Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times is set in a northern factory town at the height of the industrial revolution, far away from the writer’s normal stamping ground of London - but it certainly doesn’t lack the overlapping plots, the wide array of characters and the incorporation of melodrama, humour and tragedy that we associate so closely with the author. Dickens had travelled north himself as a journalist to cover a cotton strike in Preston and seen first hand the various ways in which the facto...
Oct 02, 2024•14 min
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is one of the most well-known and influential pieces of writing in Western literature. Initially presented as a true account, this tale of adventure, desert island shipwrecking and survival has been re-told and re-packaged for different audiences, different generations and different times - rom The Swiss Family Robinson to Lost In Space, and Lord of the Flies to Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway. The term ‘Robinsonade’ was even coined to identify ...
Sep 22, 2024•15 min
Set in the turbulent years of 20th century India, Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day brings us a story of family and political upheaval in the blistering heat of Old Delhi. John Yorke unpicks the threads that hold both family and community together until they fray and fall apart. From an opening in the 1980s we are taken backwards and forwards in time to find loyalties and tensions amongst siblings set against the backdrop of India’s turbulent history. The most significant event for India wa...
Aug 25, 2024•14 min
Set in the turbulent years of 20th century India, Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day brings us a story of family and political upheaval in the blistering heat of Old Delhi. John Yorke unpicks the threads that hold both family and community together until they fray and fall apart. From an opening in the 1980s, we are taken backwards and forwards in time to find loyalties and tensions amongst siblings set against the backdrop of India’s turbulent history. The most significant event for India w...
Aug 18, 2024•14 min
John Yorke looks at the first in Donna Leon’s hugely successful Venetian police series. Death at La Fenice introduces Leon’s likeable Commissario Guido Brunetti, and establishes the recipe that has made Leon one of the world’s best-loved crime writers, and Brunetti one of the most popular fictional detectives. Death at La Fenice was published in 1992, and opens with a dramatic interruption to a performance of La Traviata at Venice’s famous opera house. The death of a world-renowned conductor is ...
Aug 04, 2024•15 min
John Yorke takes a look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus. Mary Shelley began the short story that would develop into her Gothic novel in 1816 while she was still a teenager. It was published two years later when she was twenty. Despite her young age the book has mature themes: the perils of unregulated scientific experiment, the responsibilities that come with parenting, how society treats the vulnerable and outcast, and man’s role in the universe. Written at a time when ...
Jul 14, 2024•14 min
John Yorke takes a look at Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mary Wollstonecraft was a trailblazer, a human rights champion whose personal life defied convention and whose ideas changed the world. Born at a time when girls were encouraged to do needlework and prepare for marriage rather than being sent to school like their brothers, Mary rebelled against the notion and educated herself. As her ideas developed and she found her place among radical Dissenters, she fought ...
Jul 07, 2024•15 min
John Yorke explores Franz Kafka's first and unfinished novel The Man Who Disappeared. Kafka's re-imagining of an innocent's arrival and adventures in New York is, at first glance. the classic tale of rags to riches. Teenage Karl Rossman has been exiled by his parents to a fate unknown across the ocean with just a trunk of mementoes and a slowly smelling sausage. Millions of Kafka's fellow Czechs had also made that journey but Kafka only ever made his voyage of exploration on the page and in his ...
Jun 16, 2024•14 min
John Yorke explores the enduring mystery and power of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial. All Joseph K was expecting when he awoke was breakfast. Instead he is arrested for a nameless crime and finds his life gradually, utterly consumed by the process. Set in a nameless city very like the twisting alleyways and cramped confines of Kafka’s Prague, the book was only published after the writer’s death. Since then, it has become a world famous tale of unending, indefinable bureaucratic unease. John Yorke...
Jun 09, 2024•14 min
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke explores S R Crockett’s forgotten bestseller, a swashbuckling adventure story set in his native Galloway in south west Scotland. Written in 1894, The Raiders is part romance, part action thriller, and part historical fiction. The action takes place in 1715, during the reign of George I, a time when Galloway was awash with pirates, smugglers, cattle rustlers, gypsies and bandits. John suggests it was the Mis...
