World Book Club
270 episodes - English - Latest episode: 25 days ago - ★★★★★ - 335 ratingsThe world's great authors discuss their best-known novel.
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Episodes
Charlotte Wood: The Weekend
April 01, 2024 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBAward-winning Australian novelist Charlotte Wood joins Harriett Gilbert to answer questions from readers around the world about her novel, The Weekend. It's a story of grief and friendship; three women meet to clear their deceased friend’s beach house and find themselves uncovering secrets and stirring up memories. (Image: Charlotte Wood. Photo credit: Carly Earl.)
Ann Patchett: The Dutch House
March 01, 2024 12:10 - 49 minutes - 22.9 MBMulti award-winning novelist Ann Patchett will be discussing The Dutch House. A dark modern fairytale set against the very real world of post-WWII Philadelphia, tracing the love between a brother and sister, their vanishing mother, distant father and jealous stepmother. Ann Patchett tells the story of a family over five decades with a finely balanced mixture of wit and heartbreak. (Image: Ann Patchett. Photo credit: Emily Dorio.)
Madrid
February 10, 2024 20:06 - 48 minutes - 22.2 MBWorld Book Café heads to Madrid to talk to writers about a new boom in feminist fiction. A few month after the resignation of President of the Spanish Football Federation over a non-consensual kiss of footballer Jenni Hermoso at the World Cup final, World Book Café investigates how Madrid’s women writers are challenging gender roles in the books world.
Carlo Rovelli: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
February 01, 2024 18:42 - 49 minutes - 22.8 MBPresenter Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to acclaimed Italian physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli about his runaway bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. A compact and engaging exploration of some of the most fundamental ideas in modern physics this book takes readers on a captivating journey through seven concise chapters, each dedicated to a different topic. From the theory of relativity to quantum mechanics and the nature of time, Rovelli presents complex concepts...
Antonio Muñoz Molina: In the Night of Time
January 01, 2024 03:06 - 49 minutes - 22.7 MBAntonio Muñoz Molina answers questions from around the world on his novel In the Night of Time. The panoramic portrait of Spain on the brink of civil war follows the life of Ignacio Abel, master builder and architect, as he navigates an illicit love affair with an American woman as the darkness of war surrounds him. Recorded in the prestigious Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. (Photo: Antonio Muñoz Molina. Credit: Elena Blanco)
Shehan Karunatilaka: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
December 01, 2023 03:06 - 49 minutes - 22.9 MBHarriett Gilbert and readers around the globe talk to acclaimed Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka about his Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Almeida, a gay war photographer, recently deceased, with secrets aplenty, awakes to find himself sitting in line in an ethereal visa office, determined to find out who has murdered him. In a Sri Lanka beset by civil war, death squads and terrorist bombs, the list of suspects is long. He has 'seven moons' a week, to make ...
AS Byatt - Possession
November 17, 2023 18:37 - 26 minutes - 12.3 MBEnglish author A. S Byatt talks to an audience about her novel 'Possession'. First broadcast in March 2004 (Photo: A S Byatt. Credit:BBC)
Xiaolu Guo: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
November 03, 2023 17:46 - 50 minutes - 23 MBXiaolu Guo talks about her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. The book was her first written in English and made prestigious fiction shortlists on publication in 2007. Twenty-three year old Zhuang – or Z as she’s called in England because no-one can pronounce her name – arrives to spend a year learning English. The loneliness and strangeness of the city are overwhelming, but as she struggles through the challenges of nouns and verbs and the oddities of English speech, sh...
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
October 02, 2023 10:54 - 49 minutes - 22.8 MBAmerican writer Michael Chabon talks about his 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. From Jewish mysticism to Houdini to the Golden Age of Comic Books and WWII, Chabon’s immersive novel deals with escape and transformation through the lives of two Jewish boys in New York. Josef Kavalier makes an impossible escape from Prague in 1939, leaving his whole family behind but convinced he’s going to find a way to get them out too. He arrives in New York to ...
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife
September 01, 2023 13:49 - 49 minutes - 22.8 MBAmerican writer and visual artist Audrey Niffenegger talks about her bestselling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife - a magical love story with a twist. Funny, quirky, and occasionally heartbreaking, this is the story of a relationship lived in the moment – even if those moments are all in the wrong order. Clare and Henry met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when she was twenty-two and he was thirty. Because Henry is a time traveller. He suffers from a rare genetic...
