My Life In Books with Red Szell

Over the past four decades Patrick Gale has built an international reputation for writing beautifully crafted literary fiction that combines intimate character studies with broader social themes. His novels and short stories explore family relationships, forbidden love, identity, and the long-term impact of secrets. His latest novel, Love Lane, picks up where 2015’s A Place Called Winter left off....

Growing up at Farmleigh, the grand country house built by his great-great grandparents outside Dublin, Arthur Edward Guinness was fascinated by the stories that surrounded the earlier generations of his world-famous brewing family. In Guinness: A Family Succession he outlines the struggles and passions of his ancestors, who rose from humble beginnings in Kildare to the top echelons of Irish and Br...

Kate Storey is a British author who writes books about books. Her latest novel, The Last Page Café, centres around a book-club founded on the unusual premise, that its members choose their next title based solely on a reading of its last page. But when a new member joins the group and suggests they each write their own happy-ever-after ending, it leads them to consider the extent to which they are...

Chris Bridges is a British author and former palliative care nurse with a hidden disability. Both his experience as a healthcare worker, and his diagnosis, have inspired him to write thrillers featuring protagonists with chronic illnesses, turning the trope of passive suffering on its head.  His latest novel, The Death Bed, ramps up the suspense to Hitchcockian levels.   When nurse Laura arrives a...

Helen Blair’s debut novel How to Kill Your Biggest Fan is a deliciously dark and playful exploration of the relationship between authors and their fans. When a best-selling romantic novelist whose career is on the slide, discovers she has a stalker, she finds herself both in peril, and creatively re-energised. Blending slow-burn psychological suspense with biting social commentary, Helen probes th...

To celebrate the 100th edition of the show Red is joined by an author whose books on landscape, nature, place, people and language have won international acclaim, and helped bring the conversation about man’s relationship with the natural world into our everyday lives. Regarded by many as the outstanding nature writer of his generation, Robert Macfarlane continues that conversation in his latest b...

A decade after learning that her son is autistic, writer Julie M. Green received her own diagnosis, shedding light on a lifetime of feeling othered and misunderstood. In Motherness: A Memoir of Generational Autism, Parenthood, and Radical Acceptance, Julie offers an unflinchingly honest and profoundly compassionate account of raising a neuro-diverse child while processing her own presence "on the...

J Randy Taraborrelli is a best-selling biographer and one of the most highly acclaimed historians of the Kennedys. His latest book, JFK: Public, Private, Secret, gives a richly detailed portrait of John F. Kennedy that explores beyond the iconic “Camelot” myth, to examine the man in three dimensions: his public life as Senator and President; his private life as husband, son, and brother; and his s...

Amy Spurway is a Canadian writer from Cape Breton, which is also the setting for her debut novel, Crow. When Stacey Fortune is diagnosed with three unpredictable, and inoperable, brain tumours, she abandons the crumbling glamour of her life in Toronto for her mother’s scruffy trailer in the backwoods. On Cape Breton, Stacy is known as Crow, and everybody believes that her family is cursed. With th...

In 1898 Joshua Slocum completed the first single-handed circumnavigation of the globe. His account of the three-year, 46,000-mile adventure, Sailing Alone Around the World, became an instant classic that has remained in print ever since. A decade later, he set out for the Amazon and was lost at sea. In Captain Solitude: One Surfer's Search for the World's Greatest Sailor, his fellow Nova Scotian,...

With global sales figures of over six and a half million books, Mark Billingham is one of the most successful, and critically acclaimed, crime writers in the business. His Tom Thorne series has kept readers gripped for quarter of a century, with a combination of gritty realism, psychological depth, and consummate plotting. The 18th book in the series, What the Night Brings, sees DI Thorne investig...

Michael Sheridan is a veteran foreign correspondent with over two decades experience reporting on Chinese affairs. His latest book, The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China, takes the reader from the impoverished, pariah state of Xi's youth in the 1950s to the military and economic superpower of today. The son of one of Chairman Mao’s right-hand men, the young Xi was cast into exile when his...

Septimius Severus was Rome’s Black emperor. Born in the blistering heat of what is now Libya, in 145 A.D., he died in the freezing cold of a British winter 66 years later. Now, in a groundbreaking new biography, The African Emperor, British historian Simon Elliott, examines the life and legacy of one of the greatest warrior emperors in history. The ruler of the Roman Empire when it was at the peak...

