Waterstones Liverpool welcomes Liverpool academic & writer Saul Leslie

We are honoured to welcome Liverpool writer and academic Saul Leslie as he joins us to discuss his debut novel A Working Title I Want To Change which explores the dizzyingly over-lit world of austerity Britain, revealing consumerism’s rituals and illusions in all their comedy and menace.

2013 - In the labyrinth of Tesco’s flagship supermarket, precariously employed workers search for dignity at the margins of late-capitalist London, while a nameless narrator cycles through the discarded nametags of sacked colleagues. Gradually absorbing their stories, he drifts from shifts at the superstore to temporary accommodation, as imminent homelessness threatens his intellectual hopes. Petty triumphs, quiet humiliations, and fleeting acts of kindness become markers of resistance to the wider collapse beyond the store’s walls.

Drawing comparisons with Laura Grace Ford’s Savage Messiah , Martin Amis, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces , Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square and Edward Chrisholm’s A Waiter in Paris Saul Leslie's novel reveals consumerism’s rituals and illusions in all their comedy and menace.

Saul Leslie is a writer and academic in Liverpool. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Liverpool and Hope University. His fiction has been published by Bloomsbury and Liverpool University Press, and his remarks about disability and literature have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Conversation , and The Poetry Review . His academic research on disability and employment was instrumental in influencing policy that brought about the British Sign Language Act in 2022. In addition to his PhD research on disability and the workplace, he also works with Penguin-Random House as an editor of disabled writers’ memoirs and novels

Saul Leslie will be in conversation with Dr David Hering - Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University of Liverpool and co-director of the Centre for New and International Writing.

Their conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A and a book signing.