Pilar Quintana: The Bitch
August 01, 2023 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.7 MBColombian writer Pilar Quintana talks about her acclaimed novel The Bitch which explores themes of motherhood, loss, and the impact of violence on women's lives. Set against the backdrop of the Pacific coast, the story revolves around Damaris, a young woman longing for a child but unable to conceive. When she discovers a pregnant dog near her home, she becomes obsessed with the idea of adopting one of its puppies. However, her evolving relationship with the puppy becomes entangled with t...
Sofi Oksanen: Purge
July 01, 2023 11:06 - 50 minutes - 22.9 MBBestselling author Sofi Oksanen answers readers' questions about her novel Purge. It's a harrowing story of sexual violence, betrayal and retribution which charts the troubled history of Estonia during and after the Second World War. Told through the lives of two women, the story starts when a frightened stranger, Zara, arrives on Aliide's doorstep. Gradually, their parallel stories, and connected histories are uncovered. This powerful novel has been translated into 38 languages. (Picture...
Judith Kerr: When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
June 05, 2023 09:13 - 50 minutes - 22.9 MBOn the centenary of her birth another chance to hear much-loved author Judith Kerr discussing her memorable young adults' novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit with Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world. Set during the Second World War, this semi-autobiographical novel traces the story of a young Jewish girl and her family who flee Berlin just as the Nazis come to power. The journey of a family splintered by conflict, driven by fear and eventually rewarded with reunion is seen through...
Curtis Sittenfeld: Prep
May 05, 2023 08:30 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBBest-selling American author Curtis Sittenfeld discusses her acclaimed debut novel, Prep. Set in an exclusive boarding school in north-eastern America, Prep is an insightful, caustic and funny coming-of-age story and a savage dissection of class, race, and gender. Clever, aspirational Lee Fiora is fourteen years old when her father drops her at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts that she has won a scholarship to. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, she becomes a shr...
Paul Theroux: Deep South
April 01, 2023 08:30 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBPresenter Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to acclaimed American author Paul Theroux about his bestselling travel book Deep South. After fifty years crossing the globe, seeking adventure and stories to tell about places far from home, Theroux travels deep into the heart of his native country and discovers a land as profoundly foreign as anything he has previously experienced abroad. He finds in the deep south a place of contradiction, full of unforgettable characters, lan...
World Book Cafe: Paris
March 18, 2023 20:00 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBWorld Book Café travels to Paris to meet some of the French capital’s newest writers. Authors Mahir Guven, Blandine Rinkel, Laurent Petitmangin and Capucine Delattre discuss taking on the literary establishment and finding new ways to express themselves. Like many places in the world, questions of equality, diversity and freedom of expression are top of the agenda in France. But it is complicated; the ideal of universalism - meaning every citizen is considered to be the same regardless of c...
Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales
March 04, 2023 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBThis month World Book Club visits Paris, France to be guests of the iconic bookshop on the Left Bank of the River Seine, Shakespeare & Co. There Harriett Gilbert and a bookshop audience talk to acclaimed French writer Marie Darrieussecq about her extraordinary novel Pig Tales. Pig Tales is the story of a young woman who works at a shady Parisian massage parlour, becoming a favourite with her lustful clients until, that is, she slowly and alarmingly metamorphoses into a pig. A dark feminis...
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: Waking Lions
February 04, 2023 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBDriving too fast through Israel’s Negev desert in his SUV after a long day in the hospital, Dr Eitan Green accidentally hits a lone Eritrean man on the empty moonlit road, killing him instantly. Panic stricken he drives off instead of calling for help and confessing what he’s done. A decision that will change the course of his life irrevocably because the dead man’s wife, the elegant, enigmatic Sikrit, knows what happened. In atonement for his crime Sikrit insists the doctor start treating ...
Anuk Arudpragasam: A Passage North
January 07, 2023 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBA Passage North explores the impact of the vicious Sri Lankan civil war between Tamil and Sinhalese which tore Sri Lanka apart for two and a half decades before a fragile ceasefire was finally reached in 2009. When Krishan learns that his grandmother’s former carer Rani has died he makes the long journey north to attend the funeral across a country still traumatised and scarred by its recent past. Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and t...
Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways
December 03, 2022 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBWorld Book Club travels to The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in England, as guests of The Off the Shelf Festival and talks to local prize-winning Sheffield writer Sunjeev Sahota about his compelling novel, The Year of the Runaways. Voyaging from India to England, from childhood to the present day, Sunjeev Sahota's heart-rending novel follows a group of young men each in flight from India and desperately searching for a new and fulfilling life in the northern British town of Sheffield. Tarl...
