Bookclub

Wilbur Smith discusses his novel When the Lion Feeds with James Naughtie and a group of readers.

With James Naughtie. Judith Kerr discusses her novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. First published in 1971, she wrote it for her son in order to explain the story of her own family's flight from Nazi Germany. Her father was a drama critic and a distinguished writer whose books were burned by the Nazis. The family passed through Switzerland and France before arriving finally in England in 1936. Ke...

James Naughtie's first guest on Bookclub for 2015 is Marina Lewycka. Marina was born in Kiel, Germany, after the war, and moved to England with her family when she was about a year old. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman...

With James Naughtie. In a special 200th edition of the programme we celebrate the centenary of author Patrick O'Brian and Allan Mallinson is our guide to the first in his hugely popular series of Napoleonic naval stories, Master and Commander. Known as the Aubrey/Maturin novels, the twenty books are regarded by many as the most engaging historical novels ever written. Master and Commander establis...

With James Naughtie. Poet Blake Morrison talks about his memoir of growing up in Yorkshire in the fifties and sixties, the son of two local GPs. It's an honest account of family life, father-son relationships and bereavement. The book also movingly chronicles his father's death in 1991, and attempted to resolve some of the secrets in his father's life. First published in 1993, And When Did You Las...

With James Naughtie. Celebrated Australian writer Tim Winton discusses his novel Dirt Music with a group of readers. Tim reveals how after seven years of writing Dirt Music, he was unable to hand it in to his publisher on the agreed date. He felt ashamed of the novel and that it wasn't ready; if he found himself getting lost in it so would the reader. He spent the next fifty-five days redrafting a...

With James Naughtie. Recorded at the BBC at the Edinburgh Festivals, Allan Massie discusses his novel A Question of Loyalties. First published in 1989, the book is widely acclaimed as his finest. The novel engages with all the complexities and ambiguities of loyalty and nationality as it follows a family through the divisions in France during World War II, and the repercussions which last for deca...

With James Naughtie. Sadie Jones talks about her novel The Outcast which won the Costa First Novel award in 2008. The book is about a boy called Lewis - his childhood and adolescence - as he grows up in the stultifying world of the home counties in the late forties and fifties. It's a tale of drunkenness, violence and a fair amount of sex, set amongst the well-brought-up professional classes. It i...

With James Naughtie. The celebrated American writer Lorrie Moore discusses her short novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? In the early nineties, Lorrie Moore was wandering through an art gallery when she came upon a painting with this same intriguing title, depicting two young girls looking at a pair of bandaged frogs. Lorrie Moore bought the painting, and borrowed its name and imagery for her se...

With James Naughtie. Emma Donoghue discusses her novel Room with an invited group of readers. Donoghue, an Irish writer living in Canada, tells the story of a five-year-old boy, Jack, who has been imprisoned with his mother in a tiny room - 11 feet by 11 feet - for his whole life. Emma was inspired to write Room after reading about European kidnapping cases such as the Fritzls in Austria, and so J...

With James Naughtie. Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas responds to readers' questions about his award-winning debut The Slap. The book generated considerable debate - should you slap a child who's misbehaving, but isn't yours? In this controversial novel Tsiolkas presents an apparently harmless domestic incident from eight very different perspectives and examines how its aftermath reverberates...

With James Naughtie. Celebrated Irish writer John Banville discusses his novel The Sea which won the Man Booker prize in 2005. In The Sea, middle-aged art historian Max Morden loses his wife to cancer and is compelled to go back to the seaside resort where he spent childhood holidays. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the stra...

With James Naughtie. Naomi Alderman, listed as one of Granta's Best Young Novelists 2013, responds to readers' questions about her first novel Disobedience. Alderman, herself a product of London's Jewish community, tells the story of Ronit, a young woman who's escaped her Orthodox upbringing for independence in New York. Ronit is forced to face her past when she returns home after her father, a pr...

