Bookclub

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Society & Culture
**Bookclub**

Led by James Naughtie, a group of readers talk to acclaimed authors about their best-known novels

Latest Episodes:

Jo Nesbo talks about his book, The Snowman May 06, 2018

Show notes

Jo Nesbo talks to James Naughtie about his book, The Snowman.

Thomas Keneally discusses his Booker Prize-winning novel Schindler's Ark Apr 17, 2018

Show notes

A treat from the Bookclub archive to celebrate our 20th anniversary.

Sarah Perry discusses her novel, The Essex Serpent Apr 01, 2018

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Sarah Perry speaks to James Naughtie about her novel, The Essex Serpent.

Muriel Spark discusses the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Mar 15, 2018

Show notes

A treat from the Bookclub archive to celebrate our 20th anniversary

Patrick Gale - A Place Called Winter Mar 04, 2018

Show notes

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 allotted homestead in a place called Winter is a world away from the suburbs of turn-of-the-century Edwardian England. And yet it is here, isolated in a seemingly harsh landscape, under the threat of war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before.

Patrick Gale describes how he followed in his great-grandfather's footsteps and travelled to Winter in Saskatchewan and learned about those pioneering communities and their relationship with the Cree, the Native North American tribe. And how the character Troels Munck was named for a Danish man who bidded to appear in Gale's next novel at a charity fundraiser.

Presenter : James Naughtie Producer : Dymphna Flynn

April's Bookcub choice : The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (2016).

Douglas Adams discusses The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Feb 14, 2018

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A treat from the Bookclub archive to celebrate our 20th anniversary

Eimear McBride talks about her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing Feb 04, 2018

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Eimear McBride discusses her book, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

Colin Thubron - In Siberia Jan 07, 2018

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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, reactionary Communists and the remnants of a so-called Jewish state; from the site of the last Czar's murder and Rasputin's village, to the ice-bound graves of ancient Scythians, to Baikal, the deepest and oldest of the world's lakes.

Presenter : James Naughtie Interviewed guest : Colin Thubron Producer : Dymphna Flynn

February's Bookclub choice : A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2013).

Clive James Dec 31, 2017

Show notes

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, from which his father never returned. Clive tells Bookclub how that event has dominated his whole life.

Jennifer Egan discusses her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit from The Goon Squad. Dec 03, 2017

Show notes

In an extended version, Jennifer Egan talks about A Visit from The Goon Squad.

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