Tahmima Anam: A Golden Age
November 05, 2022 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBThis month as World Book Club continues its year-long season celebrating the Exuberance of Youth it also celebrates the 20th anniversary of the programme. To mark this happy occasion World Book Club are guests of the London Literature Festival at the South Bank Centre on the River Thames and Harriett Gilbert talks to Bangladeshi-born British novelist Tahmima Anam about her enthralling novel, A Golden Age. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel A...
Brit Bennett: The Vanishing Half
October 01, 2022 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBThis month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, we talk to American writer Brit Bennett about her unputdownable novel, The Vanishing Half. The Vanishing Half charts the rollercoaster parallel lives of estranged twin sisters who choose to live in two very different worlds - one black and one white. Stella and Desiree are identical twins, growing up together in a small, Southern black community. Until, at age sixteen, they run away. Decades later, still separated ...
Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station
September 03, 2022 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBNext in the series exploring The Exuberance of Youth World Book Club talks to the award-winning American author Ben Lerner about his beguiling debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station. Brilliant, unreliable, young American poet Adam Gordon is on a fellowship in Madrid, where he is struggling to establish his identity and dazzle his contemporaries. Instead of studying, his research becomes a meditation on authenticity - are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain, especially the t...
Yaa Gyasi
August 06, 2022 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBIn this year-long celebration of The Exuberance of Youth, World Book Club revisits the multi-prize-winning debut novel Homegoing by the acclaimed Ghanaian author Yaa Gyasi. The story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a white slave-trader, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history. A novel of remarkable sweep and power, wi...
Mohsin Hamid: Exit West
July 02, 2022 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBIn the season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, World Book Club talks to Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid about his compelling novel, Exit West. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Exit West features Nadia and Saeed, two ordinary young people, attempting to fall in love in a world turned upside down. Civil war is driving them from their homeland and they join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, to find their place in the world. Then something extr...
World Book Cafe: Brooklyn
June 18, 2022 19:00 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBWorld Book Café, the programme where writers reveal the secrets of their home cities, goes to Brooklyn. In a lively and engaging conversation from the heart of the neighbourhood, Asian American authors will share insights into their creative lives, the obstacles they face and the joy they find in words and writing. Presenter Michelle Fleury will be joined on stage by Brooklyn-based writers Elaine Hsieh Chou, Crystal Hana Kim, Matthew Ortile, Pitchaya Sudbanthad and Jen Lue.
Jennifer Egan: A Visit from the Goon Squad
June 04, 2022 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBJennifer Egan answers audience questions about her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. It is a dazzling, exciting book, which plays with form and storytelling traditions. Goon Squad is made up of connected short stories circling around musician and record executive Bennie Salazar, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. It explores their pasts and catapults them into the future using a rich variety of voices and narrative styles. This special edition...
Jennifer Egan: A Visit From The Goon Squad
June 04, 2022 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBJennifer Egan answers audience questions about her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad. It's a dazzling, exciting book which plays with form and storytelling traditions. Goon Squad is made up of connected short stories circling around musician and record executive Bennie Salazar, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. It explores their pasts and catapults them into the future using a rich variety of voices and narrative styles. This special edition of...
Bryan Washington: Memorial
May 07, 2022 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBThis month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to award-winning American writer Bryan Washington about his moving novel Memorial. Benson, a Black day-care teacher and Mike, a Japanese-American chef, live together in Houston, but are beginning to wonder why they're a couple. When Mike flies off to visit his seriously ill, estranged father in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother arrives for a visit, Benson is ...
NoViolet Bulawayo: We Need New Names
April 02, 2022 11:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBIn the latest in World Book Club's season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, Harriett Gilbert talks to Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo about her extraordinary novel, We Need New Names. A remarkable literary debut shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize We Need New Names is the unflinching, compelling story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe and into America. A coming-of-age story, we follow a young girl named Darling, first as a 10-year-old in Zimbabwe with her friends, navigatin...
Kiley Reid: Such a Fun Age
March 05, 2022 06:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBA remarkable debut from an exhilarating young new voice, Such a Fun Age is a big-hearted page-turner of a story about race and privilege, centring on a young black babysitter, her well-meaning employer, and a chance encounter that threatens to undo them both. (Picture: Kiley Reid. Photo credit: David Goddard.)
