Mick Herron | The Slow Horses are Back!
Sat 22 Nov 2025 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Bestselling and critically acclaimed author Mick Herron returns with Clown Town, the latest instalment in his award-winning Slough House series – the inspiration for the smash-hit Apple TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman as the unforgettable Jackson Lamb.
In Clown Town, the disgraced spies of Slough House are once again caught up in a web of deception, betrayal and blackmail. River Cartwright, sidelined from duty, stumbles into dangerous secrets hidden in his late grandfather’s library. At Regent’s Park, First Desk Diana Taverner turns threats into opportunity, weaponising the past to shore up her present power. And while Catherine Standish prays for calm, Jackson Lamb knows that when Taverner starts playing games, people get hurt. The slow horses may be clowns, but they’re his clowns, and if they don’t all come home, there will be a reckoning.
Exhilaratingly plotted, scabrously funny and sharply intelligent, Herron’s novels have redefined the spy thriller for a new age.
Come and hear one of Britain’s finest living crime and espionage writers on page and screen talk about the extraordinary world of the slow horses.
In conversation with Alex Clark
Livestream option available
Venue: TTP Stage (Cambridge Union)
Duration: 1 hour
Event supported by
Tickets available soon.
Author Biography
Mick Herron is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have been published in over twenty-five languages and are the basis of the award-winning Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Among his other novels are the Zoë Boehm series, also now adapted for TV starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, and the standalone novels The Secret Hours and Nobody Walks. Mick’s awards include the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the CWA Gold, Steel and Diamond Daggers. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford.
Chair Biography
Alex Clark is a broadcaster and journalist, who writes for many publications including the Guardian, the Observer, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a co-host on the Graham Norton Book Club for Audible and hosts the TLS podcast. She is a professional chairperson and appears all over the UK at Edinburgh, Hay and the Southbank Centre. Alex is a festival honorary patron.
