Previews: Edinburgh International Book Festival

Dr Raj Persaud - 18th, 4.30pm

A renowned consultant psychiatrist, Persaud is a divisive figure: some see him as ahead of his time for promoting the use of hallucinogens as medication, while others accuse him of dumbing down medical science for his media career. He has admitted plagiarism, after whole passages of one of his books were revealed to have been lifted from other works. But for better or worse, Persaud has arguably contributed more than anyone else in the last few years to the public's understanding of mental illness, and his is bound to be a thought-provoking talk.

Susan Richards and Colin Thubron - 19th, 10am

Among the Russians, Thubron's 1983 account of the lives of the ordinary citizens in the Soviet Union, was a seminal piece of travel writing as well as rare glimpse by a Western writer into life behind the Iron Curtain. In Epics of Everyday Life, Susan Richards tracked the fortunes of idealistic young people in an emergent Russia after the fall of communism. In conversation, these two travellers will share their first-hand knowledge of a fascinating country at a critical point in its history.

AL Kennedy - 21st, 11.30am

An accomplished novelist and short-story writer, AL Kennedy has become a fixture of Edinburgh's festival scene with her recent forays into comedy. In her latest volume of short stories, What Becomes, she turns her attention to the broken-hearted. Kennedy is often considered gloomy, perhaps thanks to her 2007 novel Day, the story of a World War Two tailgunner. But her fiction—and her short works in particular—is astonishingly varied, exhibiting a piercing dark wit that makes her one of the most rewarding British novelists writing today.

David Peace - 22nd, 8pm

It's surprising that there are tickets remaining for David Peace, a brilliantly entertaining innovator who has surely enjoyed as much exposure as any other British novelist in the last year or so. The Damned United, his brilliant account of Brian Clough's tenure as manager of Leeds United, was recently adapted for the big screen, while his Red Riding series—about the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire ripper—was turned into an acclaimed TV series. More recently he penned the highly-acclaimed Tokyo Year Zero, set in the alienating capital of contemporary Japan.