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, Russia, Greece, Egypt, and what happens to them as the years pass and they get forgotten, and surpassed by the modern gods of technology – television, mobile phones and the media.
Join Harriett Gilbert, and an invited audience to hear Neil Gaiman talk about his book American Gods.
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 Sharif al-Baroudi, is set amidst the brutality of British imperialism and the fierce political battles of the Egyptian Nationalists. This tale reaches across time to an account of their descendants negotiating passions and political unrest in late 20th Century Egypt. We hear how Soueif had originally set out to write a ‘tawdry romance’ but hadn’t managed to stop herself writing something much more meaningful and monumental!
Listen to this great Egyptian voice clearly and compellingly explain exactly what has gone wrong in Egypt, in her eyes, over the last decade.
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 different classical-musicians whose lives thread in and out of each other in 1970s and 80s Bombay.
The city itself is on a roll -- expanding, growing ever richer and more glittery -- and the novel's main characters are variously jostled by the changes taking place around them. But they're also struggling with such matters as the place of musical tradition in the modern world, and the need to earn a living while pursuing an artistic vocation.
Amit Chaudhuri himself is a musician as well as author and he talks about how contemporary Indian classical music is currently in a moribund state, as it takes a great deal of commitment to be successful.
And in a novel filled with strong and lively characters, Amit explains how difficult he finds it to write characters, and how in his work as a teacher of creative writing, he finds characterisation impossible to teach.
Hear him also read three extracts from The Immortals and take calls from listeners in Delhi and Pennsylvania who will bring their own international perspective to the story.
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 with America that goes dangerously wrong and tackles the ever more relevant and complex issues of Islamic fundamentalism and America’s ‘war on terror’ with sympathy and balance.
So, go see the film, or better still read the book – and then tune in to World Book Club with Mohsin Hamid and Harriett Gilbert, to see what readers around the world made of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
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 chronicler of today’s New York young urban sophisticates, novelist Jay McInerney. He is joined on stage by F Scott Fitzgerald scholar Anne Margaret Daniel and together we discuss the haunting tale of dazzling, doomed Jay Gatsby as told to through the eyes of young Midwesterner Nick Carraway.
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 worrying that the legal system will fail to adequately punish the two white men who brutally raped and beat his daughter. In a fascinating discussion about racism in the deep south of America hear how John Grisham has wrestled with his own feelings of prejudice, his changing views on the death penalty and how he's stumped for words when told he's beautiful!
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 his master’s palate that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradise, and yet subtle undercurrents of impending doom do ripple through Triton’s haunting story of memory and friendship.
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 enthralling and often chilling vision of humanity’s will to power and where it will lead us, David Mitchell's deftly crafted novel follows the stories of six people whose lives interlock in subtle and mysterious ways.
So go see the film or even better read the book and listen for another chance to join Harriett Gilbert and writer David Mitchell to hear what readers both in the studio and around the world made of Cloud Atlas.
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 Jane Austen Society, all here to share with us their passion for this much loved classic English novel.
We’ll also be hearing from other writers from around the world – AS Byatt, Colm Toibin, Nii Parkes, Kamila Shamsie, to name a few, why the razor-sharp wit of Elizabeth Bennet and the cool hauteur of the gorgeous Mr Darcy are still drawing in more readers than ever across the globe in the twenty-first century.
Susannah Fullerton is the author of Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Image: Jane Austen, Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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, and controversial retelling, some 40 years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally puts forward his story as he remembers it.
Looking back on his childhood and youth from an old age the gospel writers denied him, Judas recalls his friendship with Jesus; their schooling together; the 12 disciples and their stories; their journeys together and their dealings with the powers of Rome and the Jewish clerics.