Isabel Allende: Eva Luna
February 08, 2022 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBIn the second in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this centenary year of the BBC, Harriett Gilbert talks to world-famous Chilean writer Isabel Allende about her extraordinary novel, Eva Luna. Eva Luna is the story of an orphan who beguiles the world with her remarkable visions, triumphing over the worst of adversities and bringing light, as her name would suggest, to a dark place. As Eva comes of age and tells her tale, Isabel Allende conjures up a whole complex, unidentif...
Naoise Dolan: Exciting Times
January 01, 2022 06:06 - 49 minutes - 22.7 MBThe first of our season of celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this the centenary year of the BBC, World Book Club talks to Irish writer Naoise Dolan about her dazzling novel Exciting Times. Psychologically astute and dryly funny, Exciting Times is a modern, intelligent dissection of youth, power and privilege set amongst the international circles of contemporary Hong Kong. Clever, young millennial Ava, an Irish graduate teaching English, is having an affair with rich cynical banker Julia...
Monique Roffey: The Mermaid of Black Conch
December 04, 2021 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBHarriett Gilbert talks to the multi-award-winning Trinidadian-British author Monique Roffey about her enchanting novel The Mermaid of Black Conch, which won the 2020 Costa Book of the Year. Roffey spins the mesmerising tale of a cursed mermaid and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her. When American bounty-hunters capture Aycayia from the deep seas off the island of Black Conch, David rescues her and vows to win her trust. With Aycayia in hiding, their love grows as they navigate ...
Burhan Sönmez: Istanbul, Istanbul
November 06, 2021 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBContinuing our month-long season to celebrate the English PEN centenary, World Book Club talks to multi-award-winning Turkish-Kurdish writer and activist Burhan Sönmez about his unforgettable novel Istanbul, Istanbul. At once powerfully political and intensely personal, Istanbul, Istanbul is the story of four prisoners kept in underground cells beneath the city, who tell one another stories about their city to pass the time. There are two Istanbuls, one below ground and one above, yet in re...
Maylis De Kerangal: Mend the Living
September 04, 2021 05:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBWorld Book Club this month talks to the award-winning French writer Maylis de Kerangal about her remarkable and haunting novel Mend the Living. After a horrific car accident on the Normandy coast surfer Simon Limbeau is rushed to hospital where his devastated parents are later told that he is on life-support, but is brain-dead. His heart, however, is still beating perfectly and could be donated to save someone’s life. They are faced with an agonising choice. Mend the Living is the story of...
Crime and Punishment: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
August 09, 2021 11:51 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBTo mark the bicentenary of the birth of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky World Book Club revisits Crime and Punishment in an edition recorded at the elegant Pushkin House, London’s Russian cultural hub, in 2016. To help us explore Dostoyevsky’s haunting classic thriller Harriett Gilbert was joined by acclaimed Russian writer Boris Akunin and Russian scholar Dr Sarah Young. Consumed by the idea of his own special destiny, Rashkolnikov is drawn to commit a terrible crime. In the a...
Jane Harper
July 07, 2021 11:44 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBWorld Book Club this month talks to the world-renowned Australian author Jane Harper at her home in Melbourne, Australia, about her internationally garlanded thriller, The Dry. Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, tensions in a small town community become unbearable when the Hadler family are found brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler’s guilty, committing suicide after slaughtering his wife and son. But policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for ...
Jane Harper: The Dry
July 07, 2021 11:44 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBWorld Book Club this month talks to the world-renowned Australian author Jane Harper at her home in Melbourne, Australia, about her internationally garlanded thriller, The Dry. Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, tensions in a small town community become unbearable when the Hadler family are found brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler’s guilty, committing suicide after slaughtering his wife and son. But policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for...
Manu Joseph: Serious Men
June 10, 2021 10:07 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBSerious Men tells the intertwined stories of wily Ayyan Mani - who tries to pass off his son as a mathematical genius - and life at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai, where Ayyan works, and where veteran scientists battle over their pet theories about how life began on Earth. Serious Men won the Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010 and the 2011 PEN Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. It’s an unsettling comedy about inequalities in Indian society; i...
