Author: BBC World Service

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 bunch of ruthless killers and criminals from the underworld Jake knows he should back off but passion for his lost love draws him further into a terrifying web of intrigue and murder.

Hear what Harlan has to say about how he creates such tightly coiled plots and why the sound of an upstairs toilet flushing is the scariest noise you can hear.

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 excited audience of all ages gathers to discuss the novel with Malorie Blackman.

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 falls for a mysterious email correspondent and Rumi, the 13th Century mystic encounters his spiritual mentor, the wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz.

Photo: Mychele Daniau/AFP/Getty Images.

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 its aftermath reverberates through the lives and communities of everyone who witnesses it happen.

(Photo: Christos Tsiolkas)

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 and now recognised, twenty-two years after its publication, as a modern war classic, Regeneration is a part-historical, part-fictional exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.

Picture: WW1 patients recuperating in hospital in 1918, Credit: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

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 coming to replace them. Instead, nature is reclaiming the earth and Greybeard and his clan wander this strange new and dangerous land searching out a place of safety to grow ever older in.

(Photo: Brian Aldiss, courtesy of Brian)

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 Dame. Here an eager audience gathers in the upstairs attic room where aspiring novelists are regularly to be found sleeping off their exertions in quiet alcoves.

As well as questions from the audience in the bookshop and from our wider audience abroad World Book Club also hears from feted writers from around the world explaining why they think this most startling tale of sun, sea, sand and murder is still one of the great classic novels of our age.

To complement this edition of World Book Club you can listen to a BBC drama of The Outsider and also to The Insider, a new play imagining the story of the silent Algerian characters that appear in Camus’ novel.

Picture: Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images.

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 with their mixed cultural environment.

Beginning in America, and spilling back over memories and generations to India, the book explores how family life and relationships are affected by the uprootings and resettlings of the Bengali immigrant experience.

Picture: Jhumpa Lahiri. Credit: Marco Delogu.

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.