Jun 02, 2024•15 min
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke explores S R Crockett’s forgotten bestseller, a swashbuckling adventure story set in his native Galloway in south west Scotland. Written in 1894, Crockett’s novel is part romance, part action thriller, and part historical fiction. The action takes place in 1715, during the reign of George I, a time when Galloway was awash with pirates, smugglers, cattle rustlers, gypsies and bandits. John suggests it was th...
May 26, 2024•14 min
The Man Who Fell to Earth by American writer Walter Tevis was published in 1963. Unlike most sci-fi of its time, it’s not about space, far-off galaxies or a distant future, but set only a decade or so from the time of writing. When an inhabitant of the planet Anthea comes to Earth in search of the resources to save his world, he uses his knowledge of advanced technology to amass the fortune he needs to save his people from extinction. As Thomas Jerome Newton’s secret project takes shape at a sit...
May 12, 2024•15 min
John Yorke looks at Charlotte Keatley’s play My Mother Said I Never Should, written aged just 25 and first premiered at the Contact Theatre in Manchester in 1987. The story explores the lives and relationships of four generations of mothers and daughters born over the course of the 20th Century. Their very different lives reflect the sweeping societal changes of that period, and how each new generation is able to push further than their parents when it comes to pregnancy, careers and romantic lo...
Apr 29, 2024•14 min
John Yorke explores Rosamunde Pilcher’s sweeping family saga, The Shell Seekers. Published in 1987, this captivating story of life and love is a phenomenon in its own quiet way. It has been named among the best-loved books of all time, selling more than 10 million copies. The novel spans four decades in the life of Penelope Keeling, free-spirited and elegant, a mother of three children that she loves dearly - but does not always like. Penelope navigates relationships, love and loss against a Sun...
Apr 14, 2024•15 min
The Sportswriter, by the American novelist Richard Ford, is the first of what became a series of five novels following the life of Frank Bascombe – a failed writer of fiction who turns to writing about sport to make a living. Frank’s marriage to a woman only referred to as X is over - although he wishes it wasn’t – and Ralph, one of their three children, has died. Published in 1986, The Sportswriter was named one of Time magazine's five best books of the year and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulk...
Apr 07, 2024•15 min
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness remains one of the most enigmatic works of 19th Century literature, charting as it does the story of Marlow, the captain of a steamboat heading up an unnamed river in the employ of an unnamed organisation described simply ‘the Company’. He becomes fixated on tracking down the figure of Kurtz, a company agent in charge of a trading post - but this is no action adventure so typical of the time. John asks what the phrase Heart of Darkness - and Kurtz’s famous epigr...
Mar 17, 2024•14 min
John Yorke digs under the surface of two more of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, both of which once again reveal how deftly she marries psychological understanding with compelling narratives. The Blue Lenses, published in 1959, and The Little Photographer (1952) are both preoccupied with ‘seeing’ and how a lens can reveal a truth that might have otherwise been hidden. Du Maurier’s characteristic themes of truth, deception, jealousy and obsession thread themselves through these stories and Joh...
Mar 03, 2024•14 min
In 1971, Daphne du Maurier published Don’t Look Now and it was to become a landmark in the development of the psychological thriller. Du Maurier was an extraordinarily prolific writer producing a string of bestselling novels such as Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, but it’s in her short stories that we find her darkest and most disturbing work. In Don’t Look Now, a couple visit Venice trying to come to terms with the grief of losing their daughter. A blind psychic tells them she can see their daughter a...
Mar 03, 2024•14 min
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke looks at Jean Toomer’s Cane about African American life in 1920s America. Jean Toomer, born and raised in Washington DC, wrote Cane after a three month trip south to Georgia in 1921. Cane has a unique structure. Divided into three sections, the book is a series of vignettes, poems and short stories and concerns the lives of African Americans in the deep South and those that made the journey up to the northe...
Feb 24, 2024•15 min
The series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke examines Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Hermann Hesse was an established writer by the time he wrote Siddhartha and didn’t live to see its lionisation by the 60s counterculture. But even in his own time Hesse’s writing appealed to young people, particularly young men, in a way that he found irritating. John looks at why this book so appealed to younger generations, especially to the one that emerged in the 60s an...
