Afleveringen
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Recorded at the Hay Festival
SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas StewartON THE BLACK HILL by Bruce ChatwinAGAINST NATURE by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Harriett Gilbert takes to the stage in the BBC Marquee at the Hay Festival for a special edition of the programme recorded in front of an audience.Actor and writer Doon Mackichan known for her outrageous character Cathy in the sitcom Two Doors Down chooses Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart as her good read. It's a touching but heartbreaking tale of a young Glaswegian boy's desperate efforts to save his mother Agnes from the alcoholism that ruins and degrades her. It won the Booker Prize in 2020.As we're in Wales Harriett's fitting choice is Bruce Chatwin's On The Black Hill an account of rural Welsh life in the mid 20th century. It's the story of two brothers' lives over 80 years and their connection to land and community.Bruce Robinson actor, director and writer of the hit film Withnail and I which has been adapted for stage chooses a book that features in the final scene of the film. The I character places two books in a suitcase at the end of the film, one of which is A Rebours - Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Bruce confesses that he's not the book's biggest fan but the ensuing discussion provides an entertaining insight into books we might read when we're younger and how differently we feel about them in later life. It's the story of an eccentric recluse Jean des Esseintes in 19th century France who loathes people and creates a fantasy world for himself but ultimately suffers from his self-inflicted pretentious ennui."I wish I hadn't chosen this book" proclaims Bruce Robinson as he introduces it. "I wish you hadn't chosen it" agrees Doon Mackichan. They then elicit a lot of audience laughter from their deconstruction of this seminal French novel that all three find pretentious.
This is a longer version of the broadcast programme.
Producer: Maggie Ayre
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Shahidha Bari discusses EM Forster's A Passage to India with Neel Mukherjee, Elizabeth Lowry and Dr Chris Mourant.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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ABSENT IN THE SPRING by Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott) (HarperCollins), chosen by Simon BrettIN THE GARDEN OF THE FUGITIVES by Ceridwen Dovey (Penguin), chosen by Denise MinaHIDE MY EYES by Margery Allingham (Penguin), chosen by Harriett Gilbert
Crime writers Denise Mina and Simon Brett join Harriett Gilbert to read each other's favourite books.
Simon chooses Agatha Christie under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, with Absent In The Spring. It’s a story without any detective and one that, perhaps, reveals a more personal side to Christie's writing.
Denise picks the novel In the Garden of the Fugitives by South African-Australian author Ceridwen Dovey, an epistolary novel which begins with a letter that breaks seventeen years of silence between a rich, elderly man with a broken heart and his former protegee, a young South African filmmaker.
And for the occasion of having two crime authors, Harriett Gilbert picks a golden age crime book, Hide My Eyes by Margery Allingham, where private detective Albert Campion finds himself hunting down a serial killer.
Producer: Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio in BristolJoin the conversation @agoodreadbbc Instagram
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Johny Pitts talks to Kevin Barry about his new novel, The Heart in Winter
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Claire Messud, Kafka and Jiaming Tang
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QUARTET IN AUTUMN by Barbara Pym, chosen by Samantha HarveyMRS CALIBAN by Rachel Ingalls, chosen by Harriett GilbertPHARMACOPOEIA: A DUNGENESS NOTEBOOK by Derek Jarman, chosen by Darran Anderson
Two award-winning writers share books they love with Harriett Gilbert.
Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio
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Historian and author Kathryn Hughes and No Such Thing As a Fish presenter Dan Schreiber recommend favourite books to Harriett Gilbert. Kathryn chooses Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, an exploration of the French writer's life in the form of a novel. Dan's choice is very different - John Higgs taking on the conceptual artists and chart toppers The KLF. Harriett has gone for Michael Ondaatje's novel Warlight, set in a murky and mysterious post-war London.
Presenter: Harriett Gilbert
Producer for BBC Audio Bristol: Sally Heaven
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Octavia Bright talks to Maggie Nelson about Like Love, an anthology of essays which explore art and friendship and criticism. And a new prize for climate fiction.
Presenter: Octavia BrightProducer: Nicola Holloway
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Sarah Perry talks to Shahidha Bari about her new novel, Enlightenment
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Hari Kunzru talks to Shahidha Bari about his new novel, Blue Ruin
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Sunjeev Sahota talks to Alex Clark about his new novel, The Spoiled Heart
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Sinéad Gleeson is a writer, broadcaster and editor of three anthologies of Irish writing. Her collection of essays, Constellations: Reflections from Life won Non Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards, and now publishes her debut novel, Hagstone.
Hagstone is set on a remote island of the coast of Ireland, it tells the story of Nell an artist whose work takes inspiration from the landscape and folklore. When she receives an invitation to create a piece of art from the Inions, a reclusive commune of women living sustainably on the island, things begin to unravel. Sinead discusses the precarity of living as an artist, the folklore which infuses Hagstone and dedicating the book to the late activist and artist Sinead O' Connor.
The Book Makers by Adam Smyth is a celebration of five hundred and fifty years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary people. The printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders - who took the book in radical new directions. We hear about the binder who created Shakespeare's First Folio, a 16th century Dutch printer who created bestsellers on Fleet Street and the Cut and Paste Bible sisters who made art from the gospels.
And Kick the Latch author Kathryn Scanlan discusses her love of Moyra Davey’s Long Life: Cool White, Photographs and Essays.
Book List – Sunday 21 March
Hagstone by Sinéad GleesonThe Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers by Sinéad GleesonThe Glass Shore edited by Sinéad GleesonConstellations: Reflections from Life by Sinéad GleesonKick the Latch by Kathryn ScanlanLong Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra DaveyThe Book Makers by Adam Smyth
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US author Percival Everett talks about his new novel, James - a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of view of runaway slave, Jim.
