James Naughtie and readers talk to American writer Nicole Krauss, shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize. Our chosen novel is her critically acclaimed The History of Love. It's a complex tale of loss - a lost manuscript, lost homelands, characters grieving for lost loved ones. There are four separate narrators who are all drawn to the lost book - also called The History of Love. Leo Gursky is at the end of his life, tapping his radiator each evening to let his neighbour know he's still alive, ...
Jun 05, 2011•28 min
Andrew O'Hagan is a rising star in the literary world. He joins James Naughtie and readers to discuss his novel Be Near Me, the story of Father David, an aesthetic English Catholic priest working in a working class community in Ayrshire. This is a poignant story of a man who doesn't fit in. Father David is trapped by class hatreds, and troubled by sexual feelings which he struggles to keep submerged. He's a character who's almost intent on self destruction, and as the reader follows his story, w...
May 01, 2011•28 min
Recorded at the Verbal Arts Centre in Londonderry/City of Derry, James Naughtie and readers talk to one of Ireland's finest writers - Jennifer Johnston. Now in her eighties, Jennifer has been called 'The Quiet Woman' of Irish literature. Her distinguished career has spanned more than 40 years and has netted the Whitbread Prize among her many awards. Her books are taught on the Irish school curriculum and in American Universities. The chosen novel for this edition of Bookclub is one of her later ...
Apr 03, 2011•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to Benjamin Zephaniah, the poet and novelist who's equally popular with both adults and children. Our chosen novel is Refugee Boy, written for young adults. Benjamin is perhaps best known for his performance poetry with a political edge, but he has also written novels for young people. Benjamin is interested in international affairs and travels extensively throughout the developing world. He has visited refugee camps in places like Gaza and Montenegro and in Refug...
Mar 04, 2011•27 min
James Naughtie and a group of readers talk to journalist Tim Butcher about his bestselling travel book Blood River. When Tim Butcher was appointed the Daily Telegraph's correspondent to South Africa in 2000, he became obsessed with the Democratic Republic of Congo. This vast country dominated a map of Africa on his office wall and he began to plan a journey following in the footsteps of a famous predecessor - Henry Stanley. Stanley, of Dr Livingstone renown, had travelled along the route of the ...
Feb 03, 2011•27 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to this year's Man Booker prize winner - Howard Jacobson. The chosen book for this edition of Bookclub is the one he says he wants people to read : The Mighty Walzer, first published in 1999. Peculiarly, it is a comic novel about the joy and despair of table tennis. It's also a portrait of a Jewish boyhood in Manchester, showing how the main character - Oliver Walzer - comes to terms with the demands of puberty and his sporting genius; as well as the attentions of...
Jan 05, 2011•27 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to Sarah Hall about her novel The Carhullan Army, recorded at the Chapter and Verse Literature Festival in Liverpool. Sarah Hall is being tipped as one of the most interesting up and coming novelists of her generation. By the age of thirty-five she had already been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. The chosen book in this month's programme is The Carhullan Army, her tale about a flooded post-apocalyptic Britain, and how a group of women are living on the outsi...
Dec 05, 2010•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to award winning biographer Claire Tomalin about her life of Thomas Hardy - The Time-Torn Man. Claire Tomalin is celebrated for her ability to create an intimacy of her subjects' life, whether it's Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan or in this edition of Bookclub, the author and poet Thomas Hardy. Claire reveals a personal relationship with Hardy - with childhood memories of her sister reciting his poem 'Lyonnesse'; and how she snuck into h...
Nov 07, 2010•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to the Irish writer Roddy Doyle about his Booker prize winning novel Paddy Clarke HA HA HA. In the novel ten year old Paddy rampages through the streets of suburban Dublin with a pack of like-minded boys, playing cowboys and Indians, etching their names in wet concrete and lighting fires. To get into the character of the boy Roddy took himself into his own childhood memories. He walked round Dublin and tried to remember how the City looked from a child's eye view,...
Oct 01, 2010•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to the Canadian writer Yann Martel about his novel Life of Pi, which won the 2002 Man Booker prize and went on to be a global phenomenon. James Naughtie chairs the programme. October's Bookclub choice : 'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha' by Roddy Doyle Producer : Dymphna Flynn.
Sep 05, 2010•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to American writer Siri Hustvedt about her novel What I Loved. Siri Hustvedt's novel is part love story, thriller, and part family saga. It's set in New York's glamorous art world, and starts in 1975 when an art historian buys a remarkable painting of a woman and tracks down the artist. The two men become good friends and their lives intertwine as their sons grow up together. In the boys' teenage years the worlds of the two families fall apart and the novel change...
Aug 01, 2010•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to the Swedish thriller writer Henning Mankell about his novel Sidetracked, featuring his detective Kurt Wallander. Henning Mankell's character is now in the pantheon of fictional detectives. Like Conan Doyle before him, Mankell receives letters from readers addressed to Kurt Wallander. They think he's real because he's like us. He's a detective who suffers angst about the way the world is changing, readers witness his depressions and his difficult relationships w...
Jul 04, 2010•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to the celebrated author Lynne Reid Banks about her first novel, The L-Shaped Room. It was an instant success and has been in print ever since it was published exactly fifty years ago. It's the story of Jane, a single young woman who falls pregnant. Reading The L-Shaped Room again in 2010, it's easy to forget what a taboo it was to be pregnant and unmarried in the early 1960s. Jane is a brave character who decides to bring up the baby by herself, after her father ...
Jun 06, 2010•28 min
Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most prominent writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Fiction, joins James Naughtie and readers to discuss My Name is Red. The novel is a complicated mixture of murder mystery, fairy tale and exploration of the medieval world of the Turkish miniaturist painter. The novel begins - surreally - from the point of view of the murdered man; his body thrown down the bottom of a well, he waits for this death to be discovered. The story is then taken up by a myriad of characters, ...
