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February 2012 marks the bicentenary of Victorian author Charles Dickens.
In this special edition of World Book Club, biographer Claire Tomalin talks to Harriett Gilbert about Dickens novel Great Expectations live from the BBC Radio Theatre, with actor Simon Callow.
(Image: Charles Dickens. Credit: Getty Images)
For further details of the British Council’s Global Celebration of Charles Dickens visit: www.britishcouncil.org/dickens2012
Acclaimed Maori writer Witi Ihimaera talks to Harriett Gilbert and a group of readers at the Cheltenham Literary Festival about his magical, lore-laden novel, The Whale Rider.
It tells the haunting story of a spirited Maori girl, her tribe and their mysteriously intertwined destinies. Kahu, a 12-year-old girl struggles to become the chief of her tribe but her grandfather Koro, whose attention she craves, believes that this is a role reserved for males only. Kahu will not be ignored and in her quest she finds a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales.
Once this sacred gift is revealed, will Kahu be able to assume her rightful position and lead her tribe to a bold new future?
(Image: Witi Ihimaera 2015) (Credit: XAVIER LEOTY/AFP/Getty Images)
Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed British writer Penelope Lively about her Booker Prize winning novel Moon Tiger.
A haunting tale of loss, loneliness and secret desires Moon Tiger is the kaleidoscopic story of maverick historian Claudia Hampton.
Telling nurses on her death bed that she will write a "history of the world and in the process my own," she charts her intensely-lived life from her childhood in England after World War I to the war-torn desert plains of Egypt, 30 years later – and beyond.
Egocentric and condescending as well as vulnerable and gutsy, Claudia is a complex heroine for our times who lingers in the mind long after you put the book down.
(Image: Penelope Lively. Copyright: Penguin)
Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Israeli writer David Grossman about his award-winning novel, To the End of the Land.
Winner of - amongst others - the Wingate Jewish Book Prize for 2012, To the End of the Land is a novel of extraordinary power and lyrical intensity about the power of love and the devastating cost of war.
Instead of celebrating her son Ofer’s discharge from the Israeli Army, Ora is appalled when he reenlists and is sent back to the front for a major offensive. Unable to bear the thought of sitting alone waiting for the ‘notifiers’ to bring her bad news, she sets off on a hike across Israel with Ofer’s biological father who has never met his son and has has lived in near-seclusion since being tortured as a prisoner in the Yom Kippur war three decades before.
Photo credit: Reuters
With the international release of the much anticipated film of We Need To Talk about Kevin in October, here's another chance to catch the World Book Club in which Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience talk to acclaimed American writer Lionel Shriver about this searing novel.
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, We Need To Talk about Kevin is the profoundly disturbing story of a boy who, shortly before his 16th birthday, kills seven classmates in a high school massacre.
Grippingly but unreliably narrated through the letters of his mother Eva to his absent father Franklin, the novel raises questions about culpability, the limits of maternal love and the nature of evil itself.
Harriett Gilbert talks to Hisham Matar about his stunning debut novel In The Country Of Men.
Set in the bewildering world of Tripoli, it is the emotional tale of a young boy growing up, where fears, secrets and betrayal threaten the ties of family and friendship.
The novel was shortlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize.
Hariett Gilbert talks to Irish author Colm Toibin about his book Brooklyn.
A haunting tale of love, loss and familial duty, and winner of the 2009 UK Costa Novel Award, Brooklyn follows the fortunes of a young Irish woman who leaves home to make a new life for herself in 1950s New York.
Hear how Colm's own painful memories of homesickness in America and Spain inform Eilis' experiences in Brooklyn and how her ambivalent relationship to the small town Ireland she's left behind also echoes Colm Toibin's own.
This month's World Book Club comes from the church of St Mary Magdalene in Woodstock, England.
Harriett Gilbert talks to Swedish superstar Henning Mankell about Faceless Killers, the first novel in his globally acclaimed series featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander.
In it, an elderly farm couple is brutally murdered and the only clue is the wife's uttering of the word "foreign" before she dies. Wallander must find the killers before anger towards foreigners boils over.
Hear about - and from - Wallander's female admirers around the globe all apparently queuing up to marry him, and about how Mankell plants deliberate errors - one in each novel - that no-one has ever spotted.
Acclaimed British writer Val McDermid discusses her page-turning crime novel A Place of Execution.
A taut psychological suspense thriller told through two overlapping and interlocking narratives, A Place of Execution takes place both in the present day as well as 1963 rural England with two different investigators exploring the disappearance of a 13 year old girl who vanished without a trace on a bitterly cold winter's afternoon.
This is not a cosy novel but one that confronts us with brutal realities and stirs up uncomfortable reactions, gripping the reader up to the very last page and its stunning conclusion.
Detective Erast Fandorin investigates a student's apparent suicide in 19th-century Moscow. Russian writer Boris Akunin talks to Harriett Gilbert and listeners in the studio and around the world about his page-turning, best-selling crime novel The Winter Queen.
After setting out to solve the apparent suicide of a university student in 19th Century Moscow, eager young investigator Erast Fandorin soon finds himself embroiled in a far-reaching international conspiracy.
Boris Akunin tells us where he found the inspiration for his winning young detective who bounces from one cliff-hanger to the next. He also describes why short Russian literature - rather than the heavy tomes of earlier generarions - provides a better "role model" for today's youngsters.
Photo: Boris Akunin Credit: Getty Images