With James Naughtie. Donna Tartt discusses her cult debut novel The Secret History, first published in 1992. "I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell." In a rare visit to the UK, Donna Tartt discusses The Secret History, which she has described as a 'why dunnit'. It's a murder mystery about a group of classic students at a privileged New England college; but from page one she discloses ...
Jan 05, 2014•28 min
With James Naughtie. Lee Child discusses the first in his hugely successful Jack Reacher series, Killing Floor, and published in 1997. He's now gone on to write 18 books featuring his grizzled action hero, a former military policeman of no fixed abode. Lee reflects on the genesis of Jack Reacher, who appeared when he decided to write fiction after being made redundant by Granada TV in 1995. Lee says that he and Jack were on a parallel journey in Killing Floor, as Jack has just left the military ...
Dec 01, 2013•28 min
With James Naughtie. Matthew Hollis discusses his Costa winning biography of the poet Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France. The book is an account of the final years of Thomas who died in action in the First World War in 1917. Although an accomplished prose-writer and literary critic, Edward Thomas only began writing poetry in 1914, at the age of 36. Before then, Thomas had been tormented by what he regarded as the banality of his work, by his struggle with depression and by his marriage....
Nov 03, 2013•28 min
With James Naughtie. The celebrated travel writer Paul Theroux discusses Dark Star Safari. The book is his account of an overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town, which he made 35 years after first living as a volunteer teacher in Malawi in the early 60s. In the programme he talks about the pleasures and hazards of travelling across countries that many consider no-go areas. He recalls the joy of wild camping by the little known pyramids of the Sudan, the peril of being shot at on the road, and h...
Sep 01, 2013•28 min
Deborah Moggach talks about her bestselling novel Tulip Fever, a story of love, greed and betrayal in 17th Century Amsterdam. Artist Jan van Loos falls for his married subject Sophia during 'tulipomania'. Prices for the recently introduced flower reached extraordinarily high levels - one bulb could fetch thousands of pounds - and then suddenly collapsed. James Naughtie and a group of invited readers discuss the story and its resonance with 21st century boom and bust economies, as well as the pai...
Aug 04, 2013•27 min
Audrey Niffenegger discusses her bestselling novel The Time Traveler's Wife with James Naughtie. It's a romantic story about a man - Henry - with a gene that causes him to involuntarily time travel, and the complications it creates for his marriage to Clare. The book opens when they meet in a Chicago library, and they both understand that he is a time traveller. But Clare knows much more than this about him as he has not yet been to the times and places where they have met before, and she rememb...
Jul 08, 2013•28 min
Jim Crace talks about his novel Quarantine. The novel is a re-working of the biblical account of Jesus' forty days spent in the wilderness; and, he says, has its roots in a 'Care in the Community' hostel in Moseley, Birmingham. First published in 1997, it was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize for Fiction. James Naughtie presents and a group of readers ask the questions. Recorded at the Stratford-Upon-Avon Literature Festival. July's Bookclub choice : The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Ni...
Jun 02, 2013•28 min
The National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke discusses her collection Ice which was shortlisted for last year's TS Eliot prize. Inspired by the snowy winters of 2009 and 2010, the poems in Ice move through the seasons : from Gillian's experience of being snowed in to the sound of an icicle as it begins to melt. From the bluebells of Spring (inspired by a Renoir painting at the National Museum of Art in Cardiff) through to a hot summer's day and on to the harvest moons of autumn to New Year's Eve. T...
May 05, 2013•28 min
Turkey's leading female novelist Elif Shafak discusses her novel The Forty Rules of Love. The novel is about finding love and is written in two strands. One is the friendship between a whirling dervish and the Sufi poet Rumi in 13th century Anatolia; the other is about a mother in contemporary America who finds inspiration in the historical story to break away from an unhappy life. Amazingly, Elif wrote the book in English, which she first learnt at the age of ten. She then worked with professio...
Apr 07, 2013•27 min
Andrew Miller discusses his novel Pure, winner of the 2011 Costa Prize. Set in pre-revolutionary Paris, the book is a gripping, earthy story about the clearing of a huge cemetery in the area now known as Les Halles. When a young engineer Jean-Baptiste Baratte arrives in Paris from Normandy, he is charged with the huge task of destroying the church and cemetery of Les Innocents in 1785. He is surrounded by a fully fledged cast of characters : LeCoeur, his friend and former colleague from the mine...
