The Lounge has hosted the European launches of several recent publications in University of Ottawa Press' Lowry series, starting with his 'lost' novel, In Ballast to the White Sea: A Scholarly Edition, published almost 60 years after his death. Talks were followed by a panel discussion involving one of the book’s editors Patrick A. McCarthy (University of Miami), Vik Doyen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), and two of the Firminists involved in organising the Lounge, Ailsa Cox and Colin Dilnot.

The book, partly set on Merseyside, is about an aspiring writer, a Cambridge undergraduate who believes that both his book and his life have already been 'written' by a Norwegian novelist. The manuscript of Lowry’s most ambitious project of the mid-1930s was thought to have been lost in a fire but was later discovered in New York Public Library after it become known his first wife, Jan Gabrial, still had a typescript of the book.

The book cover and press release are included here courtesy of University of Ottawa Press.