Double Book Launch: Diamond Life & The Decadence
We are thrilled to host a joint celebration for two of the sharpest new voices in British fiction, Anna Maconochie and Leon Craig, as they bring their latest books to Moabit.
Anna Maconochie's Diamond Life (Héloïse Press) is a collection of urban short stories following London millennials chasing creative lives, failed aspirations, romantic fiascos, and the particular chaos of faking it until you make it. From a disastrous blind date to a struggling artist promised change by a Soho fortune teller, these are stories about ambition, desire, and the gap between the life you want and the one you are actually living.
Leon Craig's The Decadence (Sceptre) is a lush, unsettling ghost story about a group of late twenty-somethings bickering, seething, and hard partying their way through a decaying country house, its history as menacing as anything supernatural. Sharlene Teo calls it a novel with "a keen eye for observation and a very dark and distinctive imagination."
About Anna: Anna Maconochie was born and raised in London, where she still lives. After a decade in the film industry and at the BBC, she began writing short stories drawing on those worlds as well as her home city. Her work has appeared in the Erotic Review, the Dublin Review, the London Magazine, and the Bitter Oleander, and she featured in Desire: 100 of Literature's Sexiest Stories, compiled by Mariella Frostrup. In 2023 she received a Pushcart Prize nomination for her story "Victor & Cleo." Diamond Life is her second collection, following Only the Visible Can Vanish with Cultured Llama Publishing.
About Leon: Leon Craig is a writer and editor, originally from London and now based here in Berlin. Her debut novel The Decadence (2025) and her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells (2022) are both published by Sceptre Books UK. Her work has featured in the Sunday Times, Nulla journal, Hazlitt, and the Literary Review, with more forthcoming in the Berlin Babel anthology.
Come for two very different visions of what it means to be young, restless, and a little bit doomed, and stay for the wine.
Tickets: €5 Book via Eventbrite