Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

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World Book Club - Kamila Shamsie – Burnt Shadows

Harriett Gilbert and an audience at the Drill Hall Theatre in Central London talk to bestselling Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie about her internationally acclaimed novel Burnt Shadows.

Spanning much of the 20th Century and into the 21st, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties honoured and betrayed, and loves lost and found.

In the devastating aftermath of the second atomic bomb, Hiroko Tanaka leaves Japan in search of new beginnings.

From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the uncertain wake of 9/11, to the novel's nail-biting climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow over the entire world over.

(Photo: Kamila Shamsie. Credit: Reuters)

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World Book Club - Barbara Kingsolver

This month's World Book Club comes from the Jesus Centre in London.

Harriett Gilbert and readers talk to bestselling writer Barbara Kingsolver about her internationally acclaimed novel The Poisonwood Bible.

Having sold four million copies around the world, Kingsolver's most ambitious novel paints an intimate portrait of a crisis-ridden family amid the larger backdrop of an African nation in chaos.

In 1959 an overzealous Baptist minister Nathan Price drags his wife and four daughters deep into the heart of the Congo on a mission to save the unenlightened souls of Africa.

As his plans unravel in tandem with the country's dreams of becoming an independent democracy, the five women narrate the novel, each in their own inimitable voice.

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World Book Club - World Book Club: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Part stunning literary thriller, part gothic novel, the book The Shadow of the Wind is a page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead.

It is a potent mix of a coming-of-age novel and a tragic love story set in Barcelona's post-war years. Harriet Gilbert puts questions from the audience to the author Carlos Ruiz Zafon.