World Book Club

In this month’s edition of BBC World Book Club bestselling American writer Elif Batuman discusses her acclaimed debut novel. ‘The Idiot’ follows Selin, a Turkish-American fresher at Harvard in the mid-1990s, delving into her experiences as she navigates the challenges of university life, grappling with identity, language, and the complexities of relationships, romantic and otherwise. Selin becomes infatuated with Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics student, and their relationship unfolds primarily through a series of cryptic emails, highlighting the difficulties of virtual communication across cultures. As Selin travels to Europe for a summer teaching job, she continues to struggle with her sense of self, her obsession with Ivan, and the meaning of her experiences. The novel captures the disorienting, often absurd nature of early adulthood, where intellectual exploration meets the messiness of real life and its chaotic emotions. Infused with dry humour and philosophical musings, The Idiot is at heart a playful meditation on the limitation of language, and the gap between theoretical knowledge and lived experience.

German author Ewald Arenz answers readers' questions about his bestselling novel Tasting Sunlight. It’s the moving story of Liss, a reclusive woman who single-handedly runs her family farm, and teenage runaway Sally who takes refuge there. As they work together, Liss and Sally form an unlikely – and nurturing – friendship.

Image: Ewald Arenz (Credit: Tristar Media/Getty Images)

In one of the last broadcast interviews, the acclaimed Irish author Edna O’Brien, who died aged 93 in July 2024, is in conversation with Kim Chakanetsa. In this bonus episode, shediscusses her final novel, Girl – which tells the story of a young girl in Nigeria who is captured by the Islamist group Boko Haram – the effects of lockdown and her love of writing and literature from around the world… (Recorded in 2020)

Another chance to hear Harriett Gilbert talking to bestselling American writer Paul Auster, who died earlier this year on 30 April 2024.

Paul Auster joined Harriett in 2012, with a literary festival audience and readers from around the world, to discuss his acclaimed work The New York Trilogy. In three brilliant variations on the classic detective story, Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York City his own. Each interconnected tale exploits the elements of standard detective fiction to achieve an entirely new genre that was ground-breaking when it was published four decades ago.

In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of identity and what it means to be human.

Hear what readers made of Paul and his novel and what happened when another Paul Auster stood up to introduce himself to the Paul Auster on the stage – a very New York Trilogy occurrence.

Presenter: Harriett Gilbert Producer: Allegra McIlroy

(Photo: Paul Auster interview with Stephen Sackur in New York, 2021)

Following the death of the Irish author Edna O’Brien in July 2024, another chance to hear a 2008 World Book Club episode in which she talked to Harriett Gilbert and an audience of readers about her renowned debut novel The Country Girls. Banned in her homeland on publication, it has become one of O’Brien’s most admired and renowned works.

Producer: Oliver Jones

Image: Edna O'Brien, pictured in 2009 at the Hay Festival (Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images)

Toronto is a bustling city on Lake Ontario which is growing at an astonishing rate. Almost a third of Torontonians have arrived in the last decade and more than half were born outside of Canada. The city’s Mohawk name is , which means “the place on the water where the trees are standing". Noah Richler explores the fictional landscape of the city with four of its exciting writers from different generations and backgrounds; Catherine Hernandez, Adrianna Chartrand, Don Gillmor and Deepa Rajagopalan who all join him in front of a lively audience at The House of Anansi Bookshop.

Kevin Kwan discusses his internationally best-selling novel, Crazy Rich Asians, with readers from around the world.

Chinese-American academic Rachel Chu lives a modest and happy life with her boyfriend and fellow academic Nick. But when Nick invites her home to Singapore to meet the family, everything changes – starting with the first class flights.

Saturated with wildly wealthy and deliciously dysfunctional super-elites, this ironic and funny rom-com makes a perfect escapist summer read.

(Photo: Kevin Kwan is seen in midtown on 24 August, 2023, New York City. Credit: Raymond Hall/Getty Images)

In Miriam Toews’s novel, Women Talking, the women of a remote Mennonite colony are hold secret meetings to talk about the crimes of the men who they live alongside. After years of being told that they were suffering from hysterical delusions, the women “came to understand that they were collectively dreaming one dream, and that it wasn’t a dream at all.”

Women Talking is a response to the real life events on a Mennonite settlement in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009.

Miriam Toews talks to World Book Club readers in Toronto and around the world about her unique and powerful story about the power of language and solidarity.

