World Book Café travels to Paris to meet some of the French capital’s newest writers. Authors Mahir Guven, Blandine Rinkel, Laurent Petitmangin and Capucine Delattre discuss taking on the literary establishment and finding new ways to express themselves. Like many places in the world, questions of equality, diversity and freedom of expression are top of the agenda in France. But it is complicated; the ideal of universalism - meaning every citizen is considered to be the same regardless of class ...
Mar 18, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club visits Paris, France to be guests of the iconic bookshop on the Left Bank of the River Seine, Shakespeare & Co. There Harriett Gilbert and a bookshop audience talk to acclaimed French writer Marie Darrieussecq about her extraordinary novel Pig Tales. Pig Tales is the story of a young woman who works at a shady Parisian massage parlour, becoming a favourite with her lustful clients until, that is, she slowly and alarmingly metamorphoses into a pig. A dark feminist f...
Mar 04, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Driving too fast through Israel’s Negev desert in his SUV after a long day in the hospital, Dr Eitan Green accidentally hits a lone Eritrean man on the empty moonlit road, killing him instantly. Panic stricken he drives off instead of calling for help and confessing what he’s done. A decision that will change the course of his life irrevocably because the dead man’s wife, the elegant, enigmatic Sikrit, knows what happened. In atonement for his crime Sikrit insists the doctor start treating Eritr...
Feb 04, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast A Passage North explores the impact of the vicious Sri Lankan civil war between Tamil and Sinhalese which tore Sri Lanka apart for two and a half decades before a fragile ceasefire was finally reached in 2009. When Krishan learns that his grandmother’s former carer Rani has died he makes the long journey north to attend the funeral across a country still traumatised and scarred by its recent past. Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and the de...
Jan 07, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast World Book Club travels to The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in England, as guests of The Off the Shelf Festival and talks to local prize-winning Sheffield writer Sunjeev Sahota about his compelling novel, The Year of the Runaways. Voyaging from India to England, from childhood to the present day, Sunjeev Sahota's heart-rending novel follows a group of young men each in flight from India and desperately searching for a new and fulfilling life in the northern British town of Sheffield. Tarlochan ...
Dec 03, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month as World Book Club continues its year-long season celebrating the Exuberance of Youth it also celebrates the 20th anniversary of the programme. To mark this happy occasion World Book Club are guests of the London Literature Festival at the South Bank Centre on the River Thames and Harriett Gilbert talks to Bangladeshi-born British novelist Tahmima Anam about her enthralling novel, A Golden Age. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, ...
Nov 05, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, we talk to American writer Brit Bennett about her unputdownable novel, The Vanishing Half. The Vanishing Half charts the rollercoaster parallel lives of estranged twin sisters who choose to live in two very different worlds - one black and one white. Stella and Desiree are identical twins, growing up together in a small, Southern black community. Until, at age sixteen, they run away. Decades later, still separated by many...
Oct 01, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Next in the series exploring The Exuberance of Youth World Book Club talks to the award-winning American author Ben Lerner about his beguiling debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station. Brilliant, unreliable, young American poet Adam Gordon is on a fellowship in Madrid, where he is struggling to establish his identity and dazzle his contemporaries. Instead of studying, his research becomes a meditation on authenticity - are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain, especially the two cle...
Sep 03, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this year-long celebration of The Exuberance of Youth, World Book Club revisits the multi-prize-winning debut novel Homegoing by the acclaimed Ghanaian author Yaa Gyasi. The story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a white slave-trader, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history. A novel of remarkable sweep and power, with e...
Aug 06, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, World Book Club talks to Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid about his compelling novel, Exit West. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Exit West features Nadia and Saeed, two ordinary young people, attempting to fall in love in a world turned upside down. Civil war is driving them from their homeland and they join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, to find their place in the world. Then something extraordi...