Mar 03, 2013•27 min
John Simpson, the BBC's World Affairs Editor and writer Hilary Spurling discuss George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, as part of the Radio 4 Real Orwell Season. Homage to Catalonia was first published in 1938 and is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War. This pivotal time in his writing career led in later years to Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm. James Naughtie presents and a group of readers ask the q...
Feb 03, 2013•28 min
Ben Macintyre discusses Agent Zigzag - his bestselling book on the true story of a professional criminal named Eddie Chapman, a successful British double agent who infiltrated the Nazi intelligence services during World War II. A notorious safe-breaker before the war, Chapman duped the Germans so successfully that he was awarded their highest decoration, the Iron Cross. He remains the only British citizen ever to win one. His story is one of chance and charm. Recruited as a spy whilst serving ti...
Jan 06, 2013•28 min
Sathnam Sanghera discusses his memoir The Boy With The Topknot, which won the 2009 Mind Book of the Year. Born to Punjabi parents in the West Midlands, the book is his account of his childhood in 1980s Wolverhampton. The youngest of a Sikh family, it wasn't until he was 24 that he discovered his mother had protected him from the family's secret : that his father had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia all his life. Subtitled "A memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton", writing the boo...
Dec 02, 2012•28 min
David Almond talks about his prize winning novel, Skellig, which is loved by children and adults alike. Skellig is the story of what happens when a Newcastle boy finds a strange man living in the garage of his new home. Michael sets out to help the ill Skellig recover. With him is his new unconventional friend Mina, who David Almond says is the star of the book. She introduces Michael to the worlds of nature and evolution, and to William Blake's poetry, his drawings of angels, his views on educa...
Nov 04, 2012•27 min
American writer Marilynne Robinson talks to James Naughtie and readers about her novel Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Marilynne Robinson enjoyed great success with her first novel, Housekeeping, when it was published in 1980. She reveals to Bookclub why there was a gap of twenty-four years before she was able to write Gilead, her second book; and how the voice of the narrator came to her when she found herself alone in a hotel one Christmas. Gilead is the autobiography of the Reveren...
Oct 07, 2012•28 min
Victoria Hislop talks to James Naughtie and readers about her debut novel The Island, a fictional account of a real life leper colony, the island of Spinalonga, just off the coast of Crete. First published in 2005, The Island has now sold over a million copies. Victoria says that when she first went to Spinalonga, as a curious tourist, she had no idea that leprosy still even existed in the 20th century. She thought it had been wiped out hundreds of years ago. Even today, around 500 new cases are...
Sep 02, 2012•28 min
Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje talks to James Naughtie and readers about his 1992 Booker prize-winning novel The English Patient. The novel tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian villa as the Second World War ends. The exhausted nurse Hana, the maimed thief Caravaggio, the bomb disposal expert Kip who are each haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless burns victim who lies in an upstairs room. As well as the mystery of the patient, the novel we...
Aug 05, 2012•28 min
To celebrate the centenary of novelist Elizabeth Taylor, David Baddiel is our guide to her best known book, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. Like many writers, David Baddiel thinks that Elizabeth Taylor has been overlooked and is one of the finest writers of the middle of the twentieth century. He has called her 'the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike'. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was the last book to be published in her life time, and was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1971. It...
Jul 01, 2012•28 min
Philippa Gregory, queen of historical fiction, talks about her best-selling tale of lust, jealousy and betrayal, The Other Boleyn Girl. James Naughtie presents and a group of readers ask the questions. The novel charts the lives of Anne Boleyn, and her sister Mary, thought to be the mistress of Henry VIII before Anne. Each in their turn are "the other Boleyn Girl", pawns of their fiercely ambitious, conniving family who in the novel use the girls to advance their own positions at the court of He...
Jun 03, 2012•28 min
Ross Raisin is a young writer who won much praise for his debut novel God's Own Country in 2008. He discusses the book with James Naughtie and a group of readers. It's the story of Sam Marsdyke who's a troubled nineteen year old young man living on a remote farm in the North Yorkshire Moors. It's a place of beauty and Sam resents the incomers, be they the ramblers he spies upon, or the new neighbours who've just moved up from London. Sam is one of contemporary fiction's unforgettable characters;...
