Opening Lines

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 pe...

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, ho...

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 ed...

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 h...

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. Si...

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 w...

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 Gallo...

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 nee...

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 gener...

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 lo...

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 Sportswrit...

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 adve...

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 characteristi...

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 te...

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 concer...

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 a...

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...

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 ‘Greenel...

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 deftl...

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...

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 o...

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 pe...

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 cel...

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 fat...

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 C...