The Australian writer Helen Garner joins Harriett Gilbert as World Book Club continues its celebration of women writers. She’ll be talking about her 2008 novel The Spare Room. It’s the story of two women: Nicola, who has cancer, and Helen who looks after her for three challenging weeks. Helen has her doubts about the unconventional clinic where Nicola has sought out treatment, but she nonetheless throws herself into the role of nurse, finding some comfort in the practical demands of the job. Bas...
Aug 01, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month, for the seventh World Book Club edition celebrating International Women writers, Harriett Gilbert is joined by the remarkable British writer Bernardine Evaristo from her home in east London to talk about her Booker-Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. Although still unable to gather an audience together in a studio, we take questions from listeners from all around the world via phonelines, tweets and emails to once again create a truly global event. Girl, Woman, Other charts the l...
Jul 06, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club talks to acclaimed British author Deborah Levy about her Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Hot Milk. In this era of coronavirus we are sadly not able to gather together in a studio but we will be talking remotely to international listeners via phonelines, emails, skype calls, social media – you name it! In Levy’s hypnotic tale of female sexuality two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and her doctors are mystified....
Jun 08, 2020•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club marks the recent worldwide publication of The Mirror and The Light by treating you to a repeat of our memorable edition of the programme with the double-Booker prize-winning British writer Hilary Mantel. Recorded two years ago at the Man Booker 50 Festival at the South Bank Centre, which was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the renowned prize, Hilary Mantel discusses the second volume in her acclaimed series of novels about Thomas Cromwell. Bring Up the Bodies delve...
May 04, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Long-listed for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, Bhutto’s lyrical debut novel unfolds over the course of one morning in Mir Ali, a small town in Pakistan's Tribal Areas close to the Afghan border. Set during the American invasion of Afghanistan, it chronicles the lives of five young people trying to live and love in a world on fire. On a day seemingly like any other, three brothers meet for breakfast before going their separate ways. Three hours later their day will end in devastating circ...
Apr 06, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani joins Harriett Gilbert in the Radio Theatre at the BBC and readers from around the world to talk about her novel Lullaby, the devastating story of a nanny, Louise, who kills two children in her care. The book – an international bestseller – opens with this horrific crime then travels back in time to discover why an apparently perfect nanny turned into a cold blooded murderer. Through the lives of Louise and her employers, Slimani explores Paris’s economy and ...
Mar 08, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert is joined by Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah for this month’s edition of World Book Club, continuing 2020’s celebration of women’s writing. Petina will be answering questions from readers around the world about her novel The Book Of Memory. It’s narrated by Memory, an albino woman convicted of murdering her wealthy white guardian, who took her away from life in the townships when she was a child. In this testimony, written from her prison cell, Memory looks back over her life ...
Feb 03, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Naomi Alderman talks about her extraordinary novel The Power which imagines that women suddenly develop an electrifying strength, putting them firmly in control - of everything. The new order spreads around the globe, liberating women from enslavement and subjugation but also freeing their darker ambitions. It’s a pacey read, teeming with characters and plot lines. Alderman focusses on Roxy, the teenage daughter of a London crime lord; Tunde a Nigerian journalist chasing the story around the glo...
Jan 08, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club is in Germany marking the 30th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall with a programme from the St George’s Bookshop in the heart of the capital. We’re speaking with one of the country’s greatest living writers Jenny Erpenbeck about her highly acclaimed novel, Visitation. Visitation’s central character is a beguiling house on the forested banks of a lake in Brandenburg near Berlin, which is inhabited by various occupants, one dislodging the next over the course of ...
Dec 09, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast David Nicholls talks about his internationally successful novel Us. Almost three decades after their improbable relationship first blossomed in London biochemist Douglas and his attractive artist wife Connie live seemingly happily enough with their moody 17-year-old son, Albie just outside London. Then Connie drops a bombshell: she thinks she wants a divorce. Devastated but determined to fight to save their marriage, Douglas insists that the family stick to a previously planned Grand Tour of Eur...