May 08, 2012•28 min
Anne Enright talks to James Naughtie and readers about her 2007 Man Booker prize-winning novel The Gathering. The book was the surprise win of that year - beating Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. Chair of Judges Howard Davies proclaimed the novel had one of the best closing sentences of any he had ever read. The Gathering of the title is the wake of Liam Hegarty who has committed suicide by walking into the sea at Brighton. His sister Veronica, one of the remaining nine siblings, narrates. In an ex...
Apr 01, 2012•28 min
Alan Hollinghurst talks to James Naughtie and readers about his 2004 Man Booker prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty. Framed by the general elections of 1983 and 1987 which returned Margaret Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty is a story of love, class, sex and money - and AIDs. It won praise for the way it crawls deep under the skin of 1980's Britain. Protagonist Nick Guest is a young, gay Oxford graduate of modest means who is invited to stay with the wealthy Fedden family at their Notting...
Mar 05, 2012•27 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to the American writer and artist Art Spiegelman about his graphic novel Maus. First published in short frames in his experimental comic RAW in the 1970s, Maus the book has become a publishing phenomenon, selling over two million copies world wide. It tells the story of his parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, from their first meeting in pre-war Poland to their survival of the death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau and their move to New York after the war. Part of th...
Feb 05, 2012•28 min
Hunter Davies talks to James Naughtie and readers about his biography of The Beatles, first published in 1968. Recorded at the Cavern, Liverpool. In 1966-68 Hunter Davies spent eighteen months with the Beatles at the peak of their powers. As their only ever authorised biographer he had unparalleled access - not just to John, Paul, George and Ringo but to their friends, family and colleagues. He hung out in Abbey Road studios whilst they recorded Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At the end o...
Jan 01, 2012•28 min
December's Bookclub author is Sebastian Barry. Well known as a successful dramatist and novelist, his literary career became stellar when he won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year Award with this month's chosen book, The Secret Scripture; and he is considered one of Ireland's greatest living writers. The novel is told by Roseanne, who is uncertain of her age; she thinks she is now one hundred. She's been incarcerated in asylums in Ireland for over sixty years, and is writing the story of her life, ...
Dec 04, 2011•27 min
Iain Banks meets James Naughtie and readers at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh to talk about his debut novel The Wasp Factory, first published in 1984. This shocking novel is an insight into the life of sixteen year old Frank, a brutal and disturbed teenager who enjoys killing animal and insects all too much. But Frank isn't alone in his madness - his brother Eric has just escaped from an asylum, and is gradually making his way back home to the remote island house Frank shares with...
Nov 06, 2011•28 min
Arundhati Roy talks to James Naughtie and readers about her Booker prize winning novel The God of Small Things. It's Arundhati Roy's first and so far only book of fiction and it took the literary world by storm, winning the Booker Prize in 1997. It's a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who must be loved, and how, and how much". The book is a description of how the small things in life affect people's behaviour and...
Oct 02, 2011•28 min
Mohsin Hamid talks to James Naughtie and readers about his bestselling book The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This edition of Bookclub will be broadcast just two days after the novel has been featured as Radio 4's Book at Bedtime, and it's a timely choice as we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a sparse, gripping, short novel that tackles the complex issues of Islamic fundamentalism and America's 'war on terror' with ...
Sep 04, 2011•28 min
Donna Leon talks to James Naughtie and a group of readers about the first in her hugely successful crime series set in Venice, Death At La Fenice. The book launched the career of her fictional detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti in the early 1990s, and he is now beloved by readers. Like an Italian Maigret, he's a policeman of integrity. Brunetti also has a fulfilled family life with his intellectual and feminist wife Carla, and their two children, who are trapped in an eternal adolescence as t...
Aug 07, 2011•28 min
James Naughtie and readers talk to William Fiennes about his memoir The Music Room. The book is his account of growing up in a castle with an epileptic brother. It's an honest yet discrete story of a fascinating family and how they deal with the eldest brother's struggle with epilepsy. In his upbeat moments, Richard brims with tenderness and high spirits, and at his worst he is threatening and even violent. Richard dies of a seizure at forty-one; his life defined by damage done to his brain by h...
Jul 03, 2011•28 min
