Author: BBC World Service

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!

(Image: John Grisham. Credit: Bob Krasner)

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.

(Image: CK Stead)

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 was ground-breaking when it was published three decades ago.

In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of identity and what it means to be human.

Hear what readers made of Paul and his novel and what happened when another Paul Auster stood up to introduce himself to the Paul Auster on the stage.

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 haunted by family secrets that cast their long shadow over his contentment and ponders the nature of secrecy – its convenience, its price – does he even want to know the truth he asks himself.

In the company of a lively group of readers at the Spanish Cultural Centre Marias also playfully dispenses his wisdom on how to keep a marriage together and why pen and paper beats technology.

In September's edition of World Book Club superstar US novelist Jodi Picoult talks about her heart-rending novel My Sister's Keeper.

A searing examination of what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person - My Sister's Keeper confronts the question of whether it is morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child’s life.

In the programme Jodi talks with disarming openness about the near tragedy in her own life that helped to drive her to write the novel and she explains why for her writing feels like a form of schizophrenia.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's searing yet ultimately uplifting coming-out, coming-of-age tale, in which a young girl learns to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing, and set out on her own path in life. To mark thirty years since its publication, here's another chance to hear the memorable World Book Club in which Jeanette Winterson discusses where fact meets fiction - there are distinct parallels to her own life.

Hear how important this ground-breaking novel has been for readers around the globe. British writer Jeanette Winterson is in conversation with Harriett Gilbert (First broadcast in 2012.)

(Photo: Jeanette Winterson) (Credit: Ysabel Halpin)

This is the last edition of the London Calling season of World Book Clubs - which have been going out each Saturday during May.

This week the programme are guests of The Nehru Centre - the cultural wing of the High Commission of India in London - and we're talking to acclaimed Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh about his haunting novel, The Shadow Lines.

A moving and thought-provoking meditation on the very real yet invisible lines, which divide nations, people, and families, The Shadow Lines focuses on a family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London.

From the tales of his colourful cousin the narrator conjures up a picture of London in his imagination that is so vivid that he recognizes it instantly when he visits years later and learns that real places can be invented inside your head.

(Photo: Amitav Ghosh) Credit: Getty Images)