Jul 02, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast World Book Café, the programme where writers reveal the secrets of their home cities, goes to Brooklyn. In a lively and engaging conversation from the heart of the neighbourhood, Asian American authors will share insights into their creative lives, the obstacles they face and the joy they find in words and writing. Presenter Michelle Fleury will be joined on stage by Brooklyn-based writers Elaine Hsieh Chou, Crystal Hana Kim, Matthew Ortile, Pitchaya Sudbanthad and Jen Lue.
Jun 18, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jennifer Egan answers audience questions about her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. It is a dazzling, exciting book, which plays with form and storytelling traditions. Goon Squad is made up of connected short stories circling around musician and record executive Bennie Salazar, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. It explores their pasts and catapults them into the future using a rich variety of voices and narrative styles. This special edition of ...
Jun 04, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to award-winning American writer Bryan Washington about his moving novel Memorial. Benson, a Black day-care teacher and Mike, a Japanese-American chef, live together in Houston, but are beginning to wonder why they're a couple. When Mike flies off to visit his seriously ill, estranged father in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother arrives for a visit, Benson is stuck...
May 07, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the latest in World Book Club's season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, Harriett Gilbert talks to Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo about her extraordinary novel, We Need New Names. A remarkable literary debut shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize We Need New Names is the unflinching, compelling story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe and into America. A coming-of-age story, we follow a young girl named Darling, first as a 10-year-old in Zimbabwe with her friends, navigating a vi...
Apr 02, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast A remarkable debut from an exhilarating young new voice, Such a Fun Age is a big-hearted page-turner of a story about race and privilege, centring on a young black babysitter, her well-meaning employer, and a chance encounter that threatens to undo them both. (Picture: Kiley Reid. Photo credit: David Goddard.)
Mar 05, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the second in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this centenary year of the BBC, Harriett Gilbert talks to world-famous Chilean writer Isabel Allende about her extraordinary novel, Eva Luna. Eva Luna is the story of an orphan who beguiles the world with her remarkable visions, triumphing over the worst of adversities and bringing light, as her name would suggest, to a dark place. As Eva comes of age and tells her tale, Isabel Allende conjures up a whole complex, unidentified, S...
Feb 08, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast The first of our season of celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this the centenary year of the BBC, World Book Club talks to Irish writer Naoise Dolan about her dazzling novel Exciting Times. Psychologically astute and dryly funny, Exciting Times is a modern, intelligent dissection of youth, power and privilege set amongst the international circles of contemporary Hong Kong. Clever, young millennial Ava, an Irish graduate teaching English, is having an affair with rich cynical banker Julian. T...
Jan 01, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriett Gilbert talks to the multi-award-winning Trinidadian-British author Monique Roffey about her enchanting novel The Mermaid of Black Conch, which won the 2020 Costa Book of the Year. Roffey spins the mesmerising tale of a cursed mermaid and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her. When American bounty-hunters capture Aycayia from the deep seas off the island of Black Conch, David rescues her and vows to win her trust. With Aycayia in hiding, their love grows as they navigate both ...
Dec 04, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Continuing our month-long season to celebrate the English PEN centenary, World Book Club talks to multi-award-winning Turkish-Kurdish writer and activist Burhan Sönmez about his unforgettable novel Istanbul, Istanbul. At once powerfully political and intensely personal, Istanbul, Istanbul is the story of four prisoners kept in underground cells beneath the city, who tell one another stories about their city to pass the time. There are two Istanbuls, one below ground and one above, yet in reality...
Nov 06, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month, to kick off a mini-season to celebrate a very special centenary World Book Club talks, for a second time, to the Nobel Prize-winning giant of world literature, Professor Wole Soyinka, about one hundred years of the writers’ organisation English PEN. PEN is the influential pressure group which helps support and campaign for the release of writers held unlawfully in jail around the globe and which helped to secure Soyinka’s release in 1969, after 26 months of detention without trial by...