Plus, writing openly about the challenges of motherhood, and doing so with humour. Shahidha talks to two authors who have done just that, in the short story form: Naomi Wood, winner of the BBC Short Story Award, and author of a new collection, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, and to Helen Simpson who has written stories about motherhood in books such as Motherhood, and Hey Yeah Right Get A Life over 20 years previously.
Presenter: Shahidha BariProducer: Emma Wallace
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Alex Clark talks to Andrew O’Hagan about his new book Caledonian Road. Told over the course of a year, Caledonian Road follows art historian and public intellectual Campbell Flynn as a friendship with a young student calls into question the complacency of his much-cherished liberal credentials. With an epic Dickensian cast from drill artists to the wealthy Russian oligarchs in bed with British politicians, the book spools out to encompass a wide canvas of contemporary British life.
Alex also talks to the Australian writer Helen Garner as three books from her back catalogue have been reissued: The Monkey Grip, chronicling a young mother’s life in bohemian Melbourne in the 1970s; This House of Grief, a true crime story of a murderous father; and her most widely renowned novel, The Children’s Bach, which takes us into the lives of a family turned upside down by the forces of sexual desire and the impulse toward freedom.
And, DJ turned novelist, Annie Macmanus shares the Book She'd Never Lend
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THE RED PARTS by Maggie Nelson (Vintage), chosen by Carol Morley INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino (Vintage), chosen by Will Hislop ORDINARY PEOPLE by Diana Evans (Vintage), chosen by Harriett Gilbert
Film director Carol Morley chooses a memoir called The Red Parts, in which author Maggie Nelson tries to make sense of the horror, grief and scepticism of her own aunt's murder trial. A book that blurs the boundaries between personal memoir, psychoanalysis and true crime.
Comedian Will Hislop chooses Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which transports us to 55 different fictional reincarnations of Venice through a series of beautifully detailed and occasionally absurd vignettes. Calvino's prose poems are ordered by theme and, as a reader, you can choose how you want to navigate his matrix of the chapters.
Harriett's choice takes us to London with a novel by Diana Evans called Ordinary People, in which two couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning, an intimate study of identity, parenthood and the fragility of love.
Presenter: Harriett Gilbert Producer: Becky Ripley
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Carys Davies on her new novel, Clear. Plus Annie Ernaux and photography
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Alex Clark talks to novelist Jonathan Buckley about his novel, Tell.
The story is told as a monologue by an unnamed narrator, the gardener of self-made businessman and would-be art collector, Curtis Doyle. Doyle has gone missing from his Scottish estate and many stories about his rags to riches life are being constructed. Tell is a novel concerned with the nature of storytelling, narrative form and the inherent unreliability of memory.
Critic and writer Lauren Oyler and fiction editor of the TLS, Toby Lichtig, discuss the impact of online reviewing on professional literary criticism.Plus David Baddiel on his ten years of writing books for children.
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JUST KIDS by Patti Smith, chosen by Lindsey HilsumMAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Viktor E. Frankl (trans. Ilse Lasch), chosen by Christopher EcclestonTOWARDS THE END OF THE MORNING by Michael Frayn, chosen by Harriett Gilbert
The television journalist and actor share favourite books with Harriett Gilbert.
Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor of Channel 4 News, loves Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids, her account of coming to New York as a young woman and of her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It's a coming-of-age story set against the heady backdrop of 1970s counterculture; it's a story of becoming an artist; and it's a love story that turns into an elegy.
The actor Christopher Eccleston chooses Man's Search for Meaning, the psychotherapist Viktor Frankl's account of his time in Nazi concentration camps and how those experiences informed his belief that man's deepest need is to search for meaning and purpose. It's a powerful book about retaining one's humanity in the face of unimaginable suffering and degradation.
And Harriett Gilbert chooses Towards the End of the Morning, Michael Frayn's 1967 satire about journalists working on a newspaper during the heyday of Fleet Street.
Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio
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CHESS by Stefan Zweig (Faber), chosen by Katy Hessel MAUD MARTHA by Gwendolyn Brooks (Penguin), chosen by Amy Blakemore THE PIER FALLS by Mark Haddon (Vintage), chosen by Harriett Gilbert
Art historian Katy Hessel chooses a book that she read in one sitting because she couldn't put it down: Chess by Stefan Zweig. A novella about the limitless possibilities of the game, and of the human mind.
Author Amy Blakemore chooses Maud Martha by the American poet Gwendolyn Brookes, a story of a life told with such a brevity and beauty of prose that it is almost poetry.
Harriett's choice is a collection of short stories called The Pier Falls by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon, who is not afraid to disturb.
Presenter: Harriett Gilbert Producer: Becky Ripley
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"Last night I dreamt of Manderley again..." begins Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier one of the most well-loved novels of the 20th century. As part of the Daphne du Maurier: Double Exposure season on Radio 4, Open Book looks again at her hugely popular novels to reveal the enduring qualities and appeal of her writing.
From the pirates, smugglers and bewitching Cornish wilds of Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek, to the gender politics and class commentary of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, du Maurier’s reputation as a romance novelist misrepresented the true breadth of her work. Octavia Bright is joined by Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City, Funny Weather and Crudo; novelist, short story writer and Cornish resident Wyl Menmuir and Dr Laura Varnam of Oxford University, an expert on du Maurier’s life and work, to strip away some of the undermining labels she struggled to shake in her lifetime.
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