Louise Penny: Still Life
May 01, 2021 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBThis month World Book Club talks to acclaimed Canadian writer Louise Penny about the very first in her astonishingly successful series of Inspector Gamache crime novels. When a much-loved inhabitant of the village of Three Pines in the Eastern Townships of Quebec is found dead in the woods during Thanksgiving, the locals are certain that it was just a tragic hunting accident. But Chief Inspector Armand Gamache from Montreal suspects foul play and won’t rest until he’s rootled out the darkn...
Robert Seethaler: A Whole Life
April 03, 2021 12:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBSpanning much of the twentieth century and told with an elegant simplicity which belies the harshness of the tale it tells, Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life is the story of one man's relationship with an ancient landscape. Andreas Egger knows every nook and cranny of the Alpine mountain valley that is his home and from which vantage point he witnesses the arrival of the modern world, in all its many and daunting forms. A stark yet tender book about love, loss and endurance, and about findin...
Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions
March 08, 2021 11:39 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBA modern classic in the African literary canon and voted in the Top Ten of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, Nervous Conditions is the coming-of-age story of two Shona girls, Tambudzai and Nyasha, both trying to find their place in contemporary Zimbabwe. Whilst Nyasha has been to England and questions the effect of that Westernisation on her family, Tambudzai is from a more traditional branch of the family and is awed by her cousin’s seeming sophistication. Through its explora...
Bill Bryson: Notes from a Small Island
February 06, 2021 06:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBThis month World Book Club discusses Bill Bryson’s hugely acclaimed travelogue Notes from a Small Island with the author and his readers around the world. After two decades as a resident of the United Kingdom, Bryson took what he thought might be a last affectionate trip around his adoptive country before returning to live in his native America. Notes from a Small Island is the irreverent and hilarious account of this meandering journey through his beloved island nation. From Dover to Down...
Sjón - Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was
January 04, 2021 11:54 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBOn this month’s World Book Club, Icelandic literary superstar Sjón will be answering questions from readers around the world about his novel Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. Set in Reykjavik in 1918, it’s the story of sixteen year old Mani, whose life is completely changed by the arrival of the Spanish flu in the city. It’s a fascinating novel about human resilience and connections, a love letter to cinema and a portrait of a place at a very particular moment in its history. Moonstone w...
Yaa Gyasi: Homegoing
December 05, 2020 01:06 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBA novel of breathtaking sweep revealing the devastating impact of slavery through history. This month World Book Club discusses the multi-prize-winning debut novel Homegoing with its acclaimed Ghanaian author Yaa Gyasi and her fans around the world. The story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a white slave-trader, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two contine...
Yiyun Li: The Vagrants
November 09, 2020 15:58 - 49 minutes - 22.7 MBLife or death choices in a bid to survive the horrors of 1970s Communist China This month in the penultimate edition of a year celebrating the globe’s greatest women writers World Book Club talks to acclaimed Chinese author Yiyun Li about her harrowing debut novel The Vagrants. Winner of the Guardian First Book Award The Vagrants is based on real events which took place in China in 1979 during the era that ultimately led to the fateful Tiannanmen Square uprising. In the provincial town...
Ali Smith: How to Be Both
October 05, 2020 11:55 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBA fast-moving, passionate, genre-bending work of art that both dazzles and entertains. This month, World Book Club discusses the much garlanded novel How to Be Both with its acclaimed British author Ali Smith and her fans around the world. Still not able to gather together in a studio, presenter Harriett Gilbert and Ali Smith will be talking remotely to international listeners via all manner of means - phonelines, emails, Skype calls, and social media. In this playfully ambitious novel, ...
Ali Smith: How to be Both
October 05, 2020 11:55 - 49 minutes - 22.5 MBA fast-moving, passionate, genre-bending work of art that both dazzles and entertains. This month World Book Club discusses the much garlanded novel How to be Both with its acclaimed British author Ali Smith and her fans around the world. Still not able to gather together in a studio presenter Harriett Gilbert and Ali Smith will be talking remotely to international listeners via all manner of means - phonelines, emails, skype calls, and social media. In Ali Smith's playfully ambitious nov...
Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge
September 07, 2020 13:25 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MBThis month’s World Book Club is the ninth in our series celebrating the greatest women writers at work across the globe. Harriett Gilbert and listeners from around the world talk to the world-renowned American author Elizabeth Strout at her home in New Brunswick, Maine, in the USA. The novel under discussion is her internationally-garlanded Olive Kitteridge: a novel made up of 13 luminous short stories set in small-town Maine and bound together by one larger-than-life character, the flawe...