(Photo: Miriam Toews, Canadian author at the Hay Festival, 4 June, 2022 in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images)

Percival Everett will be discussing his Booker-shortlisted novel The Trees. This powerful and fiercely funny satire centring on revenge and racial justice in America shifts genres between police procedural, magical realism and horror with wit and consummate skill. Percival Everett addresses some of America’s darkest history with an unusual mix of playfulness and political seriousness.

Award-winning Australian novelist Charlotte Wood joins Harriett Gilbert to answer questions from readers around the world about her novel, The Weekend.

It's a story of grief and friendship; three women meet to clear their deceased friend’s beach house and find themselves uncovering secrets and stirring up memories.

(Image: Charlotte Wood. Photo credit: Carly Earl.)

Multi award-winning novelist Ann Patchett will be discussing The Dutch House.

A dark modern fairytale set against the very real world of post-WWII Philadelphia, tracing the love between a brother and sister, their vanishing mother, distant father and jealous stepmother. Ann Patchett tells the story of a family over five decades with a finely balanced mixture of wit and heartbreak.

(Image: Ann Patchett. Photo credit: Emily Dorio.)

World Book Café heads to Madrid to talk to writers about a new boom in feminist fiction. A few month after the resignation of President of the Spanish Football Federation over a non-consensual kiss of footballer Jenni Hermoso at the World Cup final, World Book Café investigates how Madrid’s women writers are challenging gender roles in the books world.

Presenter Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to acclaimed Italian physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli about his runaway bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

A compact and engaging exploration of some of the most fundamental ideas in modern physics this book takes readers on a captivating journey through seven concise chapters, each dedicated to a different topic. From the theory of relativity to quantum mechanics and the nature of time, Rovelli presents complex concepts with remarkable clarity, making them accessible to a wide audience.

Throughout the book, Rovelli weaves together the history of scientific discovery with his own personal reflections, creating a narrative that is both poetic and thought-provoking. Delving into the mysteries of the universe and examining our own place in the cosmos Rovelli invites readers to ponder the profound questions that physics raises about the nature of space, time, and existence itself.

(Photo: Carlo Rovelli. Credit: Christopher Wahl.)

Antonio Muñoz Molina answers questions from around the world on his novel In the Night of Time. The panoramic portrait of Spain on the brink of civil war follows the life of Ignacio Abel, master builder and architect, as he navigates an illicit love affair with an American woman as the darkness of war surrounds him.

Recorded in the prestigious Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid.

(Photo: Antonio Muñoz Molina. Credit: Elena Blanco)

Harriett Gilbert and readers around the globe talk to acclaimed Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka about his Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Almeida, a gay war photographer, recently deceased, with secrets aplenty, awakes to find himself sitting in line in an ethereal visa office, determined to find out who has murdered him. In a Sri Lanka beset by civil war, death squads and terrorist bombs, the list of suspects is long. He has 'seven moons' a week, to make contact with and steer his two closest friends to the evidence stash that could uncover the culprit and change the course of his country's destiny.

Navigating the afterlife with a mix of sardonic wit and streetwise sensibility Maali roams war-torn Columbo confronting the ghosts and murderers who haunt Sri Lanka, in a country where the past is never really dead.

(Photo: Shehan Karunatilaka. Credit: Dominic Sansoni)

English author A. S Byatt talks to an audience about her novel 'Possession'. First broadcast in March 2004

(Photo: A S Byatt. Credit:BBC)

Xiaolu Guo talks about her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. The book was her first written in English and made prestigious fiction shortlists on publication in 2007.

Twenty-three year old Zhuang – or Z as she’s called in England because no-one can pronounce her name – arrives to spend a year learning English. The loneliness and strangeness of the city are overwhelming, but as she struggles through the challenges of nouns and verbs and the oddities of English speech, she meets and falls in love with an older English man. When he invites her to ‘be my guest’ she brings round her suitcase and moves into his house.

Written in broken English that subtly improves throughout the novel, with perfectly funny insights into English cultural quirks and her own Chinese background, this is a romantic comedy about two people who neither speak one another’s language nor understand one another’s culture.

(Photo: Xiaolu Guo. Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images)

American writer Michael Chabon talks about his 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

From Jewish mysticism to Houdini to the Golden Age of Comic Books and WWII, Chabon’s immersive novel deals with escape and transformation through the lives of two Jewish boys in New York. Josef Kavalier makes an impossible escape from Prague in 1939, leaving his whole family behind but convinced he’s going to find a way to get them out too. He arrives in New York to stay with his cousin Sammy Klayman, and together the boys cook up a superhero to rival Superman – both banking on their comic book creation, The Escapist, to transform their lives and those around them, which in part he does. Their first cover depicts The Escapist punching Hitler in the face, and they wage war on him in their pages, but the personal impact of WWII is painfully inevitable.

