EIBF Events on Tuesday 21st August

• Wake Up To Words - Highland Park Spiegeltent

Two of the brightest, burgeoning talents on the new Scottish fiction scene. Alan Bissett has established himself after only two novels as a writer of immense zest, originality and energy. Simon Biggam visited last year's festival with his chilling debut about a Peeping Tom; the follow-up, The First Day, set in 1944, is equally gripping.

• The Murray Beith Murray Event - RBS Main Theatre

Book quickly. When hugely admired Scottish broadcaster Andrew Marr was last at the Book Festival, his was the fastest selling event of them all. His enthralling new look at modern Britain is a brilliant sweep through politics, culture, sexuality, the cult of celebrity and the current apparent victory of consumerism over grand vision. Chaired by Ruth Wishart.

• The Pinsent Masons Event - RBS Main Theatre

Massively popular for his no-holds-barred wit and satire, top Scottish crime writer Christopher Brookmyre also has the best titles bar none. Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks explores strange psychic palaver at a Glasgow University which might yet fatally threaten our hero Jack Parlabane. Also - an exclusive glimpse at the next book he is working on – A Snowball in Hell. You heard it here first. Chaired by Janice Forsyth of BBC Radio Scotland's The Radio Café

• Fine Fiction - ScottishPower Studio Theatre

One of the most successful stand-up comedians in the UK, Rhona Cameron received great praise for her funny, sensitive memoir of growing up in Musselburgh. Now she embarks on fiction with her first novel, The Naked Drinking Club, in which an Edinburgh twenty-something embarks on a suitably debauched tour of Australia.

• Fine Fiction - Peppers Theatre

A stunning double bill of two of the most acclaimed and award-laden writers to come out of Scotland and Ireland. John Burnside is leading poet, story writer and memoirist; his latest novel The Devil's Footprints is equally accomplished, a dark fable set in a Fife fishing village. Colm Tóibín's beautiful, powerful stories of Mothers and Sons prove him a master of prose and emotional insight.