling examination of what it means to lose a country and then to reclaim it.

Andrew Harding has worked as a foreign correspondent for the past twenty-five years in Russia, Asia and Africa. He has been visiting Somalia since 2000. His television and radio reports for BBC News have won him international recognition, including an Emmy, an award from Britain’s Foreign Press Association, and other awards in France, Monte Carlo, the United States and Hong Kong. He lives in Johannesburg with his family.

The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.

Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.

Bejan Matur is the most illustrious poet among a bold new women’s poetry emerging from the maelstrom in the Middle East.

Bejan’s poetry is certainly engaged in her people’s struggles, currently spilling across borders that ill-define ravaged eastern Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. She has been jailed by the Turkish regime, and – with other writers – faces continuous menace and harassment. She writes dissident journalism and a prose work based on interviews with Kurdish men and women became an instant bestseller in Turkey.

Her first book of translations into English, In The Temple of a Patient God, refers in stark terms to an Exodus by stateless people who “… walked with touches of the moon / veiling our pain / but still we were tired”. And more vividly: “My mother shows the dead / to my brother / and has become the journey. / They weep together”. 

And yet there is always this palpable mysticism in her writing, close to nature, imagining dragons and leopards, meditating on creation – a dialogue with God. Or what her translator calls “an endless spiritual quest to understand the nature of being”. And this is what propels a second translated volume, How Abraham Abandoned Me, which Matur wrote after being impelled to abandon a trip to Lebanon and listen to the poetry in her mind inspired by her native Diyarbakir. The result can only be likened to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – visionary, as though dictated from some outer world, writing of: “A long sleep in the garden / and before roses / and birdsong / the serpent, / his body unfamiliar with earth / would slither along / and steal heaven away from us.” Or: “Where poets / and prayers / and words cannot reach / a lover’s breath / and his throbbing breast / will be the guide. / A lover’s swelling heart / watching the river at night / will summon the tiger”. 

For this very special BookNight, Bejan will talk about her work and people, but – here’s the difference – sections of Bejan’s poetry will be read first in translation, and then by her in Turkish or Kurdish, according to the original.

Recommended reading: In The Temple of a Patient God, and How Abraham Abandoned Me, both published by Arc. 

The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.

Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.

The event will be hosted by Senior Correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.

Navai focuses on eight protagonists: a porn star, an ageing socialite, an assassin and enemy of the state who ends up working for the Republic, a volunteer religious militiaman who undergoes a sex change, a dutiful housewife who files for divorce and an old-time thug running a gambling den. Drawn from across the spectrum of Iranian society, their lives present a fascinating and intimate portrait of a complex, colourful and changing city.

Ramita Navai, winner of The Debut Political Book Of The Year Award and The Jerwood Award For Non-Fiction, is a British-Iranian journalist and reporter. Born in Tehran, she has reported from over 30 different countries, including Sudan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Nigeria, El Salvador and Zimbabwe. She was awarded an EMMY for her undercover reporting from Syria. She has also worked as a journalist for the United Nations in Pakistan, northern Iraq and Iran, was the Tehran correspondent for The Times from 2003 to 2006 and reported for Channel 4’s foreign affairs series, Unreported World.

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. This an informal dinner event. We start with drinks from 7pm, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. Menu £25 per person excluding drinks.

The event will be hosted by Pranvera Smith and Ed Vulliamy, senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer.

Despite this, Burgess was never challenged or arrested by Britain’s spy-catchers in a decade and a half of espionage; dirty, scruffy, sexually promiscuous, a ‘slob’, conspicuously drunk and constantly drawing attention to himself, his superiors were convinced he was far too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow.

Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert‘s new book Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone reveals just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool his many friends and acquaintances for so long, ruthlessly exploiting them to penetrate major British institutions without suspicion, all the while working for the KGB.

Purvis and Hulbert also detail his final days in Moscow – so often a postscript in his story – as well as the moment the establishment finally turned on him, outmanoeuvring his attempts to return to England after he began to regret his decision to defect.

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. This an informal dinner event. We start with drinks from 7pm, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. Menu is £25 per person excluding drinks.

The event will be hosted by Pranvera Smith and Ed Vulliamy, senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer.

1 November 2006. Alexander Litvinenko is brazenly poisoned in central London. His crime? He had made some powerful enemies in Russia.

Based on the best part of a decade’s reporting, as well as extensive interviews with those closest to the events, Luke Harding‘s A Very Expensive Poison is the definitive inside story of the life and death of Alexander Litvinenko.

The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.
Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.

Along with Luke Harding, we are delighted to welcome Marina Litvinenko at the BookNight dinner.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.

Based on new archive research and original interviews with leading correspondents and diplomats, the book explores why this fiercely contested region exerts such a pull over reporters: those who bring the story to the world. Despite decades of diplomacy, a just and lasting end to the conflict remains as difficult as ever to achieve.