Feb 18, 2024•15 min
John Yorke explores Robert Burns’s only long form narrative poem, Tam O’Shanter. He discovers Tam’s wild ride through a stormy Scottish night where witches and warlocks are at play. Robert Burns was born in 1759, one of the children of a tenant farming father and a mother who was a great singer and storyteller. He found fame with the publication of Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and it was the Scots language that gave his poetry such energy and vigour. Tam O’Shanter tells the story of a w...
Jan 27, 2024•14 min
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke explores Graham Greene’s dark, comic classic, Our Man in Havana. Set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, Our Man in Havana is a comic spy caper with a dark heart. In this the second episode on the novel, John considers what impact the place had on the work, and how Greene’s fictional locations became known as ‘Greeneland’. He also examines how Greene’s attitude to the question of loyalty, a recurring theme in his wr...
Jan 07, 2024•15 min
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke explores Graham Greene’s classic dark comedy, Our Man in Havana. Greene was already an established and successful novelist and screenwriter by the time he wrote Our Man in Havana and, in this first of two episodes about the book, John looks at the plot of what became a classic comedy thriller and at how deftly Greene outlined his characters. The book is set in pre-revolutionary Havana and John also hears ho...
Jan 07, 2024•15 min
John Yorke looks at the short story The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern. It’s Christmas Eve and George Pratt is contemplating suicide when a stranger appears almost by magic, and grants George a wish, that he’d never been born. When Stern wrote the story in 1943, he could find no one who wanted to publish it so he sent it out to friends as a Christmas card. One of those cards found its way to Frank Capra, one of the great film directors of the 1940s, and became a film that now defines Ch...
Dec 24, 2023•15 min
John Yorke takes a look at Tove Jansson's magical 1946 novel Comet In Moominland. Comet In Moominland is the second Moomin book and it’s a classic children’s tale. A comet is heading straight for earth, indeed to Moomin valley - so Moomintroll and his best friend Sniff head off on an adventure to try and do something about it. Their journey is eventful; they meet lots of new people and make lots of new friends but remain focussed on their mission to find out more about these faceless dangers, an...
Dec 23, 2023•14 min
John Yorke takes a look at A Grain of Wheat, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s groundbreaking book about the lead up to Kenyan Independence. Published in 1966 as part of the Heineman African Writers Series, A Grain of Wheat offers an authentic insight into Kenya’s Land and Freedom Army rebellion (better known in Britain as the Mau Mau) and its brutal suppression by British colonial authorities. Told from the perspective of various Kikuyu characters living in Kenya’s central highlands, it is set in the four da...
Dec 17, 2023•15 min
John Yorke shines a light on the dark, claustrophobic pages of Manuel Puig’s classic 1976 novel Kiss of the Spiderwoman, that went on to become a play, a musical and an Oscar-winning film. Puig wrote the novel, which focuses on the relationship between a gay window dresser and a revolutionary political prisoner, having fled the ruling military dictatorship in Argentina. John shows how the book celebrates the power not only of human connection but also the imagination, as the two central characte...
Dec 10, 2023•15 min
A Many-Splendoured Thin’, by the Eurasian author and doctor Han Suyin, was an instant hit in Britain and the States on its publication in 1952. Set in Hong Kong between 1949 and 1950, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the author’s own passionate and transformative love affair. The protagonist mirrors Han Suyin, herself – a Eurasian doctor originally from mainland China, born to a Chinese father and a Belgian mother. In real life, Han Suyin fell in love with an Australian war correspondent ...
Nov 26, 2023•15 min
The novel A Many-Splendoured Thing, by the Eurasian author and doctor Han Suyin, was an instant hit in Britain and the States on its publication in 1952. Set in Hong Kong between 1949 and 1950, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the author’s own passionate and transformative love affair. The protagonist mirrors Han Suyin, herself – a Eurasian doctor originally from mainland China, born to a Chinese father and a Belgian mother. In real life Han Suyin fell in love with an Australian war corre...
Nov 26, 2023•15 min
John Yorke looks at The Manxman by the Sir Thomas Hall Caine, a love story set on the Isle of Man. The novel broke sales records and changed the book industry forever when it was published in 1894. Hall Caine was globally famous, hugely successful, adored by readers and feted by royalty. The story was adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock, translated into 12 languages and performed on stage. Yet today, The Manxman and Hall Caine are almost completely forgotten. John looks at this hugely successfu...
Nov 19, 2023•15 min
