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Bookclub

BBC Radio 4•www.bbc.co.uk
Books

Led by James Naughtie, a group of readers talk to acclaimed authors about their best-known novels

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Episodes

David Nicholls - One Day

David Nicholls talks to James Naughtie and a group of readers about his novel One Day

Sep 07, 2015•28 min

Henry Marsh - Do No Harm

With James Naughtie. Doctors work under the oath 'do no harm', but the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh says the decision whether to operate on a brain is rarely that simple. His account of his working life Do No Harm has caught the attention of readers all round the country since its publication a year ago and has this week Do No Harm won the South Bank Award for Literature, as well being shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Costa, and Wellcome book prizes this year. Henry discusses his memoir Do No Har...

Jun 07, 2015•28 min

Hisham Matar - In the Country of Men

James Naughtie and readers talk to Hisham Matar about his gripping debut novel In The Country Of Men. This international bestseller is set in Colonel Gaddafi's Libya of 1979, as the narrator Suleiman looks back on his childhood summer and tries to makes sense of the bewildering world around him. His best friend's father disappears and is next seen on state television at a public execution, a mysterious man sits outside the house all day, gives him sweets and asks for the names of his father's fr...

May 03, 2015•28 min

Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze

Adam Foulds discusses his Man Booker shortlisted novel The Quickening Maze with James Naughtie and a group of readers. Set in the 1840s, The Quickening Maze tells the story of the poet John Clare, and his incarceration at High Beach Asylum in London's Epping Forest. Run by the charismatic and reformist Dr Matthew Allen, its principles include occupational and talking therapies. Based on real life events, amongst the patients is Septimus Tennyson, brother to the young poet Alfred Tennyson. The Te...

Apr 05, 2015•28 min

Judith Kerr - When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

With James Naughtie. Judith Kerr discusses her novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. First published in 1971, she wrote it for her son in order to explain the story of her own family's flight from Nazi Germany. Her father was a drama critic and a distinguished writer whose books were burned by the Nazis. The family passed through Switzerland and France before arriving finally in England in 1936. Kerr found herself a fairly willing refugee, seeing her long travels as a great adventure. Her parents...

Feb 01, 2015•28 min

Marina Lewycka - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

James Naughtie's first guest on Bookclub for 2015 is Marina Lewycka. Marina was born in Kiel, Germany, after the war, and moved to England with her family when she was about a year old. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction 2005. Nadezhda and her sister Vera are dismayed when their eighty-four year ...

Jan 04, 2015•28 min

Patrick O'Brian - Master and Commander

With James Naughtie. In a special 200th edition of the programme we celebrate the centenary of author Patrick O'Brian and Allan Mallinson is our guide to the first in his hugely popular series of Napoleonic naval stories, Master and Commander. Known as the Aubrey/Maturin novels, the twenty books are regarded by many as the most engaging historical novels ever written. Master and Commander establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his ship's surgeon a...

Dec 07, 2014•28 min

Blake Morrison - And When Did You Last See Your Father?

With James Naughtie. Poet Blake Morrison talks about his memoir of growing up in Yorkshire in the fifties and sixties, the son of two local GPs. It's an honest account of family life, father-son relationships and bereavement. The book also movingly chronicles his father's death in 1991, and attempted to resolve some of the secrets in his father's life. First published in 1993, And When Did You Last See Your Father? became a bestseller, was adapted into a film starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbe...

Nov 02, 2014•28 min

Tim Winton - Dirt Music

With James Naughtie. Celebrated Australian writer Tim Winton discusses his novel Dirt Music with a group of readers. Tim reveals how after seven years of writing Dirt Music, he was unable to hand it in to his publisher on the agreed date. He felt ashamed of the novel and that it wasn't ready; if he found himself getting lost in it so would the reader. He spent the next fifty-five days redrafting and rewriting, and the novel went on to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2002 and is consider...

Oct 05, 2014•28 min

Allan Massie - A Question of Loyalties

With James Naughtie. Recorded at the BBC at the Edinburgh Festivals, Allan Massie discusses his novel A Question of Loyalties. First published in 1989, the book is widely acclaimed as his finest. The novel engages with all the complexities and ambiguities of loyalty and nationality as it follows a family through the divisions in France during World War II, and the repercussions which last for decades. In the early 1950s Etienne de Balafré strives to find out what happened to his father when the ...

Sep 07, 2014•28 min

Sadie Jones - The Outcast

With James Naughtie. Sadie Jones talks about her novel The Outcast which won the Costa First Novel award in 2008. The book is about a boy called Lewis - his childhood and adolescence - as he grows up in the stultifying world of the home counties in the late forties and fifties. It's a tale of drunkenness, violence and a fair amount of sex, set amongst the well-brought-up professional classes. It is also a love story. Sadie says : There's something fascinating about the 50s, the cataclysm of the ...

Aug 03, 2014•27 min

Lorrie Moore - Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

With James Naughtie. The celebrated American writer Lorrie Moore discusses her short novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? In the early nineties, Lorrie Moore was wandering through an art gallery when she came upon a painting with this same intriguing title, depicting two young girls looking at a pair of bandaged frogs. Lorrie Moore bought the painting, and borrowed its name and imagery for her second novel. She says the book is not autobiographical except "in a spiritual way." Her intent was to...

Jul 06, 2014•28 min

Emma Donoghue - Room

With James Naughtie. Emma Donoghue discusses her novel Room with an invited group of readers. Donoghue, an Irish writer living in Canada, tells the story of a five-year-old boy, Jack, who has been imprisoned with his mother in a tiny room - 11 feet by 11 feet - for his whole life. Emma was inspired to write Room after reading about European kidnapping cases such as the Fritzls in Austria, and so Jack was born into captivity after his mother was taken by a stranger at the age of 19 and held priso...

Jun 01, 2014•28 min

Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap

With James Naughtie. Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas responds to readers' questions about his award-winning debut The Slap. The book generated considerable debate - should you slap a child who's misbehaving, but isn't yours? In this controversial novel Tsiolkas presents an apparently harmless domestic incident from eight very different perspectives and examines how its aftermath reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen. He explains how he uses this one event to di...

May 06, 2014•28 min

John Banville - The Sea

With James Naughtie. Celebrated Irish writer John Banville discusses his novel The Sea which won the Man Booker prize in 2005. In The Sea, middle-aged art historian Max Morden loses his wife to cancer and is compelled to go back to the seaside resort where he spent childhood holidays. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. John Banville talks about the power of rev...

Apr 06, 2014•28 min

Disobedience - Naomi Alderman

With James Naughtie. Naomi Alderman, listed as one of Granta's Best Young Novelists 2013, responds to readers' questions about her first novel Disobedience. Alderman, herself a product of London's Jewish community, tells the story of Ronit, a young woman who's escaped her Orthodox upbringing for independence in New York. Ronit is forced to face her past when she returns home after her father, a pre-eminent Rabbi, dies. Disobedience won the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers. Producer: Dymphna Fly...

Mar 02, 2014•28 min

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner

With James Naughtie. Khaled Hosseini talks about his global bestselling novel, The Kite Runner with a group of invited readers. The book describes how the happiness of an afternoon's kite flying competition in late-1970s Kabul is broken when young Amir fails to help his best friend Hassan avoid a terrible incident. The effects on the duo's friendship are devastating. Over 20 years later, Amir returns to Afghanistan from America, determined to redeem himself. Khaled Hosseini explains the unequal ...

Feb 02, 2014•28 min
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