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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

Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn

Colm Tóibín discusses his best-selling novel Brooklyn with James Naughtie and a group of invited readers. Brooklyn follows the fortunes of a young Irish woman Eilis Lacey as she leaves home to make a new life in 1950s New York. Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed and left behind. Just as her homesickness abates and she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back t...

Jul 01, 2018•35 min

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood discusses her dystopian masterpiece The Handmaid's Tale with James Naughtie and a group of readers. This edition celebrates Bookclub's 20th anniversary and includes contributions from former alumni of Bookclub such as Ali Smith, Eimear McBride and Evie Wyld; as well as the reading group made up of Radio 4 listeners. Thirty three years ago, Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, a novel about a futuristic America, which following a major ecological disaster, is ruled by a ...

Jun 03, 2018•59 min

Patrick Gale - A Place Called Winter

Patrick Gale discusses his novel, A Place Called Winter, set at the beginning of the 20th century. The life of Patrick's own great-grandfather Harry Cane provides the backdrop for a fictional story about the character Harry Cane, who leaves behind his wife and daughter in order to keep a scandalous love affair with another man quiet, and emigrates to the harsh wilderness of Canada. Harry signs up for an emigration programme to the newly colonised Canadian prairies. Remote and unforgiving, his al...

Mar 04, 2018•29 min

Colin Thubron - In Siberia

James Naughtie and a group of readers talk to the renowned travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron about his account of travelling through Russia in the late 1990s, In Siberia. It's the story of how Thubron made a 15,000-mile journey through an astonishing region - one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth. He journeyed by train, river and truck among the people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union, travelling among Buddhists and animists, radical Christian sects, reactionar...

Jan 07, 2018•28 min

Clive James

James Naughtie and readers talk to Clive James about the first volume of his autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, which has sold over a million copies. Clive James is a poet, essayist, novelist, documentarist, critic, talk show host, travel writer, cultural commentator - and red-hot tango dancer. The audience talk to Clive about Unreliable Memoirs, which covers his boyhood years in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney. Clive was born in 1939; the other event that year (he says) was the outbreak of war, fro...

Dec 31, 2017•27 min

Edward St Aubyn - Mother's Milk

James Naughtie and a group of readers talk to author Edward St Aubyn, who is best known for his five autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, which dissect the agonies of family life with honesty, wit and precision. His debut novel Never Mind won a Betty Trask award, while our chosen book is the fourth in the Melrose series, Mother's Milk, and was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker prize. In Mother's Milk, the middle aged Patrick Melrose is married with two young children. He finds his wife con...

Nov 05, 2017•28 min

Peter Hoeg - Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Peter Høeg's internationally bestselling Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow was the original Scandi-crime thriller. First published in 1992 the novel's runaway success was due to its extraordinary central character, 37 year old Smilla Qaavigaaq Jasperson, as well as the unfamiliar backdrop of snowy Copenhagen and the icy wastes of Greenland. Smilla is half-Dane and half-Inuit; she is unmarried, childless, independent and irascible and yet she forms an unlikely friendship with her neighbour six year ...

Oct 01, 2017•28 min

Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Michael Chabon talks about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay with James Naughtie and a group of readers. The novel follows the story of the teenage Josef Kavalier, who makes a daring escape from the Germans in Prague in 1939, leaving his family behind. He travels across Europe and eventually arrives at his cousin Samuel Clayman's house in Brooklyn. There the pair discover a shared love of the burgeoning comic book world of Superheroes - Joe Kavalier is the artist, and Sam Clay, as he...

May 07, 2017•28 min

Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

Sunjeev Sahota discusses his novel The Year of the Runaways which was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. The Year of the Runaways follows the stories of three undocumented Indian men who share a house in Sheffield. Tochi has fled India after his family were killed in a Caste-related massacre; Avtar arrives on a student visa, but intending to work. Randeep, Avtar's friend and neighbour, is the beneficiary of a sham marriage. In a flat on the other side of town lives Randeep's visa-wife, t...

Apr 02, 2017•28 min

Jonathan Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer talks about his acclaimed novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Set in the aftermath of 9/11, it is the story of a young boy coming to terms with the tragedy of his father's death in the World Trade Centre. hen he find s an envelope with the word 'Black' written on it in his father's hand he sets out to find everyone in the city called Black, to see if he can pick up a clue. After finding a mysterious key in a left behind in his father's closet, in an envelope labelled ...

Mar 05, 2017•28 min

Barbara Trapido - The Travelling Hornplayer

Novelist Barbara Trapido has been delighting readers over a forty year career. In The Travelling Hornplayer (1998) she spins a tale of betrayal, misunderstanding, coincidence and the passions of youth, all with her subversive and entertaining sense of humour. From its haunting start : "Early on in the morning of my interview, I woke up and saw my dead sister" to its grand finale at an Oxford College, The Travelling Hornplayer zips along with plot twists and character turns, shocking revelations ...

Feb 05, 2017•28 min

John Lanchester - Capital

John Lanchester talks to James Naughtie and a group of readers about his novel Capital, which was a major BBC TV drama in 2015. The residents of an affluent street in London are busy getting on with their lives when one day something strange happens. Every house in the street has an identical, mysterious postcard pushed through their letterboxes that simply states "'We Want What You Have.' At first, the residents of Pepys Road, who are from mixed racial and social backgrounds, dismiss the notes ...

Jan 01, 2017•28 min

Jay McInerney - Bright Lights, Big City

American writer Jay McInerney discusses his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City with James Naughtie and a group of readers. Bright Lights, Big City not only cemented Jay McInerney as a superstar among debut novelists, but came to define the culture of 80s New York in all its gritty yet glamorous glory. We follow the young unnamed narrator - he's 'You' throughout the book - during a whirlwind week in New York. He is bored with his job on a Manhattan magazine, wants to be a writer, and has been ab...

Dec 29, 2016•28 min
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