With James Naughtie. Khaled Hosseini talks about his global bestselling novel, The Kite Runner with a group of invited readers. The book describes how the happiness of an afternoon's kite flying competition in late-1970s Kabul is broken when young Amir fails to help his best friend Hassan avoid a terrible incident. The effects on the duo's friendship are devastating. Over 20 years later, Amir retu...

With James Naughtie. Donna Tartt discusses her cult debut novel The Secret History, first published in 1992. "I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell." In a rare visit to the UK, Donna Tartt discusses The Secret History, which she has described as a 'why dunnit'. It's a murder mystery abo...

With James Naughtie. Lee Child discusses the first in his hugely successful Jack Reacher series, Killing Floor, and published in 1997. He's now gone on to write 18 books featuring his grizzled action hero, a former military policeman of no fixed abode. Lee reflects on the genesis of Jack Reacher, who appeared when he decided to write fiction after being made redundant by Granada TV in 1995. Lee sa...

With James Naughtie. Matthew Hollis discusses his Costa winning biography of the poet Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France. The book is an account of the final years of Thomas who died in action in the First World War in 1917. Although an accomplished prose-writer and literary critic, Edward Thomas only began writing poetry in 1914, at the age of 36. Before then, Thomas had been tormented b...

With James Naughtie. The celebrated travel writer Paul Theroux discusses Dark Star Safari. The book is his account of an overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town, which he made 35 years after first living as a volunteer teacher in Malawi in the early 60s. In the programme he talks about the pleasures and hazards of travelling across countries that many consider no-go areas. He recalls the joy of w...

Deborah Moggach talks about her bestselling novel Tulip Fever, a story of love, greed and betrayal in 17th Century Amsterdam. Artist Jan van Loos falls for his married subject Sophia during 'tulipomania'. Prices for the recently introduced flower reached extraordinarily high levels - one bulb could fetch thousands of pounds - and then suddenly collapsed. James Naughtie and a group of invited reade...

Audrey Niffenegger discusses her bestselling novel The Time Traveler's Wife with James Naughtie. It's a romantic story about a man - Henry - with a gene that causes him to involuntarily time travel, and the complications it creates for his marriage to Clare. The book opens when they meet in a Chicago library, and they both understand that he is a time traveller. But Clare knows much more than this...

Jim Crace talks about his novel Quarantine. The novel is a re-working of the biblical account of Jesus' forty days spent in the wilderness; and, he says, has its roots in a 'Care in the Community' hostel in Moseley, Birmingham. First published in 1997, it was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize for Fiction. James Naughtie presents and a group of readers ask the questions. Recorded at the Stra...

The National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke discusses her collection Ice which was shortlisted for last year's TS Eliot prize. Inspired by the snowy winters of 2009 and 2010, the poems in Ice move through the seasons : from Gillian's experience of being snowed in to the sound of an icicle as it begins to melt. From the bluebells of Spring (inspired by a Renoir painting at the National Museum of Art...

Turkey's leading female novelist Elif Shafak discusses her novel The Forty Rules of Love. The novel is about finding love and is written in two strands. One is the friendship between a whirling dervish and the Sufi poet Rumi in 13th century Anatolia; the other is about a mother in contemporary America who finds inspiration in the historical story to break away from an unhappy life. Amazingly, Elif...

Andrew Miller discusses his novel Pure, winner of the 2011 Costa Prize. Set in pre-revolutionary Paris, the book is a gripping, earthy story about the clearing of a huge cemetery in the area now known as Les Halles. When a young engineer Jean-Baptiste Baratte arrives in Paris from Normandy, he is charged with the huge task of destroying the church and cemetery of Les Innocents in 1785. He is surro...

John Simpson, the BBC's World Affairs Editor and writer Hilary Spurling discuss George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, as part of the Radio 4 Real Orwell Season. Homage to Catalonia was first published in 1938 and is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War. This pivotal time in his writing career led in later yea...