May 02, 2010•27 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to Jeanette Winterson about her breakthrough first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, about a girl growing up in an Evangelical Christian group. This Spring Jeanette is celebrating twenty five years since the book was first published - the question the book has always raised is how much of it is autobiographical? Because there are distinct parallels, the main character is called Jeanette, she lives in the same kind of Northern mill town and had a similar story....
Apr 04, 2010•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to Canadian author Douglas Coupland about his cult novel Generation X. First published in 1991, it became a worldwide bestseller and defined a generation. Set during a time of yuppies and youth unemployment, the characters in Generation X are all in their late 20s, highly educated but with no ambition - they work in bars, and tell each other stories. This is the novel that made 'McJob' a popular term; and looking back at the novel Douglas speaks movingly of his ow...
Mar 07, 2010•28 min
World-wide bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith meets readers to discuss the first in his series of humorous novels set in Edinburgh - 44 Scotland Street. The presenter is James Naughtie. The book tells the story of the interlocking lives of the inhabitants of adjoining flats in a house in the Georgian New Town of Edinburgh - their comic adventures, their foibles and accidents, their chance criss-crossings day-to-day. McCall Smith talks about the challenges of writing one thousand words a d...
Jan 03, 2010•27 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to celebrated American author John Irving about his novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. The novel starts with a shock - the eponymous hero hits a foul ball in a baseball match and kills his best friend's mother. It then moves through to spooky premonitions during an amateur performance of A Christmas Carol, to a drunken psychiatrist driving down school steps, to a bloody end during the Vietnam war. Yet there is pattern and meaning in such bizarre antics, and part of t...
Dec 06, 2009•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to Linda Grant about her novel When I Lived in Modern Times, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000. Linda is known for bringing a strong Jewish identity to most of her writing. 'Scratch a Jew and you've got a story', remarks the main character Evelyn Sert on the story's first page as she looks over her life. The novel follows Evelyn - hairdresser, spy, lover - on her voyage from post-war London to Tel Aviv, where the British are preparing to leave Palesti...
Nov 01, 2009•27 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to Gillian Slovo about her novel Red Dust, a courtroom drama set in post-apartheid South Africa. Gillian is the daughter of Joe Slovo, one of the founding members of the African National Congress, and Ruth First, an anti-apartheid campaigner murdered by security forces in the early 1980s. The novel draws heavily on Gillian's own experience of coming face to face with her mother's killer during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings of the new South Africa....
Oct 04, 2009•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to travel writer and literary critic Robert Macfarlane about his book The Wild Places, in which he sets out to discover if there remain any genuinely wild places in Britain and Ireland. It is an account of journeys that he made to the remaining wilderness in the islands. He climbs hills and mountains, walks across moors and bogs, luxuriates beside hidden lochs, swims through caves and disappears into forests, all in search of that special quality of solitude in co...
Sep 06, 2009•27 min
James Naughtie and readers meet the best-selling writer CJ Sansom. They discuss Dissolution, the first in his series of Tudor mysteries featuring the investigator Matthew Shardlake. Shardlake is sent to Sussex to investigate a murder in a monastery, just as Henry VIII is beginning his reformation of the Church.
Aug 02, 2009•27 min
James Naughtie and readers meet Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty to discuss his Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Grace Notes, which concerns a young female composer very much in a man's world. Now living in Scotland, MacLaverty returns to his native Belfast especially for the recording of the programme.
Jul 05, 2009•28 min
Orange Prize winner Kate Grenville talks to James Naughtie about her novel The Secret River and answers questions from a group of readers. Told through the eyes of 19th-century deportee William Thornhill and his family as they arrive in Australia, the novel examines the themes of ownership, belonging and identity from the point of view of the settlers and the Aboriginal people who were already there. Writing the book, says Kate Grenville, was 'like getting a new set of eyes and ears'....
Jun 07, 2009•28 min
James Naughtie and readers meet Chinese author Xiaolu Guo to talk about her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. It is a story about discovery, language and understanding, and how cultural differences can sometimes be too great for a relationship to last.
May 03, 2009•27 min
As he prepares to leave the post, Andrew Motion talks to James Naughtie about his 10 years as Poet Laureate. He discusses his collection Public Property, which was the first to be published after he became Poet Laureate. Some of the poems were written to mark or celebrate events or people. Others reveal some of his own strongest influences - the countryside, his upbringing and his parents as well as poets he most admires, including Wordsworth, Keats, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin.
Apr 05, 2009•28 min
James Naughtie talks to the author and part-time stand-up comedian AL Kennedy about her 2007 Costa prize-winning novel, Day, the story of RAF gunner Alfred Day and how he comes to terms with the end of the Second World War.
Mar 01, 2009•28 min
James Naughtie talks to the novelist Bernard Cornwell. He joins an audience of readers to discuss the first novel in his series set in Saxon England, The Last Kingdom. The novel centres on the story of Uhtred Ragnarson, a Northumbrian boy captured by the invading Vikings and raised as one of their own, who returns to the Saxons after the Danish warrior who raised him is killed.
Feb 01, 2009•28 min
James Naughtie talks to the psychologist Oliver James. He joins an audience of readers to put his case against 'affluenza', a virus which he says is sweeping through the English-speaking world. Written just before the advent of the credit crunch, he points out that the aspiration to and trappings of affluence might be emotionally harmful.
Jan 04, 2009•27 min
James Naughtie talks to the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. He joins an audience of readers to discuss his novel The Glass Palace.
Dec 07, 2008•28 min
