Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

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

In this week’s audio book club, Slate’s Daniel Engber, David Plotz and Hanna Rosin discuss Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, about his quest to compete in the U.S. Memory Championships, and what he learned about the human brain along the way.

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Dysfunctional Norwegian detective Harry Hole navigates a World War Two ghost story. Voted the best Norwegian crime novel ever, Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast delves into neo-Nazi activity in Norway and ends up re-examining a crime that had its roots in the battlefields of the Eastern Front in World War II.

Hear how Jo admits that there’s more than a little of him in his dysfunctional detective Harry Hole and how his own parents ended up on opposing sides during the war, father fighting for the Nazis and his mother in the Norwegian resistance.

Jo Nesbo photo: Hakon-Eikesdal

In this week’s Audio Book Club, Slate’s Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and Hanna Rosin discuss Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, a new novel about the struggle of a family who runs an alligator-wrestling theme park.

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Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Spanish writer and historian Javier Cercas about his haunting novel Soldiers of Salamis.

Internationally feted and winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2004, Soldiers of Salamis delves into the painful history of Spain's Civil War through the gripping, death-defying story of fascist soldier Sanchez Mazas.

In his meditation on the nature of heroism and humanity in war, of remembrance and forgetting after war, the narrator moves from cynical indifference through fascination to wholehearted empathy as the true hero of the story eventually emerges centre stage.

Slate’s Audio Book Club discusses Emma Donoghue’s Room, a best-selling novel about a 5-year-old boy raised by his mother in a shed where she has been held prisoner since before he was born.

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In Eat the Rich the inimitable American satirist P.J. O'Rourke tours the world trying to understand why some countries 'have' and some countries 'have not'.

He talks to Harriett Gilbert and answers questions about his book from a live studio audience and listeners around the world.

Hanna Rosin, Ann Hulbert, and Nina Shen Rastogi discuss Amy Chua's book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." We recommend, but don't insist, that you read the book before listening to this audio program.

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Harriett Gilbert talks to the acclaimed German writer Bernhard Schlink about his explosively controversial novel, The Reader, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Made into an Oscar-winning Hollywood film with Kate Winslet The Reader tells of law student Michael Berg who, nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, re-encounters his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial.

Emily Bazelon, Hanna Rosin and Margaret Talbot discuss the new translation of Gustave Flaubert's nineteenth century French classic Madame Bovary. Relive your college days with this dissection of the original desperate housewife.

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