Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Matt Haig | Alastair Campbell | Robert Harris | Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay at the Edinburgh Book Festival | Denise Else

As the curtain falls on the 2024 Edinburgh International Book Festival, the figures are encouraging: over 100,000 visitors, and one-third of the 600 events at least 90 per cent full. Anecdotally, visitors are enjoying the new location at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and giving a thumbs up to the first programme by new director Jenny Niven.

On its last day, the festival welcomed a range of high-profile guests. At lunchtime in the McEwan Hall, Matt Haig spoke for the first time about his new novel, The Life Impossible, making his first appearance in person at a book festival for nearly five years. Since the publication of the best-selling The Midnight Library in 2020, he said he took a break from writing and wondered if he would ever write again.

It was a tough period in which he began drinking again, had therapy and was diagnosed with ADHD and autism, all while being regarded as literature’s go-to guy on mental health. Part of his journey of “facing up to things” from his past was to travel to Ibiza, where he was living when he had a breakdown at the age of 24.

Matt Haig at the Edinburgh Book Festival | Kan Lailey

He came back with a gift he didn’t expect: inspiration for a new novel. The Life Impossible is the story of Grace, a retired maths teacher grieving for her husband and son, who inherits a home on the island. Just when she feels her life is over, a new adventure is beginning. Of the book, he said simply: “This one means everything.”

Another public figure who became a - perhaps surprising - spokesman on mental health was Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former director of communications, now an author and one-half of Britain’s most popular political podcast. What we can do to fix politics was the topic for his event at the Book Festival, and he had spent time earlier in the day talking to children and young people.

It will take “more than a change of government”, he said, to switch people back on to engaging with politics. Attracting the best candidates to Westminster is a further problem, given the level of abuse directed at MPs like Jess Phillips and Mhairi Black (who stood down at the July election). Campbell described Westminster as “a laboratory for mental ill health - although it doesn’t have to be.” Both top-down and bottom-up change is needed to transform our political culture.

An untold story in UK politics is the basis for Precipice, the new novel by Robert Harris. As Britain hurtled towards involvement in the First World War, Prime Minister HH Asquith was having a secret, passionate correspondence with a woman half his age, Venetia Stanley. “Reality is so much more interesting that what you can make up,” said Harris, who had access to an “extraordinary” archive of some 500 letters from Asquith to Stanley, some of which were penned during cabinet meetings.

The nature of the relationship has never been made public, partly due to restrictions placed on publishing the letters by the Asquith family. Harris’ book reveals Stanley as “a consequential figure in British politics” who advised the Prime Minister at a crucial time in history. He regularly sent confidential documents to her - including secret intelligence from the Western Front - making the affair “potentially the greatest security risk the country ever had”.

The concluding event of 2024 Book Festival was in the capable hands of Jackie Kay, who also featured at the beginning, interviewing Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson in the McEwan Hall. Always charming and at ease, Kay began by calling on various friends by name to check they were in the audience, and having fun and games with the creator of the sur-titles.

Kay read from her new poetry collection May Day, which draws the reader into a circle of friends, collaborators and family members. Dedicated to her late parents, John and Helen Kay, who were frequent guests at her Book Festival events, it also includes poems for and about friends and for her son Matthew, who was injured while taking part in a Black Lives Matter protest. As well as being a writer of beautiful, poignant poems, Kay has the gift of being able to draw the whole audience into the circle of her warmth, making a special send-off for what has been a special festival.