Secret Life of Books

Best Valentine’s Day ever! SLOB’s “Wuthering Heights” watch-party. Sophie and Jonty take it character by character – inanimate characters included — to decide who are the winners and who are the losers in the Fennell-Robbie-Elordi mash-up adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel. And in the episode’s gripping second half they move onto the really meaty questions: race, class, sex, domestic violence, and...

The storm clouds are gathering in anticipation of the Valentine’s Day release of Emerald Fennell’s raunchy film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights . The film has been described by one critic as “very horny, very sumptuous, and very demented.” Margot Robbie looks set to change the way we read this beloved classic, well, if not forever, for a few weeks during awards season. It’s fair to...

Sophie talks to Richard Ovenden, OBE, the 25th Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, about the manuscript of Frankenstein , one of the most extraordinary, and fascinating, literary treasures of all time. Richard is head of Oxford’s Bodleian, as well as the University's libraries, museums, and even botanical gardens. Though Richard isn’t personally dusting off the attic vases or planting the bulbs, he does...

Published in 1970, written by an unknown new writer, The Bluest Eye is the great African American novelist Toni Morrison’s debut. It remains in many ways her most radical. It’s one of the most banned books in America since its publication – for its unflinching, explicit depictions of domestic abuse, racial and sexual violence in small town America.   Morrison wrote openly about Black sex and...

A serial killer on the loose in the foggy, battle-scarred streets of London after the Second World War. Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is Bleak House meets 1984 meets Silence of the Lambs. In this last in the current Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty looks at how Allingham - more, perhaps, than the other Queens of Crime - evolved her craft to suit the changing world aroun...

With the release of Chloe Zhao's rapturously acclaimed film Hamnet , adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's much-loved 2020 novel, SLOB re-releases one of our earliest episodes. Hamnet is a beautiful, lyrical novel about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, and the early death of their son, Hamnet. O'Farrell refocussed Shakespeare's story on the women who are usually only glimpsed at the edges of his life,...

A Murder is Announced (1950) was Agatha Christie’s 50th published book. So when better than the 50th anniversary of her death to celebrate one of her greatest works - and introduce Miss Marple into the back SLobalogue? In this third episode in our Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty skip daintily from one side of the Second World War to the other to see if - and how - Agatha Christie’s plots...

This week, for the second of our episodes on the Queens of Crime, we travel by steamer with Ngiao Marsh and her celebrated detective Roderick Alleyn, who decides to go on holiday in Marsh's native New Zealand — no trivial undertaking for an Englishman in the 1930s. Alleyn comes to NZ for the mountains and rivers, but stays for the bloody and highly innovative murder of a theater impressario, whose...

James Runcie is author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries - the focus of six books and a hugely successful ITV television series - following vicar-sleuth Sidney Chambers in his sleuthing career from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. James talks to Jonty about where he finds the gold in the Golden Age of Crime. In particular, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. He then ta...

Last year, the SLoBlight lingered briefly on Agatha Christie when we celebrated the centenary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from 1925. This book, more than any other, heralded the start of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the two world wars.  Taught, short and fraught with menace, these novels were in large part a response to the chaos and brutality of the First World Wa...

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the Mount Everest of Victorian fiction. A book so brilliant and monumental that it’s taken us a year of planning to take it on. But as we close out 2025, we’ve established our Middlemarch base camp and started the climb. To put it another way, we’ve recorded an episode in which we treat listeners to the story behind the story of the greatness that is Mary Ann Eva...

It won't come as a surprise to SLOB fans that the literary classics invented Christmas. But if you've got your finger on the buzzer and are already mouthing the words "Dickens, A Christmas Cracker" think again. We take you back to Christmas Eve, somewhere in North Wales, around about 1385 (brrrr). Cue the giant, jolly yet murderous Greene Knight, who shows up in the local mead hall, and issues a c...