Nov 05, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Colombian novelist and journalist Héctor Abad discusses his memoir Oblivion, a heart-breaking tribute to his late father. Héctor Abad Gómez was a medical doctor, professor and human rights campaigner in the city of Medellín, Colombia, whose criticism of the Colombian regime led to his brutal murder by paramilitaries in 1987. One of the most exquisitely written accounts of profound love between a father and son in modern literature, Oblivion paints a picture of a remarkable man who followed h...
Oct 07, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast British writer Ann Cleeves discusses Raven Black, the haunting first novel in her award-winning Shetland crime series, with presenter Harriett Gilbert, a studio audience and readers around the world. On a remote Scottish island in the Shetland Isles, a teenage girl is found dead in a snow-covered field. Some years ago, another young girl disappeared in mysterious circumstances near to his house, but the body was never found. As Inspector Perez and local police pursue their investigation a veil o...
Sep 09, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Acclaimed Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma talks about his novel The Fishermen. Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, The Fishermen tells the story of four young brothers who defy their authoritarian father to go fishing in a forbidden river on the outskirts of the western Nigerian town where they live. After a local madman issues a shocking prophecy that the oldest brother will be killed by one of the others, the strong family bonds begin to break down and a tragic chain of events of almost...
Aug 05, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Acclaimed British writer Andrea Levy was only 62 when she died earlier this year. This month another chance to hear this hugely popular author talking about her multi-prize-winning novel Small Island. A thought-provoking tale of love, friendship and immigration set in London in 1948, Small Island focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, through a group of unforgettable characters, who, escaping economic hardship on their own 'small island,' move to England. Once in the Mother Country, how...
Jul 01, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club talks to award-winning writer Siri Hustvedt about her novel What I Loved, a troubling, often turbulent tale of love, art, friendship and heartbreak set amidst the darkly flamboyant New York art scene of the late twentieth century. Scholars Leo and his wife Erica admire, then befriend, artist Bill and his first and second wives. Their respective sons Matthew and Mark grow up together until the first in a series of tragedies strikes; a calamity which devastates the whole...
Jun 03, 2019•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club talks to award-winning American writer Donna Leon about her celebrated novel Death at La Fenice. When legendary German conductor Helmut Wellauer is found dead in his dressing room two acts into a performance of La Traviata at Venice’s spectacular opera house, police commissario Guido Brunetti is called in. Despite being used to the corruptions of the city, as labyrinthine as the gorgeously crumbling city itself, Brunetti is shocked at the number of enemies Wellauer has...
May 08, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Highly acclaimed British author Tessa Hadley talks to Harriett Gilbert about her award-winning novel - The Past. Recorded at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival in the elegant surroundings of The Mathematical Institute, part of the university. Tessa skilfully evokes a brewing storm of lust and envy, the indelible connections of memory and affection, the fierce, nostalgic beauty of the natural world, and the shifting currents of history running beneath the surface of these seemingly steady li...
Apr 08, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month a special edition of BBC World Book Club coming from Nairobi in Kenya. Lawrence Pollard talks to celebrated Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in the company of an enthusiastic audience of readers and students who have gathered in the bustling bookshop of Nairobi University where Ngugi was once a director. We’re discussing Ngũgĩ's landmark novel A Grain of Wheat, set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain. In it the tangled narratives of...
Mar 05, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month we’re talking to bestselling British writer JoJo Moyes about her wildly popular novel Me Before You. Lou is a small town girl in need of a job. Will is a successful high-powered city trader who becomes wheelchair bound following an accident and decides he doesn’t want to go on living. And then Lou is hired for six months to be his new caretaker. Worlds apart and trapped together by circumstance, the two get off to a rocky start. But Lou is determined to prove that life is worth living...
Feb 04, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast World Book Club talks to one of the world’s leading thriller writers, British-born Lee Child. Killing Floor is the first book in the internationally popular Jack Reacher series and presents the all-action hero for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode: a righter of wrongs, and not a man to mess with. Early one morning Reacher jumps off a bus in the middle of nowhere and walks 14 miles down an empty country road. The minute he reaches the town of Margrave he is thrown int...
