Talk of the town

Literature lovers can enjoy a talk given by two very different novelists in the same arena this week. Gordon Burn tells us how hard the foot and mouth crisis hit the north through the eyes of a comedian and James Woods writes of the mind of a young academic and compulsive liar who rejects his priesthood father. Enjoy.

Gordon Burn and James Wood both set their stories, or parts of them, somewhere in the North of England. That is what brings these two novelists together. Otherwise they're chalk and cheese. Gordon Burn, who won the Whitbread First Novel Prize for his fact'n'fiction blended Alma Cogan has written another hybrid, The North Of England Home Service, a story set in an unnamed town in the North East, just as the foot-and-mouth epidemic is breaking out.

His hero, Ray Cruddas, is an ageing ex-comedian who returns to his roots and takes up with the local low life. James Wood's Bunting, by contrast, is a young academic and compulsive liar, who loves his father, a parish priest in a village near Durham, but wages war against the faith he serves. The Book Against God by James Wood (Cape, £12). The North Of England Home Service by Gordon Burn (Faber, £16.99).