World Book Club

This week, as part of the continuing global commemorations of the First World War, World Book Club is in sombre mood with another timely chance to hear multi-award-winning British writer Pat Barker. She talks about her internationally renowned novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy of novels which culminated in the Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road. Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and...

Harriett Gilbert talks to award-winning writer Janice Galloway about her novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing. Recorded at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Harriett discusses her novel about a drama teacher, Joy Stone, who is losing her grip on reality as she struggles to cope with the loss of her married lover and her mother. Through the wit and irony that helped gain her international acclaim,...

In this edition of World Book Club on BBC World Service, Jostein Gaarder talks to Harriett Gilbert about his novel Sophie’s World at The House of Literature, Oslo. A chart-topping global surprise bestseller Sophie’s World draws us into the world of the great philosophers through the intriguing character of 14-year-old Sophie and her mysterious teacher. As their relationship develops a story emerge...

This month World Book Club comes to a surprisingly sunny Oslo as part of our mini Norwegian season to talk to one of the country’s most feted novelists Per Petterson, about his phenomenally successful novel Out Stealing Horses. Per will be answering questions from a rapt audience here in the elegant canteen of his publishers about his poignant, compelling multi-award-winning tale. Through passages...

Maya Angelou reflects on some of her earliest and most difficult memories and talks about her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in this special commemorative edition of World Book Club from our archive.

This month chart-topping US writer and showman Harlan Coben will be talking to Harriett Gilbert and a studio full of his readers about his page-turner of a thriller, Six Years. Jake Fisher, a lovelorn professor of political science searches out the girl of his dreams who suddenly dumped him for another man six years ago and begged him not to contact her. When he finds himself entangled with a bunc...

Bestselling British writer Malorie Blackman talks about her page-turning novel for teenagers and young adults Noughts and Crosses. A gripping modern-day tale of star-crossed lovers which aims to challenge our perceptions of race, power and truth, Noughts and Crosses is set in an alternative world where whites are the oppressed underclass and blacks are all-powerful and, often, all corrupt. An exci...

This month we’re talking to one of Turkey’s foremost writers Elif Shafak. She’s answering your questions about her bestselling novel The Forty Rules of Love, an investigation into love, mysticism and the life of the famed Sufi poet Rumi. Crossing continents and centuries two parallel love stories unfold and lives are turned upside down: Ella, an unhappily married modern day American housewife fall...

World Book Club talks to the chronicler of 21st Century urban Australia Christos Tsiolkas. He talks to Harriett Gilbert about his controversial, award-winning novel The Slap which has polarised opinion in his native country and across the globe. In it he presents an apparently minor domestic incident, when a man smacks a badly behaved child, from eight very different perspectives and examines how...

This month World Book Club is in a reflective mood as we mark the beginning of the centenary commemorations for World War One by inviting multi-award-winning British writer Pat Barker on to the programme. She'll be talking to us about her internationally renowned novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy which culminated in the Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road. Also shortlisted for the Booker...

Prize-winning author Brian Aldiss, the grand old man of British science fiction writing, talks about his 1964 classic sci-fi novel Greybeard. Set decades after the Earth's population has been sterilised as a result of nuclear bomb tests in space, the world is gradually emptying of humans. The remaining ageing, childless population are left to face the fact that there is no younger generation comin...

One hundred years after his birth this month’s World Book Club, will be discussing Albert Camus' seminal novel The Outsider with his acclaimed biographer Oliver Todd, and Professor of French at Sheffield University, David Walker. And appropriately the programme comes from the heart of the Left Bank of Paris to hear from them – at the world famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company overlooking Notre...

This month a chance to hear Pulitzer Prize winning Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, whose new novel The Lowland has just been shortlisted for the British Man Booker Prize. With presenter Harriett Gilbert and a studio full of readers Lahiri talks about her acclaimed short story collection Unaccustomed Earth, whose eight tales consider the lives of Indian American characters and how they deal w...

Harriett Gilbert talks to the bestselling author Neil Gaiman, voted by listeners as the 'most wanted' guest for the programme. Neil is a British writer, comic book author, a short-story writer, a science fiction and fantasy novelist, now living in the United States. And our chosen book American Gods tells the story of the gods brought by immigrants over the centuries, from Scandinavia, Ireland, Ru...

At this crucial moment in Egypt’s story, this month’s World Book Club talks to one of the country’s great writers, Ahdaf Soueif, about her internationally acclaimed novel The Map of Love. In her Booker-shortlisted bestseller Soueif weaves together two poignant stories separated by a century of Egyptian history: a love story between aristocratic English Anna Winterbourne and romantic firebrand Shar...

World Book Club’s Harriett Gilbert talks to the acclaimed Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri, in front of a multi-national audience and listeners around the world at the Nehru Centre in London. Chaudhuri will discuss his novel The Immortals, which is about the place of Indian classical music in the modern world. Set in the heart of the world of the Bombay middle class, it tells the story of three very d...

With the current global release of the film of Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s much garlanded novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, another chance to hear the writer talking about his tense and provocative thriller. Through the eyes of the young, worldly-wise Pakistani, Changez, in conversation with a mysterious American stranger in a café in Lahore, this brief, gripping novel tells of a love affair...

This month a very special edition of World Book Club coming from New York City in the USA. We’re partnering up with the acclaimed Leonard Lopate Show’s Book Club on the New York radio station WNYC. In advance of the much anticipated film about to open worldwide we’ve come here to discuss that classic novel of The Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby. And who better to talk to about it than chronicle...

This month World Book Club are guests of the American Embassy in London and Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience will be talking to US superstar thriller writer John Grisham. They will be discussing his gripping debut novel A Time To Kill, written almost 30 years ago while Grisham was still a jobbing attorney in Mississippi. In the novel a black father takes the law into his own hands after worr...

This month on World Book Club Harriett Gilbert will be talking with one of Sri Lanka’s leading writers, Romesh Gunesekera, about his acclaimed novel Reef. Reef is the moving, multi award-winning story of young Triton, a talented young chef who goes to work for Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamps, sea movements and the island's disappearing reef. So committed is Triton to pleasing...

To mark the release of the acclaimed film of David Mitchell’s masterpiece Cloud Atlas around the world, there’s another chance to catch the multiple prize-winning English author talking about his dazzling novel. With dramatic use of time-shifts and literary forms, Cloud Atlas circles the globe, reaching from the South Seas of the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future. Offering an enthral...

This month in a very special edition, we’re celebrating that most English of novelists Jane Austen. It’s two hundred years this month since the publication of Pride and Prejudice and we’ve invited bestselling British novelist and Jane Austen aficionado PD James, along with Anglo-Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin, also a great Austen fan and from Australia Susannah Fullerton, President of the Australian...

In this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert talks to one of New Zealand's greatest living writers, CK Stead, about his prize-winning novel My Name Was Judas. With this playful re-writing of the life and death of Jesus, CK Stead poses some profound and thought-provoking questions on the nature of belief and divinity itself. Judas's name has become synonymous with 'betrayer', but in this witty...

On this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling American writer Paul Auster about his acclaimed work The New York Trilogy. In three brilliant variations on the classic detective story, Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York City his own. Each interconnected tale exploits the elements of standard detective fiction to achieve an entirely new genre that w...

This month's World Book Club is brought to you from the Institute of Cervantes in London where Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling Spanish writer Javier Marias about his prize-winning work A Heart So White. This acclaimed novel explores profoundly disturbing questions about the nature of knowledge, curiosity and truth itself. When the narrator Juan marries his sweetheart Luisa he is ha...