Author: BBC World Service

Richard Ford discusses his classic novel 'The Sportswriter' with Harriett Gilbert and an invited studio audience.

French Nobel Laureate JMG Le Clezio talks to Harriett Gilbert in front of an invited studio audience about his recently-translated work Desert.

Contrasting the beauty of a lost culture in the North African desert with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants, the novel is a rich, poetic and provocative epic about colonization and its legacy, which is still painfully relevant after 30 years.

John Boyne discusses his acclaimed novel 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' with Harriett Gilbert and an invited studio audience.

Harriet Gilbert talks to Andrea Levy about Small Island, a heart-warming and tale of love and immigration during World War II.

Harriett Gilbert talks to Indian writer Kiran Desai about her internationally bestselling work The Inheritance of Loss.

Winner of the Man Booker prize in 2006, Desai’s novel is a profoundly moving cross-continental saga that sweeps around the globe from the Himalayas to New York City to Cambridge in the UK.

Reflecting the author’s own Indian-American upbringing the novel interweaves the grand disruptions of politics with the domestic lives and loves of three memorable characters, the morose judge, his lovelorn granddaughter Sai and their devoted, long-suffering cook.

James Ellroy discusses his novel American Tabloid with Harriett Gilbert and an invited audience.

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Egyptian writer Alaa Al-Aswany about his bestselling novel The Yacoubian Building.

It was the Arab world’s number-one bestseller for five years running after it was published in 2002.

The Yacoubian Building interweaves the stories of a group of diverse characters who live and work in downtown Cairo.

A moving study of politics and power, sex and revenge - centred on the apartment building - the Yacoubian building, which still stands in Cairo today.

The novel offers a compelling yet daringly scathing portrayal of modern Egypt since the Revolution of 1952.

Half a century on from its first publication, G�nter Grass will be talking about The Tin Drum from his home in Lubeck, Germany.

This month Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed American writer Lionel Shriver.

Her prizewinning novel, 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 from his mother to his absent father, the novel raises questions about culpability, the limits of maternal love and the nature of evil itself.

In this month's World Book Club Harriett Gilbert will be at London’s South Bank Arts Centre talking to internationally acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about her bestselling novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Winner of the UK Orange Prize for fiction in 2007 Half of a Yellow Sun charts the stories of three intersecting lives turned upside down by the Biafran war in the late 1960s.

Village boy Ugwu comes to work for a charismatic professor. The professor’s glamorous girlfriend Olanna forgoes her life of luxury to live with him and Englishman Richard is in thrall to Olanna’s enigmatic twin sister. Meanwhile the shadow of this most horrific of civil wars, whose repercussions are still felt in Nigeria today, looms ever larger.

(Photo: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) (Credit: Jeff Overs/BBC)