Amy Rosen is one of Canada’s top food and travel writers. Not only has she built a reputation as a gifted journalist and TV presenter, but she is also the author of several successful cookbooks, and the entrepreneur behind Rosen’s Cinnamon Buns. Now, with the publication of her debut novel, Amy has rustled up the perfect rom-com for food lovers. Described as Briget Jones Diary meets Nora Ephron’s...

Ji Hong Sayo is a Canadian Lao-Chinese author working out of Toronto. Angelhunting is the first book in his new series featuring Seamus Caron, a hard-boiled private eye with a criminal past. In cahoots with his childhood friend, now Homicide Chief, Sandra Blair, Seamus scrapes a living from Toronto’s mean streets. But when a client asks him to find a stolen briefcase, and Sandra seeks his help loc...

Eimear McBride has won multiple awards for her four novels to date. Through lyrical, experimental prose she explores her characters’ emotional landscapes, immersing the reader in their innermost thoughts. Her latest novel, The City Changes its Face, takes up where her second, The Lesser Bohemians, left off, and is an intense, fragmented examination of a passionate love affair arriving at its first...

Gina Goldhammer has led an extraordinary life. The daughter of a high-ranking Cold War defector, she spent two decades as literary editor to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, working with him on all his books, including his seminal work, Diplomacy . Now in her 70s, she has published her debut novel, Where Snowbirds Play , a keenly observed glimpse into the opulent world of 1990s Palm B...

M. J. Arlidge is a master builder of suspense. In his TV career he has written and produced screenplays for many prime-time crime and drama serials. And as an author he has found international success both as the creator of the Audible Original drama Six Degrees of Assassination, and as the writer of the hugely successful DI Helen Grace series of crime novels. The 13th book in the series, Into the...

Dervla McTiernan has won international acclaim for her crime fiction, with both her stand-alone thrillers and gritty police procedurals consistently topping the best-seller lists. Her much-loved Detective Cormac Reilly series, set in Ireland and narrated by Aoife McMahon, has become something of an audiobook sensation, even outselling the print editions! The fourth book in the series, The Unquiet...

Will Carver has been dubbed ‘the most original writer in Britain’. His ability to blend dark humour with explosive plots encompassing elements of mystery, thriller, sci-fi and speculative fiction has won him a cult following around the world. His latest novel, Kill Them With Kindness, is a sharply satirical alt. history of the Pandemic. When a Japanese scientist thwarts an international plot to re...

Sarah Pinborough’s ability to build psychological suspense, and her versatility in bending and blending genres, have made her one of the leading lights in contemporary speculative fiction. The English author has over two-dozen titles to her name, including Behind Her Eyes, which was adapted as a major Netflix TV series. Her latest novel, We Live Here now, is a spinetingling slice of modern gothic,...

Eric Siblin is a Canadian author and former music critic for The Montreal Gazette. He is best known for his non-fiction title, The Cello Suites, which unfolds a multi-layered story of mystery, passion, history and politics surrounding an epic piece of music by Johann Sebastian Bach. His second book, Studio Grace, chronicled his year-long quest to record an album of twelve self-penned pop songs wit...

Jacob McArthur Mooney has built a reputation as one of Canada’s most compelling poets. So his debut novel has been eagerly anticipated. The Northern is both a coming-of-age story and a road trip through a bygone era of sports history. Set in 1952 it follows a man and two boys working as agents for an upstart Mormon baseball card company as they journey across Western Ontario trying to persuade pla...

In an increasingly hectic world, Emma Cowell’s novels transport the reader to timeless Greek islands where hope and healing are given space to emerge from the shadow of grief and anger. Her latest book, Under the Lemon Tree is set on the tiny island of Agistri, on which her protagonist Kat has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew she had. His existence is only the first of many secrets s...

In the highly competitive world of the psychological thriller, C.L. Taylor has an outstanding record. Eight-out-of-ten of her titles to date have topped the best-seller lists and her work has been translated into over 30 languages. Her latest, It’s Always the Husband, focuses on the school gate gossip mill. When recently divorced Jude arrives in the small town of Lowbridge, she is quickly drawn to...