We are delighted to have Stewart Ennis visit the great Blackwell's Bookshop in Aberdeen to launch his debut novel Blessed Assurance. It will be a great evening of bookish chat so save the date!

Look at what others have said so far about the book:

“Stewart Ennis has drawn on his own faith fixated upbringing to recreate a sixties childhood like no other. We meet characters Mark Twain or Flannery O’Connor would have been proud to have begotten. Blessed Assurance’s antecedents include The House with the Green Shutters, Gillespie and Docherty. More recent sources for comparison would be the work of Jeanette Winterson, James Robertson and the poet Iain Bamforth. The earnest, scab scouring schoolboy dreamer and precocious would be missionary, Joseph Kirkland takes his well-earned place amongst the many youthful savants and seers populating the coming of age stories that predominate in Caledonian letters. Ennis’s episodic structure -tableaux vibrantly vivants -have the stand alone presence to compel even as excerpts. But cumulatively these vignettes take on a mass and momentum that propel this deep and deft, richly rewarding debut novel towards precincts of the psyche as yet unprowled in contemporary Scottish fiction.” - Donny O' Rourke

“Stewart Ennis’s debut novel hovers constantly between comedy and tragedy. Small town Scotland is seen in perceptive detail through the eyes of an eleven year old boy. Characters, like his fundamentalist Gran, like the unforgettable itinerant preacher, Benjamin Mutch, leap into our heads and take us over. Steeped in matters of faith and rejection the book offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into a past world which makes you turn the pages in a quest for answers.” - Bernard MacLaverty

“This is the writer I always dreamed of finding – a born stylist with a story as intimate and vast as all creation. Ennis is the Scottish James Joyce.” - Meg Rosoff