Siân Hughes
No Such Thing As Monday

Saturday 06 June 2026, 4.00pm
Colchester Samaritans, Walsingham Road Community Hall, 34 Walsingham Road, Colchester, Essex, CO2 7BN

Booker Prize longlisted author Siân Hughes joins us to discuss her latest novel, No Such Thing As Monday. Raw, exhilarating, and full of heart it confirms Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.

‘A stunningly frank and darkly funny novel of loneliness and resilience. I loved it.‘
— Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry

Tickets: £10 / £8 (students, under 27s and unwaged)
Box Office: essexbookfestival.org.uk or Mercury Theatre 01206 573948

Part of our Love & Loss day at Colchester Samaritans.

Event Information

💬 The event will include an audience Q&A session.
📚 Copies of the book will be available to purchase on the night.
🖊️ After the event there will be an opportunity to get the book signed by the author.
🪑 Seats are unallocated.
☕ Colchester Samaritans are kindly offering refreshments at this event – donations to Samaritans welcome.
🚗 There is limited free parking at the school next to the hall. Parking details will be sent to ticket-holders a few days before the event. The nearest public car park is St Johns Multi Storey which is opposite the Samaritans Hall on the other side of Southway or St Mary’s Multi Storey is a 10 minute walk away.
♿ The venue is wheelchair accessible. There are disabled facilities on site.

Siân Hughes

Photo of Siân Hughes © Stretton Studios

Siân Hughes is a writer who grew up in a small village in Cheshire. Her first collection of poetry The Missing was a Poetry Society Recommendation, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis and the Aldeburgh prizes, and won the Seamus Heaney Award.

Siân’s first novel Pearl was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2023 and shortlisted for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2024.

No Such Thing As Monday

Steffie spends her days working in a dry-cleaner’s, trying to scrub the world clean one garment at a time. But no matter how spotless the clothes, she can’t rid herself of the guilt and grime she feels inside.

Haunted by what happened to her sister when they were children, large fragments of which she can’t fully remember, Steffie is stuck in a loop of self-destruction, defiance, and shame.

When her violent, bullying father dies suddenly, it sparks a reckoning that cracks open her past. What follows is an unexpectedly redemptive journey of a woman trying to piece herself together in a world that failed to make space for her.

Raw, exhilarating, and full of heart, No Such Thing as Monday confirms Sian Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.

‘A stunningly frank and darkly funny novel of loneliness and resilience. I loved it.‘
— Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry

‘In Steffie, Sian Hughes has created one of the most powerful, highly original and hilarious voices in fiction. What she suffers is almost unbearable and yet her resilience knocks the stuffing out of it. It’s deftly woven, the writing is delicious, and it hit my heart like a hammer blow.‘
— Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

‘I was blindsided by the brilliance of this novel.‘
— Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss

‘Richly absorbing and powerful – a ’read to the small hours,’ novel. Steffie has a unique voice that keeps you glued to her story, and that I absolutely loved.’
— Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat

Order a copy of the book from bookshop.org.