Opening Lines

John Yorke examines Kate Atkinson’s 1995 Whitbread award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum. An epic tragi-comedy, the novel tells the story of protagonist Ruby Lennox, who is born above a family pet shop in York in the early 1950s and grows up in post-war Britain. Through Ruby, the reader is transported back and forth through the centuries as she recounts the stories of four generation...

John Yorke examines Kate Atkinson’s 1995 Whitbread award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum. An epic tragi-comedy, the novel tells the story of protagonist Ruby Lennox, who is born above a family pet shop in York in the early 1950s and grows up in post-war Britain. Through Ruby, the reader is transported back and forth through the centuries as she recounts the stories of four generation...

In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke takes a look at Rumer Godden’s children’s book Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, with the help of Dame Jacqueline Wilson. We meet two tiny Japanese dolls - Miss Happiness and Miss Flower – delivered as a Christmas present. They are strangers in a strange land, subject to social forces and customs they don’t rec...

John Yorke looks at Nancy Mitford’s depiction of the lives and loves of the English upper classes as a group of friends and acquaintances gather in the Cotswolds for Christmas. It’s a sharply observed, mostly gentle, satire of the aristocratic type that Mitford herself knew so well. This was her second novel, written in 1932. She became, and remains, famous for her subsequent bestsellers The Pursu...

John Yorke looks at Peter Benchley’s environmentally themed novel The Girl of the Sea of Cortez. Peter Benchley is best known for his debut novel Jaws which become a huge global bestseller when it was published in 1974 and was further seared into the public consciousness by Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation the following year. His next two novels – The Deep and The Island – were also thrillers se...

The Lay of the Land, by the American novelist Richard Ford, is the third of what became a series of five books about Frank Bascombe. Now in his mid-50s, Frank has left sports writing behind and works in real estate in coastal New Jersey. But life is not settled - Frank is in remission from cancer and, previously divorced, his new marriage is facing problems of its own and relations with his grown-...

As we approach its hundredth anniversary, John Yorke explores the long-vanished world of German writer Alfred Döblin’s Expressionist masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Set in 1928 at the height of the Weimar Republic, the novel centres around Franz Biberkopf - ‘transport worker, housebreaker, pimp, manslaughterer’ - who is determined to go straight following his release from prison. Weather repor...

“I have made up my mind that I must have money,” says the character Bella Wilfer in Charles Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend – and she is one of many characters in the book for whom “money, money, money, and what money can make of life” is an overriding concern. Dickens was deeply concerned with the increasing levels of inequality he saw around him in 1860s London, a city at the he...

Our Mutual Friend was the last novel that Charles Dickens completed, and was written at a point of significant turmoil in the author’s personal life. It's a hugely ambitious and sophisticated novel, drawing the wild complexities of 1860s London life into its purview and marrying realism with mythic symbolism to great effect. Identities shift, deception battles unceasingly with the truth, while the...

Little Dorrit, written by Charles Dickens in the 1850s, is among the author’s most ambitious novels containing a massive sweep of themes, characters and locations. At its heart though is the confined space of the Marshalsea Debtors Prison, where the blameless Amy Dorrit chooses to live with her incarcerated father William, who takes pride in being the longest serving prisoner in the place. In the...

Little Dorrit, written by Charles Dickens in the 1850s, is among the author’s most ambitious novels containing a massive sweep of themes, characters and locations. It may be set 30 years before its creation, but the book feels in many ways ahead of its time, exploring themes of freedom and entrapment – both physical and psychological – in ways that would appeal enormously to later figures includin...

Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times is perhaps best known for its portrayal of school inspector Thomas Gradgrind, who states clearly and repeatedly at the outset that it’s facts that matter, and education should be all about filling children up with these facts as if they were vessels rather than human beings. In this, the second of two episodes introducing Hard Times, John Yorke looks at how Dicken...

Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times is set in a northern factory town at the height of the industrial revolution, far away from the writer’s normal stamping ground of London - but it certainly doesn’t lack the overlapping plots, the wide array of characters and the incorporation of melodrama, humour and tragedy that we associate so closely with the author. Dickens had travelled north himself as a jo...

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is one of the most well-known and influential pieces of writing in Western literature. Initially presented as a true account, this tale of adventure, desert island shipwrecking and survival has been re-told and re-packaged for different audiences, different generations and different times - rom The Swiss Family Robinson to Lost In Space, and Lord...

Set in the turbulent years of 20th century India, Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day brings us a story of family and political upheaval in the blistering heat of Old Delhi. John Yorke unpicks the threads that hold both family and community together until they fray and fall apart. From an opening in the 1980s we are taken backwards and forwards in time to find loyalties and tensions amongst sib...

Set in the turbulent years of 20th century India, Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day brings us a story of family and political upheaval in the blistering heat of Old Delhi. John Yorke unpicks the threads that hold both family and community together until they fray and fall apart. From an opening in the 1980s, we are taken backwards and forwards in time to find loyalties and tensions amongst si...

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...