Inklings Book Club

Today I’m joined by Jente Posthuma whose novel What I’d Rather Not Think About was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024. Ironically, is something I ALWAYS THINK ABOUT!!! The novel is fertile ground for rumination and thought-provoking conversation. It’s told in a series of vignettes, as a woman contemplates the suicide of her twin brother. It’s a deeply felt meditation on grief,...

Today I’m excited to be sharing an interview with one of my favourite short story writers, Bora Chung. Bora is a South Korean writer, as well as a translator. She has a pHD in Slavic literature. I first encountered her work when her short story collection Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, translated from the original Korean into English by Anton Hur – straigh...

A debut novel being shortlisted for The Booker Prize and WINNING the Women's Prize -- yeah, it doesn't get much bigger than that. Yael Van Der Wouden's The Safekeep totally floored me. It considers ownership, property, lust, yearning, repression, and the echoes of war that richochet long after the final bullet is fired. It’s historical fiction set in 1961, and writes hatred and love with the same...

Caroline O'Donoghue is a New York Times bestselling author and podcaster. Her podcast Sentimental Garbage has been streamed 12 million times. Her book The Rachel Incident has sold over 250,000 copies and is currently being adapted for the screen. Meanwhile, her young adult debut was All Our Hidden Gifts which became a much loved trilogy. Today we’re also going to be discussing her new book, the fi...

Tom Blyth (The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and Emily Bader (My Lady Jane) star in the first of Emily Henry's book-to-screen adaptations, People We Meet On Vacation. Here, they talk about their characters, Alex and Poppy, as well as their taste in books!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Henry is the queen of romance, author of novels like Beach Read, Happy Place, Book Lovers, and Funny Story. I sat down with her to discuss People We Meet On Vacation, her first book to be adapted for the screen, alongside director Bret Haley. With tremendous thanks to Marc Uddo for helping me clean up the audio! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harlan Coben is the number-one bestsellling author of 35 novels, translated into 46 different languages. Specifically, he's sold over 90 MILLION copies, and 12 of his stories have been adapted for the screen by Netflix. The newest adaptation is Run Away, starring James Norton and Ruth Jones, which follows a family trying to find their daughter Paige. I wanted to ask Harlan about finding that perfe...

It's the day after Christmas, and you might be wondering How To Kill Your Family... Author of How to Kill Your Family, Bella Mackie, has done it again. She's back with her sophomore novel What A Way To Go and discusses it here, on launch day, with Jack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm so thrilled to introduce a hero of mine to the Inklings Book Club: Rick Riordan. Author of over 40 books, including the iconic Percy Jackson series, Rick is infatuated with mythology. From Norse to Egyptian myths, he's brought characters of legends to life and introduced them to a whole new audience. Firstly, I had to just say: thank you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad...

In 2016, David Szalay's novel All That Man Is was nominated for the biggest prize in books, The Booker Prize. Then, in 2025, he was shortlisted for his newest offering, Flesh, and won the whole thing!! It's well-documented that Flesh was my personal winner this year, and I was elated to see it propser. Flesh tells the story of István, a Hungarian immigrant working for a wealthy English family as a...

Sorry for the lisp this mic seemed to give my audio guys. This is Saba Sams’ debut novel, all about the sticky stuff, the scum and the scuzz. It’s about the things we’d usually scrub away – instead of glossing over it, we linger there and embrace the mess. Set in Brighton, we follow an unconventional family dynamic – two young divorcees, Jules and Leon, and the girl, Nim, who gives them her baby,...

Our December book of the month is... HAMNET! Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet won the Women’s Prize in 2020 – an apt year to be awarded, given that it is, in part about a plague. While our own plague, COVID-19 locked us all in our houses, many of us found solace in this beautiful novel. O'Farrell took us back a few centuries to Stratford Upon Avon where Shakespeare's family resided. But this book i...

As soon as I started a book club, I knew we’d have to read Hamnet at some point. Hamnet is a fictional imagination of the life of Anne Hathaway -- here called Agnes because that’s what her family called her -- as well as her children. It’s about the family of William Shakespeare, but in the book he is never called by name. Instead, the spotlight is shifted to his family who are so often a mere foo...

