This Thursday, the 27th of March, we are hosting our Spring Statement Coffee House Shots Live.

Shots regulars, Michael Gove and Katie Balls, will be joined by very special guests, Lord David Frost, and Lord Maurice Glassman, just hours after the spring statement, or emergency budget, is announced.

They will be delving deeper into the measures and how they will reverberate throughout the political landscape.

And this will all be taking place at 7.30 at London's Cadogan Hall.

To get your tickets, go to www.spictator.com.uk-Uk.Fourg-House Live.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Francesca Simon, is a writer who will be known

to many of you as the author of the multi-squillion best-selling horrid Henry books.

And very brilliant they are, too.

We're a big fan in our household.

But this week, she's here to talk about her first novel for adults,

which is called Salka Lady of the Lake.

Francesco, can you tell me a bit about how this story, it's based on myth, isn't it?

Kind of came to you?

Well, I think this book is unusual in the sense that, well, it's a Welsh myth, but it started life as a cantata, which I wrote with the composer Gavin Higgins.

And then my editor at Faber, I was telling her about this cantata about the story of the Welsh lady of the lake,

and she falls in love with a shepherd on condition he never strikes her three blows.

And the three blows are much more emotional wounds.

This is not a story of domestic violence gone wrong.

And I was telling my editor at Faber about it,

and she said, will you write this as a novel? Which is really how it happened, because I was

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