Upcoming Talks, And The EWSY Paperback

Tom Cox

03 Jun 2026 — 5 min read

If I was more adept at this whole self promotion business I no doubt would have announced this a lot earlier but after a lengthy break from the event circuit, I'm doing a few talks this month:

9th of June at Ilminster Literary Festival, Somerset (tickets available here).

16th June at Heron Books in Bristol (tickets available here).

And finally, close to my new neck of the woods, as the inaugural event at the stunning Oxenbury's Yard venue in Bridport, Dorset (tickets available here - there will also be live music at this one, courtesy of a couple of my pals).

To make things more interesting, I will be bringing the old ruined wall I'm standing on in the photo above to all events, in the hope that its height might compensate for any potential poor attendance and make me feel momentarily important. This will serve as a small, informal sequel to my 2019 'English Oak Tour', where I singlehandedly uprooted a 300-year-old English Oak tree from Exmoor, took it to 96 different bookshops, libraries and Quaker meetings halls across the UK and barked random paragraphs at people whilst hiding in its upper branches.

The paperback of Everything Will Swallow You is published on July 2nd. If you pre-order it here from Blackwell's UK you'll get free international delivery and help convince more bookshops to stock it. But it's also getting a special early release in indie bookshops in the UK for Independent Bookshop Week on Saturday 13th June, so, if you have one of those nearby, I'd love for you to purchase it there, or ask them to stock it. Who knows? If it gets enough sales, maybe my publisher will no longer claim that it's difficult to bring to a broad audience due to it allegedly containing whimsy.

There's an extract here. If you dislike it, I'll give you your money back. Actually, I won't, because the extract is free to read. I'll just philosophically accept you're not the kind of person my writing is aimed at. You could maybe buy a Lee Child novel instead, or a children's book by a celebrity, and we can both serenely move on.

Whole thing had Charles on the edge of his eat from start to finish and he told me he didn't actually find it whimsical at all

There's also now an Everything Will Swallow You audiobook, read brilliantly by Justin Avoth, who, when it comes to narrating audiobooks, is, if you ask me, the undisputed G.O.A.T. - above even the actual goat I asked to narrate it who turned down the opportunity due to disliking knitting and the sea and having doubts about being able to do a Liverpudlian accent. It's on Audible, but if you would prefer an ethical alternative, which allows you to donate to independent bookshops, there's also Libro Fm.

P.S. Please don't purchase my books from Amazon, if you can possibly help it. As you can see below, I'm sometimes guilty of pussyfooting around that issue on social media, but, please, don't.