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that Jane Austen has a big birthday this week -- her 250th to be exact. Happy Birthday Jane! Over here on SLOB we're throwing Jane a party, and we've invited guests. They're truly the guests of honor. The women who made Jane Austen. You may not know all of their names, or any of them. We introduce some literary superstars from their own day, who...

Are you a cat-person or a tyger-person? William Blake was both. Find out why such a big fuss about "The Tyger," which never fails to show up in google searches for the best poem in English. "The Tyger" has a lot going for it: short, punchy, mystical and definitely about a tiger. But beyond that, everything is up for grabs. Who was this William Blake, not just one of the most loved poets of all tim...

Stephen King and Shirley Jackson agree that The Turn of the Screw is the GOAT of ghost-stories. It’s a gripping, excellently creepy potboiler about a mad governess and a pair of haunted children in a scary Victorian country house. Henry James already had 14 novels and a load of short fiction behind him when he wrote The Turn of the Screw , and he channeled his talent for opaque, ambiguous storytel...

One of the world's favorite novelists, on his own favorite novelist. Colm Toibin has written many beloved novels, for which he has won many prestigious prizes. The novels include Brooklyn and Long Island; The Magician and The Master. This last is Colm's fictional recreation of Henry James' extraordinary career-save in which he bounced back from the failure of his West End play, Guy Domville , to w...

Many readers consider The Portrait of a Lady to be the greatest novel in English. But for some reason, James' fellow novelists loved to dump on him. Nabokov called him a "pale porpoise," and said his books were strictly for "non-smokers." Virginia Woolf, who knew him as a family friend, wrote, "we have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane a...

SLoB is turning 1! To celebrate, Sophie and Jonty re-read one of their all time favorites, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell . My Family and Other Animals (1956) is the beloved, hilarious, brilliant chronicle of a childhood idyll — which is also a series of comic disasters — set on the Ionian Greek Island of Corfu. The memoir is the first part of a trilogy that includes Birds, Beasts a...

Salem’s Lot (1975) is Stephen King’s second published novel, and many would say it's his best. It tells the story of a plague of vampires running amok in a blue-collar town in New England and the band of heroes who come together to fight them.    We’re aware that many listeners may not have read a Stephen King novel, although they will probably have seen - and enjoyed - a film adaptation...

Chocolate Mouse , anyone? Rosemary’s Baby was a smash hit on release - the best selling horror novel of the 1960s, eventually selling over 4 million copies. The year after publication it was adapted into one of the greatest films of the decade - directed by Roman Polanski with Mia Farrow as the eponymous heroine.   At first glance, it seems that Ira Levin’s story was at odds with the pre...

Who's afraid of American horror? Sophie and Jonty, for starters. To celebrate halloween, SLOB is taking a deep dive into three classics of the American Horror genre. We've chosen novels published after 1945, and we're asking how the war - and its many aftershocks and resonances in American domestic and political life - transformed horror as a literary genre. We won't spoil the surprises by te...

Jonty and Sophie were separated by an ocean while Sophie and her family went back to New York and Jonty stayed in Sydney - so they made lemonade out of life's lemons, and created two miniature episodes about the great 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne isn't just any old essayist — he's the man who invented the form, with three volumes of brilliant, surprising, constantly...

Sophie talks to one of the world's leading literary scholars, who co-founded a whole branch of literary studies known as "The New Historicism," before reinventing Shakespeare for new generations of readers, and then turning the Roman poet Lucretius into an (almost) household name. Stephen Greenblatt is professor of English at Harvard University, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of Will...

The label says what's in the tin: Secret Life of Books dives deep into weddings and funerals in literature, asking why they become iconic moments to hang a story on. Family strife, betrayal, love, passion, disappointment and hope are all bound up in these major life events where we see characters' true colors and desires writ large. -- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofb...

With The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins published yet another giant sensation, this time pioneering the detective novel and mystery/heist genre. It was published in 1868 and serialised - just as The Woman White was - in Dickens’ All the Year Round, making it one of the most popular books of Victorian Britain. Jonty and Sophie will show how The Moonstone gave the world most of the key ingredients of the...