This month on World Book Club Harriett Gilbert will be talking with one of Sri Lanka’s leading writers, Romesh Gunesekera, about his acclaimed novel Reef. Reef is the moving, multi award-winning story of young Triton, a talented young chef who goes to work for Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamps, sea movements and the island's disappearing reef. So committed is Triton to pleasing his master’s palate that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradis...
Mar 02, 2013•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast To mark the release of the acclaimed film of David Mitchell’s masterpiece Cloud Atlas around the world, there’s another chance to catch the multiple prize-winning English author talking about his dazzling novel. With dramatic use of time-shifts and literary forms, Cloud Atlas circles the globe, reaching from the South Seas of the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future. Offering an enthralling and often chilling vision of humanity’s will to power and where it will lead us, David Mitchell...
Feb 02, 2013•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month in a very special edition, we’re celebrating that most English of novelists Jane Austen. It’s two hundred years this month since the publication of Pride and Prejudice and we’ve invited bestselling British novelist and Jane Austen aficionado PD James, along with Anglo-Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin, also a great Austen fan and from Australia Susannah Fullerton, President of the Australian Jane Austen Society, all here to share with us their passion for this much loved classic English no...
Jan 05, 2013•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert talks to one of New Zealand's greatest living writers, CK Stead, about his prize-winning novel My Name Was Judas. With this playful re-writing of the life and death of Jesus, CK Stead poses some profound and thought-provoking questions on the nature of belief and divinity itself. Judas's name has become synonymous with 'betrayer', but in this witty, and controversial retelling, some 40 years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally puts forward hi...
Dec 01, 2012•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling American writer Paul Auster about his acclaimed work The New York Trilogy. In three brilliant variations on the classic detective story, Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York City his own. Each interconnected tale exploits the elements of standard detective fiction to achieve an entirely new genre that was ground-breaking when it was published three decades ago. In each story the search for clues leads...
Nov 03, 2012•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month's World Book Club is brought to you from the Institute of Cervantes in London where Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling Spanish writer Javier Marias about his prize-winning work A Heart So White. This acclaimed novel explores profoundly disturbing questions about the nature of knowledge, curiosity and truth itself. When the narrator Juan marries his sweetheart Luisa he is haunted by family secrets that cast their long shadow over his contentment and ponders the nature of s...
Oct 06, 2012•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In September's edition of World Book Club superstar US novelist Jodi Picoult talks about her heart-rending novel My Sister's Keeper. A searing examination of what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person - My Sister's Keeper confronts the question of whether it is morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child’s life. In the programme Jodi talks with disarming openness about the near tragedy in her own life that helped to drive her to write the novel and she explains w...
Sep 01, 2012•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's searing yet ultimately uplifting coming-out, coming-of-age tale, in which a young girl learns to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing, and set out on her own path in life. To mark thirty years since its publication, here's another chance to hear the memorable World Book Club in which Jeanette Winterson discusses where fact meets fiction - there are distinct parallels to her own life. Hear how important this ground-breaking novel...
Jun 02, 2012•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the last edition of the London Calling season of World Book Clubs - which have been going out each Saturday during May. This week the programme are guests of The Nehru Centre - the cultural wing of the High Commission of India in London - and we're talking to acclaimed Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh about his haunting novel, The Shadow Lines. A moving and thought-provoking meditation on the very real yet invisible lines, which divide nations, people, and families, The Shadow Lines fo...
May 26, 2012•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week we've the third edition in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which are going out each Saturday during May. This week we're talking to Howard Jacobson at the first Soho Literary Festival in the heart of the UK capital about his dazzling Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question. A moving but often laugh-out-loud fictional foray into what it means to be Jewish Jacobson's award-winning novel features three old school friends who despite their very different lives have ne...
May 19, 2012•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrea Levy discusses her novel Small Island with a studio audience, and the author revisits the West London setting of her multi-prize-winning novel. A thought-provoking tale of love, friendship and immigration set in Earl's Court in 1948, Small Island focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own 'small island', move to England. Once in the mother country, however, for which the men had fought and died for during World War II, their reception is n...
May 12, 2012•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Coming up the first in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which will be going out each Saturday over the next four weeks. In the run up to the London Olympic games we'll be discussing four novels which focus on different aspects of the United Kingdom’s colourful and historic capital city. This week we talk to acclaimed novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd who will be discussing his haunting Whitbread prize-winning novel, Hawksmoor, with an audience at St George's Church, Bloo...
May 05, 2012•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast World Book Club celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of that modern classic novel Beloved with another chance to hear the programme with American writer Toni Morrison. In 2009 Toni Morrison came to the South Bank Arts Centre beside the River Thames in London to talk to a packed audience about her Pulitzer Prize-winning, international bestseller Beloved. Having lost none of its power to shock a quarter of a century on, Beloved stares unflinchingly into the abyss of racism and transf...
Apr 07, 2012•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert talks this month to American writer Jonathan Safran Foer about his 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. After finding a mysterious key left behind in his Dad's closet, Oskar sets out across New York hoping to find some answers. Both a meditation on pain, loss and the healing power of love - as well as an examination of the psyche o...
Mar 03, 2012•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast February 2012 marks the bicentenary of Victorian author Charles Dickens. In this special edition of World Book Club, biographer Claire Tomalin talks to Harriett Gilbert about Dickens novel Great Expectations live from the BBC Radio Theatre, with actor Simon Callow. (Image: Charles Dickens. Credit: Getty Images) For further details of the British Council’s Global Celebration of Charles Dickens visit: www.britishcouncil.org/dickens2012
Feb 04, 2012•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Acclaimed Maori writer Witi Ihimaera talks to Harriett Gilbert and a group of readers at the Cheltenham Literary Festival about his magical, lore-laden novel, The Whale Rider. It tells the haunting story of a spirited Maori girl, her tribe and their mysteriously intertwined destinies. Kahu, a 12-year-old girl struggles to become the chief of her tribe but her grandfather Koro, whose attention she craves, believes that this is a role reserved for males only. Kahu will not be ignored and in her qu...