Jan 05, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month's World Book Club once again comes from China's capital Beijing. Lawrence Pollard interviews acclaimed and controversial writer Chan Koonchung about his much debated dystopian novel The Fat Years from a buzzy local bookstore in the city centre, filled with an audience of excited readers ready with their questions for the author. Chan’s speculative fiction, The Fat Years, has been described as giddily daring. It imagines a time in the near future where China is the world’s dominant pow...
Dec 01, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month BBC World Book Club comes from Beijing with Lawrence Pollard. The programme is a guest of the Bookworm, three rooms and a roof terrace full of books in Chinese and English, a fixture on the literary scene here for over a decade. Bestselling Chinese writer Lijia Zhang answers questions about her novel Lotus. Lijia taught herself English while working in a missile factory in a bid to become a writer and a journalist, and she’s written Lotus in English. It’s the story of a young migrant ...
Nov 05, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month on World Book Club award-winning British writer Kate Atkinson discusses her celebrated novel Life After Life. In it Atkinson poses the question: What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born and then dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual....
Oct 06, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this month’s World Book Club, as he turns seventy, another chance to hear acclaimed American writer James Ellroy, who over a span of fifteen years worked on a massive fictional chronicle of 1960s America. American Tabloid, the first of the three books, exposes the underbelly of a country on the threshold of Kennedy's golden age, and follows three men close to the tentacles of power in a conspiracy with the Mafia that leads to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the assassination of JFK in Da...
Sep 02, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month’s World Book Club broadcasts from the Man Booker 50 Festival at the Southbank Centre, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the renowned prize. In the World Book Club chair is the double-Booker prize-winning British writer Hilary Mantel discussing the second volume in her acclaimed series of novels about Thomas Cromwell. Bring Up the Bodies delves into the heart of Tudor history and the downfall of Queen Anne Boleyn whom King Henry VIII had battled for seven years to marry.
Aug 05, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club talks to internationally celebrated Indian writer Anuradha Roy about her much-loved novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing. Spanning three generations of an Indian family from the turn of the 20th century to India's partition An Atlas of Impossible Longing traces the intertwining lives of the inhabitants of a vast and isolated house on the outskirts of a small town in Bengal. Centred on sensitive foundling orphan boy Mukunda and the wild and motherless daughter of the h...
Jul 08, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Epic in scope, Away is the captivating story of young Lillian Leyb, whose family is destroyed in a horrific Russian pogrom and who comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When she hears that her daughter might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, toward Siberia. A novel encompassing the searing experiences of migration and exile, mot...
Jun 06, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club talks to British writer Sarah Waters about her chart-topping novel, Tipping the Velvet. Celebrating twenty years since its first publication Tipping the Velvet is a bawdy, historical, lesbian romance, following the startling career of Nan King, oyster girl from Whitstable turned music-hall star turned rent boy. Star-struck and infatuated with actress Kitty Butler Nan starts up a double act with her idol both on and off the stage. But when Kitty, hankering after a more ...
May 14, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Presenter Lawrence Pollard talks to chart-topping Chinese-American writer Celeste Ng and an audience gathered in the local Boston radio Newsfeed Café in the Boston Public Library about her bestselling novel Everything I Never Told You. In 1970s small-town Ohio Lydia is the favorite child of parents, determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Chinese-American Lee fam...
May 14, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Award-winning Dominican American writer Junot Diaz talks to World Book Club on location in Boston, US, about his wildly popular novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Moving across generations and continents, from the dark and tragic past in the Dominican Republic to struggles and dreams in suburban America the novel chronicles Oscar and his family’s search for love and belonging. (Photo: Junot Diaz attends the Norman Mailer Center's Fifth Annual Benefit Gala. Credit: Brad Barket/Getty Imag...
Mar 12, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