The novel touches on the personal scars left by vast political upheaval, and the damaging constraints of being unable to love freely and live a true and authentic life. Chabon’s prose is perfectly crafted – sometimes lyrical, sometimes intensely witty, and occasionally painfully heartbreaking.

(Picture: Michael Chabon. Photo credit: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.)

American writer and visual artist Audrey Niffenegger talks about her bestselling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife - a magical love story with a twist.

Funny, quirky, and occasionally heartbreaking, this is the story of a relationship lived in the moment – even if those moments are all in the wrong order.

Clare and Henry met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when she was twenty-two and he was thirty. Because Henry is a time traveller. He suffers from a rare genetic condition that means he can be pulled forwards or backwards through time at any moment, without his control.

Against this backdrop, Clare and Henry build a deep and passionate relationship that spans Clare’s whole life and most of Henry’s – all while trying to live a normal life. But unlike most couples, they know how it will end from very early on. Audrey Niffenegger explores the depths of love and trust and inevitable grief and loss through her unusual and moving novel.

(Picture: Audrey Niffenegger. Photo credit: Dennis Hearne, courtesy MacAdam/Cage.)

Colombian writer Pilar Quintana talks about her acclaimed novel The Bitch which explores themes of motherhood, loss, and the impact of violence on women's lives.

Set against the backdrop of the Pacific coast, the story revolves around Damaris, a young woman longing for a child but unable to conceive. When she discovers a pregnant dog near her home, she becomes obsessed with the idea of adopting one of its puppies.

However, her evolving relationship with the puppy becomes entangled with the violence of the society around her, revealing dark secrets and triggering a journey of self-discovery.

Through Quintana's lyrical prose, the novel delves deep into the complexities of human relationships, motherhood in particular, the scars left by conflict, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

(Photo: Author Pilar Quintana. Credit: Danilo Costa)

Bestselling author Sofi Oksanen answers readers' questions about her novel Purge.

It's a harrowing story of sexual violence, betrayal and retribution which charts the troubled history of Estonia during and after the Second World War. Told through the lives of two women, the story starts when a frightened stranger, Zara, arrives on Aliide's doorstep. Gradually, their parallel stories, and connected histories are uncovered. This powerful novel has been translated into 38 languages.

(Picture: Author Sofi Oksanen. Photo credit: Toni Härkönen.)

On the centenary of her birth another chance to hear much-loved author Judith Kerr discussing her memorable young adults' novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit with Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world.

Set during the Second World War, this semi-autobiographical novel traces the story of a young Jewish girl and her family who flee Berlin just as the Nazis come to power. The journey of a family splintered by conflict, driven by fear and eventually rewarded with reunion is seen through the eyes of the nine-year-old Anna.

Judith Kerr’s novel, by turns heart-lifting and heart-rending has stood the test of time and continues to be enjoyed by readers of all ages to this day.

(Picture: Judith Kerr. Credit: Eliz Huseyin)

Best-selling American author Curtis Sittenfeld discusses her acclaimed debut novel, Prep. Set in an exclusive boarding school in north-eastern America, Prep is an insightful, caustic and funny coming-of-age story and a savage dissection of class, race, and gender.

Clever, aspirational Lee Fiora is fourteen years old when her father drops her at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts that she has won a scholarship to. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, she becomes a shrewd observer of, and ultimately a participant in, their snobby culture and rituals.

She forms intense friendships with other girls; complicated relationships with teachers and an all-consuming infatuation with a boy from the cool crowd, all of which leads to conflicts with her parents back home in the mid-West, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant.

Other novels about boarding schools mentioned in this programme include Make your Home among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James and Black Ice by Lorene Cary.

(Photo: Curtis Sittenfeld. Credit: Jenn Ackerman)

Presenter Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to acclaimed American author Paul Theroux about his bestselling travel book Deep South.

After fifty years crossing the globe, seeking adventure and stories to tell about places far from home, Theroux travels deep into the heart of his native country and discovers a land as profoundly foreign as anything he has previously experienced abroad. He finds in the deep south a place of contradiction, full of unforgettable characters, landscapes, music, and sense of community, but also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates.

On four road trips across four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits small-town churches and gun shows, meets mayors and social workers, writers and reverends. The spectre of racism and the history slavery is never far away, but more often than not Theroux is met with the warmest of welcomes and a willingness to engage in deep and wide-ranging conversations.

(Picture: Paul Theroux. Photo credit: Steve McCurry.)