Jan 07, 2012•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed British writer Penelope Lively about her Booker Prize winning novel Moon Tiger. A haunting tale of loss, loneliness and secret desires Moon Tiger is the kaleidoscopic story of maverick historian Claudia Hampton. Telling nurses on her death bed that she will write a "history of the world and in the process my own," she charts her intensely-lived life from her childhood in England after World War I to the war-torn desert plains of Egypt, 30 years later – and bey...
Dec 03, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Israeli writer David Grossman about his award-winning novel, To the End of the Land. Winner of - amongst others - the Wingate Jewish Book Prize for 2012, To the End of the Land is a novel of extraordinary power and lyrical intensity about the power of love and the devastating cost of war. Instead of celebrating her son Ofer’s discharge from the Israeli Army, Ora is appalled when he reenlists and is sent back to the front for a major offensive. Unable to bear t...
Nov 05, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast With the international release of the much anticipated film of We Need To Talk about Kevin in October, here's another chance to catch the World Book Club in which Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience talk to acclaimed American writer Lionel Shriver about this searing novel. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, We Need To Talk about Kevin is the profoundly disturbing story of a boy who, shortly before his 16th birthday, kills seven classmates in a high school massacre. Grippingly but...
Oct 01, 2011•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert talks to Hisham Matar about his stunning debut novel In The Country Of Men. Set in the bewildering world of Tripoli, it is the emotional tale of a young boy growing up, where fears, secrets and betrayal threaten the ties of family and friendship. The novel was shortlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize.
Sep 03, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hariett Gilbert talks to Irish author Colm Toibin about his book Brooklyn. A haunting tale of love, loss and familial duty, and winner of the 2009 UK Costa Novel Award, Brooklyn follows the fortunes of a young Irish woman who leaves home to make a new life for herself in 1950s New York. Hear how Colm's own painful memories of homesickness in America and Spain inform Eilis' experiences in Brooklyn and how her ambivalent relationship to the small town Ireland she's left behind also echoes Colm Toi...
Aug 06, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month's World Book Club comes from the church of St Mary Magdalene in Woodstock, England. Harriett Gilbert talks to Swedish superstar Henning Mankell about Faceless Killers, the first novel in his globally acclaimed series featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander. In it, an elderly farm couple is brutally murdered and the only clue is the wife's uttering of the word "foreign" before she dies. Wallander must find the killers before anger towards foreigners boils over. Hear about - and from - Walla...
Jul 02, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Acclaimed British writer Val McDermid discusses her page-turning crime novel A Place of Execution. A taut psychological suspense thriller told through two overlapping and interlocking narratives, A Place of Execution takes place both in the present day as well as 1963 rural England with two different investigators exploring the disappearance of a 13 year old girl who vanished without a trace on a bitterly cold winter's afternoon. This is not a cosy novel but one that confronts us with brutal rea...
Jun 04, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Detective Erast Fandorin investigates a student's apparent suicide in 19th-century Moscow. Russian writer Boris Akunin talks to Harriett Gilbert and listeners in the studio and around the world about his page-turning, best-selling crime novel The Winter Queen. After setting out to solve the apparent suicide of a university student in 19th Century Moscow, eager young investigator Erast Fandorin soon finds himself embroiled in a far-reaching international conspiracy. Boris Akunin tells us where he...
May 07, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dysfunctional Norwegian detective Harry Hole navigates a World War Two ghost story. Voted the best Norwegian crime novel ever, Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast delves into neo-Nazi activity in Norway and ends up re-examining a crime that had its roots in the battlefields of the Eastern Front in World War II. Hear how Jo admits that there’s more than a little of him in his dysfunctional detective Harry Hole and how his own parents ended up on opposing sides during the war, father fighting for the Nazis a...
Apr 02, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Spanish writer and historian Javier Cercas about his haunting novel Soldiers of Salamis. Internationally feted and winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2004, Soldiers of Salamis delves into the painful history of Spain's Civil War through the gripping, death-defying story of fascist soldier Sanchez Mazas. In his meditation on the nature of heroism and humanity in war, of remembrance and forgetting after war, the narrator moves from cynical indif...
Mar 05, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Eat the Rich the inimitable American satirist P.J. O'Rourke tours the world trying to understand why some countries 'have' and some countries 'have not'. He talks to Harriett Gilbert and answers questions about his book from a live studio audience and listeners around the world.
Feb 05, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert talks to the acclaimed German writer Bernhard Schlink about his explosively controversial novel, The Reader, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Made into an Oscar-winning Hollywood film with Kate Winslet The Reader tells of law student Michael Berg who, nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, re-encounters his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial.
Jan 01, 2011•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Damon Galgut's internationally acclaimed novel is the story of an idealistic medical graduate who arrives at an isolated South African hospital to take up a year's community service. Damon discusses his novel The Good Doctor, and answers questions from BBC World Service listeners around the world.
Dec 04, 2010•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert and an audience at the Drill Hall Theatre in Central London talk to bestselling Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie about her internationally acclaimed novel Burnt Shadows. Spanning much of the 20th Century and into the 21st, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties honoured and betrayed, and loves lost and found. In the devastating aftermath of the second atomic bomb, Hiroko Tanaka leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid In...
Nov 06, 2010•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