Dustin Thao's first novel broke the internet. You've Reached Sam was a BookTok sensation, selling over 1 MILLION copies. Now, he's back with a companion piece called You've Found Oliver, as well as a standalone queer romance novel When Haru Was Here. He joined us during his UK book tour to speak about his timeline-bending novels, the YA genre, and the inspiration behind his work. Learn more about...

It's getting to that time of year where we start to think about what our favourite book of the year is going to be… and I think I know mine. This is Rejection by Tony Tulathimmute – it’s a collection of interconnected stories with the overarching theme of rejection, and I think it’s one of the most well-constructed and thoughtful satires I’ve ever read. I can’t recommend it enough, it feels like t...

Trespasses is a politically charged forbidden love story as well as an astute depiction of a complicated mother-daughter dynamic. We follow Cushla whose name comes from an Irish Gaelic saying meaning “my pulse” – it’s an equivalent to sweetheart or darling, but specifically "the pulse of my heart". And that is who she is for multiple characters. Her mother Gina is an addict and requires a lot of c...

Today’s book of choice is Die My Love by Ariana Harwicz, an Argentine writer, screenwriter, playwright, and documentary maker. It was first published in Spanish in 2012, before being translated into English in 2017 by Sarah Moses and Caroline Orloff, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. For our discussion, we are welcoming not one, not two, but three incredibly special guests: Oscar-...

This is the third and final instalment in our three-part Frankenstein extravaganza. We’ve heard from a Shelley scholar about the origins of the book, we’ve heard from Guillermo Del Toro about the themes of the book, but today I wanted to focus on the characters of the book. Two people who know these characters very well are Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. In Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, Oscar...

Mexican filmmaker and THREE-time Academy Award winner Guillermo Del Toro joins the Inklings Book Club to discuss Mary Shelley's gothic classic Frankenstein, as well as his new Netflix adaptation. We spoke about the horror genre, his favourite books, and the library he calls Bleak House. Frankenstein is streaming from November 7th on Netflix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc...

Mary Shelley published Frankenstein anonymously in 1818. She was later credited for her work, but the book's origin story is just as interesting as the novel itself. In the "year without a summer" of 1816, Mary joined her husband Percy and Lord Byron for a weekend away, where the scared each other with ghost tales. They came up with a challenge to see who could write the creepiest story of their o...

Andrew O'Hagan is the author of seven novels, as well as being a brilliant journalist. We sat down to discuss his epic novel Caledonian Road, a state-of-the-nation novel about one man’s tragic fall from grace. He’s socially and politically liberal, and feels he’s done everything as best he can, but his life begins to unspool. With a mammoth cast of SIXTY ONE characters, Andrew embarked on a massiv...

While I was at Gothenburg Book Fair in Sweden I managed to track down the inimitable Juhea KIm to have a backstage chat all about her rapturous and ravishing prose.  Straight out the gate, Juhea Kim’s debut novel Beasts of A Little Land became a prize-winning international bestseller. It’s a historical epic set in early 20th century Korea which was occupied by Japan. We follow Jade and JungHo, two...

The Coin marks the arrival of a striking new voice to the literary landscape. Yasmin Zaher’s irreverent debut is as shocking as it is stunning, as bonkers as it is beautiful. The Dylan Thomas Prize winning novel is full of big ideas, but without ever moralising, as our unnamed narrator navigates the squalor of New York City, after leaving Palestine. Grimy city streets provide a backdrop for an evi...

Evenings and Weekends is a love story to London, a portrait of a city with a vibrant ensemble cast of characters. Everyone is facing a dilemma, and their lives collde during a sweltering heatwave where everyone feels a little... too close. But there are no villains -- instead, it's an exercise in empathy. Oh, and there's a whale stuck in the Thames. Jack Edwards chats to Irish author Oisín McKenna...

Fíona Scarlett’s debut novel Boys Don’t Cry was an international bestseller, and she was shortlisted for Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Her new novel, May All Your Skies Be Blue is a dual timeline story about young love, friendship, and the things that happen to us that we cannot control. This episode was recorded at the Gothenburg Book Fair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...