19/08/2026
Join us in Leek for an evening with international bestselling author Joanne Harris as she talks about her latest book, Sleepers in the Snow, set in the beautiful but eerie North Yorkshire Moors. A powerful novel of love, loss, mystery and dementia, perfect for those dark winter nights, when a story beckons.
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Out on the moor, in the snow, a house stands beneath a pylon. It is a house full of memories, and full of old things. And, in the dark, when the pylon sings in the wind, it is a house full of ghosts and fading memories…
The house, Kirkhill, has a new occupant – just moved in, fresh from a bitter divorce and looking for a fresh start. The moor is the perfect place for it: isolated, beautiful in the changing seasons, peaceful, and with just enough of the previous owners’ belongings that it’s a perfectly self-contained and cosy home.
Only as the nights start to draw in, and the weather takes a turn, so does the house. The cosy isolation becomes menacing, animals begin acting strangely, and it seems someone could be watching the house… and the diaries of the previous owners begin to reveal a terrible tragedy which befell Kirkhill – one which its new occupant may be unable to escape…
Joanne Harris (OBE, FRSL), winner of the Creative Freedom Award, the Whitaker Gold Award, and the Glenfiddich Award, is the author of twenty novels, three cookbooks and many short stories. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, was Chair of the Society of Authors between 2020 and 2024, and in 2022 was awarded an OBE by the Queen. She was born in Barnsley in Yorkshire and grew up above her grandparents’ sweet shop.