Oct 05, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast World Book Club this month talks to the award-winning French writer Maylis de Kerangal about her remarkable and haunting novel Mend the Living. After a horrific car accident on the Normandy coast surfer Simon Limbeau is rushed to hospital where his devastated parents are later told that he is on life-support, but is brain-dead. His heart, however, is still beating perfectly and could be donated to save someone’s life. They are faced with an agonising choice. Mend the Living is the story of Simon...
Sep 04, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast To mark the bicentenary of the birth of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky World Book Club revisits Crime and Punishment in an edition recorded at the elegant Pushkin House, London’s Russian cultural hub, in 2016. To help us explore Dostoyevsky’s haunting classic thriller Harriett Gilbert was joined by acclaimed Russian writer Boris Akunin and Russian scholar Dr Sarah Young. Consumed by the idea of his own special destiny, Rashkolnikov is drawn to commit a terrible crime. In the afterma...
Aug 09, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast World Book Club this month talks to the world-renowned Australian author Jane Harper at her home in Melbourne, Australia, about her internationally garlanded thriller, The Dry. Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, tensions in a small town community become unbearable when the Hadler family are found brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler’s guilty, committing suicide after slaughtering his wife and son. But policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the f...
Jul 07, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Serious Men tells the intertwined stories of wily Ayyan Mani - who tries to pass off his son as a mathematical genius - and life at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai, where Ayyan works, and where veteran scientists battle over their pet theories about how life began on Earth. Serious Men won the Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010 and the 2011 PEN Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. It’s an unsettling comedy about inequalities in Indian society; it’s a...
Jun 10, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club talks to acclaimed Canadian writer Louise Penny about the very first in her astonishingly successful series of Inspector Gamache crime novels. When a much-loved inhabitant of the village of Three Pines in the Eastern Townships of Quebec is found dead in the woods during Thanksgiving, the locals are certain that it was just a tragic hunting accident. But Chief Inspector Armand Gamache from Montreal suspects foul play and won’t rest until he’s rootled out the darkness at...
May 01, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Spanning much of the twentieth century and told with an elegant simplicity which belies the harshness of the tale it tells, Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life is the story of one man's relationship with an ancient landscape. Andreas Egger knows every nook and cranny of the Alpine mountain valley that is his home and from which vantage point he witnesses the arrival of the modern world, in all its many and daunting forms. A stark yet tender book about love, loss and endurance, and about finding dign...
Apr 03, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast A modern classic in the African literary canon and voted in the Top Ten of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, Nervous Conditions is the coming-of-age story of two Shona girls, Tambudzai and Nyasha, both trying to find their place in contemporary Zimbabwe. Whilst Nyasha has been to England and questions the effect of that Westernisation on her family, Tambudzai is from a more traditional branch of the family and is awed by her cousin’s seeming sophistication. Through its exploration of ...
Mar 08, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This month World Book Club discusses Bill Bryson’s hugely acclaimed travelogue Notes from a Small Island with the author and his readers around the world. After two decades as a resident of the United Kingdom, Bryson took what he thought might be a last affectionate trip around his adoptive country before returning to live in his native America. Notes from a Small Island is the irreverent and hilarious account of this meandering journey through his beloved island nation. From Dover to Downing St...
Feb 06, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this month’s World Book Club, Icelandic literary superstar Sjón will be answering questions from readers around the world about his novel Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. Set in Reykjavik in 1918, it’s the story of sixteen year old Mani, whose life is completely changed by the arrival of the Spanish flu in the city. It’s a fascinating novel about human resilience and connections, a love letter to cinema and a portrait of a place at a very particular moment in its history. Moonstone won The I...
Jan 04, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast A novel of breathtaking sweep revealing the devastating impact of slavery through history. This month World Book Club discusses the multi-prize-winning debut novel Homegoing with its acclaimed Ghanaian author Yaa Gyasi and her fans around the world. The story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a white slave-trader, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and ...
Dec 05, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
