From lifelong friendships to long-term relationships, join novelists Laura Barnett and Sarah Gilmartin in conversation with Áine Toner.

Laura’s new novel, Births, Deaths & Marriages, follows a group of university friends brought together by an engagement party, where old passions are reignited and past resentments resurface. 

Focusing on two couples, from their Trinity College days to the reckonings of midlife, Sarah’s novel, Little Vanities, explores the distance between the lives we imagine and the ones we live.

Meet the writers

Laura Barnett is the author of four novels including the number one bestseller, The Versions of Us, Greatest Hits, Gifts and This Beating Heart. As an arts journalist and theatre critic, she has written regularly for the Guardian, Observer, the Daily Telegraph and Time Out London. Laura lives with her husband Andy, son Caleb and cat Eno in rural Kent.

Sarah Gilmartin is an Irish writer and arts journalist. Her bestselling debut novel Dinner Party (One, 2021) was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Kate O’Brien Award. Her second novel Service (One, 2023) was a Washington Post top books of summer and included in the Irish Times list of the best Irish fiction of the 21st century (2025). Her new novel Little Vanities will be published in May. She is the current Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University.