Lyse Doucet, Chief International Correspondent at BBC News, said: “At a time when reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is under unprecedented scrutiny, James Rodgers provides an essential and insightful historical perspective on the long “war of words” behind a major conflict of our time. Rodgers’ book is essential reading for those seeking a greater understanding of the difficult dynamics behind reporting – and resolving conflicts.”

James Rodgers is an author and journalist. His previous books are Reporting Conflict (2012) and No Road Home: Fighting for Land and Faith in Gaza (2013). A former BBC correspondent in Moscow, Brussels, and Gaza, James lectures in Journalism at City University.

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. Previous experience has shown that members often gain insight and inspiration from discussions with the author, which enable them to continue reading the book in a new light.

This will be an in-depth discussion rather than a standard format Q&A. The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at The Guardian and The Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

SPECIAL DISCOUNT FOR THE FRONTLINE CLUB: Save 30% when ordering on palgrave.com. Please e-mail Sophie Kayes for the code. Valid until 31 October 2015. Terms and conditions apply.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks. 

The idea behind members’ BookNights is to have a thoroughly good time, encourage reading and discussion, and to end the night both happier and wiser than when it began. For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Sophie Kayes.

For July’s BookNights we are delighted to welcome the distinguished former foreign correspondent for the BBC, Martin Bell OBE, who will present his book The End of Empire over an intimate dinner with Frontline Club members.

Before his career as a BBC correspondent and independent MP, Martin Bell also served as a soldier in Cyprus between 1957 and 1959. In a chocolate box in his attic many years later he found more than 100 letters that he had sent home to his family. He was not a journalist then, but the letters are war reports of a sort, impressions of what it was like to be a conscript on active service during the EOKA rebellion against British rule.

These letters describe road blocks and cordons and searches, murders and explosions and riots – and a strategy of armed repression that ultimately failed. The reality of the failure dawned on the young soldier only at the end, as he burned his intelligence files in perforated oil drums while the EOKA fighters were being feted as heroes in the streets of Nicosia. ‘It seemed,’ he wrote, ‘like a bonfire of the policies.’

Guests will be expected to have read the book, and to be ready and willing to contribute to the conversation. This will be an in-depth discussion rather than a standard format Q&A. The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at The Guardian and The Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks.

As the long trudge towards the general election begins and the news media speculate on a myriad of hypothetical scenarios as to what the brave new world might bring, we are taking a look back at one of the most prominent British leaders and what remains of the values and ideals that he championed.

For April’s members’ BookNight, we are pleased to welcome Patrick Bishop, who will present his book Churchill’s Funeral over an intimate dinner with Frontline Club members.

After Churchill passed away 50 years ago, his funeral gave rise to unprecedented scenes of public mourning, and the conviction that Britain would never be the same again. In his book, Patrick reflects back on Churchill’s leadership during the Second World War to explore how a man who had as many enemies as supporters has managed to gain such a prominent place in our social history.

Patrick Bishop is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling Fighter Boys, Bomber Boys, 3 Para and Target Tirpitz. Previously a foreign correspondent for over twenty years, he has reported from conflicts all over the world, and was for many years Middle East correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

Guests will be expected to have read the book, ready and willing to contribute to the discussion. This will not be a standard format Q&A but an in-depth discussion.

The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author. Patrick will then make his presentation and open the floor to discussion.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and a founding member and senior correspondent at The Guardian & The Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks

After an inspiring discussion with Robert McCrum on his list of the 100 greatest novels of all time composed for The Observer, we remain in the literary gear and welcome the acclaimed playwright, poet, and librettist Dan O’Brien.

During the evening, Dan will give a reading from his book of poems War Reporter, as well as talking about his critically acclaimed play The Body of an American, which was derived from the same material.

The collection of poems focuses on the photojournalist Paul Watson. Paul won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Deriving from correspondence between poet and photojournalist, from transcripts, Watson’s own memoir, and their eventual meeting on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, these poems bear unsparing witness to the incalculable damage inflicted by contemporary warfare.

‘War Reporter is an edgy, heartbreaking amalgam of memoir, dramatic monologue and poetic intensity, in which war reporter Paul Watson’s complex personal struggles are seen against the backdrop of political violence.’
– Alan Shapiro

‘A masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling, and a completely sui generis addition not just to writing about war but to contemporary poetry’
– Patrick McGuinness, Guardian

War Reporter won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2013 and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize 2013, while The Body of an American won the prestigious Horton Foote Prize in New York in September 2014.

The format for the night will be as tried and tested: drinks from 7:00 PM, dinner at 7:30 PM – getting to know one another over starters before I cue our guest. After Dan‘s readings the discussion begins over the main course. Same ethos as usual: this is not a “book club”, more a 19th century salon after which people leave merrier, better-fed and wiser than when they arrived, having hopefully made new acquaintances, friends, lovers, who knows.

We do intend to keep the dinner intimate and places are going fast, so please book now.

Very best wishes, see you there –

Ed Vulliamy & Pranvera Smith 
Frontline Club BookNights

Menu £25 per person excluding drink