World Book Café travels to Paris to meet some of the French capital’s newest writers. Authors Mahir Guven, Blandine Rinkel, Laurent Petitmangin and Capucine Delattre discuss taking on the literary establishment and finding new ways to express themselves. Like many places in the world, questions of equality, diversity and freedom of expression are top of the agenda in France. But it is complicated; the ideal of universalism - meaning every citizen is considered to be the same regardless of class or ethnicity - is at the heart of the French republic. Does this 'universalism' leave space for the 21st Century desire to celebrate difference, and how can writing help reconcile these complex ideas?

Image: The skyline of Paris, 9 December 2022 (Credit: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)

This month World Book Club visits Paris, France to be guests of the iconic bookshop on the Left Bank of the River Seine, Shakespeare & Co. There Harriett Gilbert and a bookshop audience talk to acclaimed French writer Marie Darrieussecq about her extraordinary novel Pig Tales.

Pig Tales is the story of a young woman who works at a shady Parisian massage parlour, becoming a favourite with her lustful clients until, that is, she slowly and alarmingly metamorphoses into a pig.

A dark feminist fable of political and sexual corruption, and a grim warning of what can happen in a society without a soul, Pig Tales scandalised its readers when it first came out and became the most popular first novel published in decades.

(Picture: Marie Darrieussecq. Photo credit: Charles Freger.)

Driving too fast through Israel’s Negev desert in his SUV after a long day in the hospital, Dr Eitan Green accidentally hits a lone Eritrean man on the empty moonlit road, killing him instantly.

Panic stricken he drives off instead of calling for help and confessing what he’s done. A decision that will change the course of his life irrevocably because the dead man’s wife, the elegant, enigmatic Sikrit, knows what happened. In atonement for his crime Sikrit insists the doctor start treating Eritrean refugees after his hospital dayshifts at clandestine makeshift hospitals in the desert.

A nail-biting and morally devastating drama of guilt, racism, shame and desire which stares unflinchingly at the darkness inside us all, and asks the reader: what would you have done?

(Picture: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Photo credit: Alon Siga.)

A Passage North explores the impact of the vicious Sri Lankan civil war between Tamil and Sinhalese which tore Sri Lanka apart for two and a half decades before a fragile ceasefire was finally reached in 2009. When Krishan learns that his grandmother’s former carer Rani has died he makes the long journey north to attend the funeral across a country still traumatised and scarred by its recent past.

Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and the dead, and an unsettling meditation on what it means to have observed the war from afar rather than to have been personally caught up in its horrors.

(Picture: Anuk Arudpragasam. Photo credit: Ruvin De Silva.)

World Book Club travels to The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in England, as guests of The Off the Shelf Festival and talks to local prize-winning Sheffield writer Sunjeev Sahota about his compelling novel, The Year of the Runaways.

Voyaging from India to England, from childhood to the present day, Sunjeev Sahota's heart-rending novel follows a group of young men each in flight from India and desperately searching for a new and fulfilling life in the northern British town of Sheffield. Tarlochan is silent about his past in Bihar, and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the traumatized Randeep. Randeep has a visa wife living separately in a flat nearby, who constantly dreads a surprise call from the immigration authorities.

An unforgettable story of dignity in the face of adversity and of the enduring power of the human spirit.

(Picture: Sunjeev Sahota. Photo credit: Simon Revill.)

This month as World Book Club continues its year-long season celebrating the Exuberance of Youth it also celebrates the 20th anniversary of the programme.

To mark this happy occasion World Book Club are guests of the London Literature Festival at the South Bank Centre on the River Thames and Harriett Gilbert talks to Bangladeshi-born British novelist Tahmima Anam about her enthralling novel, A Golden Age.

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, A Golden Age is a story of passion and revolution, of hope, faith and unexpected heroism in the middle of chaos. Set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War of Independence we follow Rehana, a mother struggling to protect her children as the civil war intensifies. Wanting only to keep them safe she finds herself facing a heartbreaking dilemma in a war that will eventually see the birth of Bangladesh.

(Picture: Tahmima Anam. Photo credit: Abeer Y Hoque.)

This month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, we talk to American writer Brit Bennett about her unputdownable novel, The Vanishing Half.

The Vanishing Half charts the rollercoaster parallel lives of estranged twin sisters who choose to live in two very different worlds - one black and one white.

Stella and Desiree are identical twins, growing up together in a small, Southern black community. Until, at age sixteen, they run away. Decades later, still separated by many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple stories and generations of one family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Bennett has produced both a riveting, emotional family drama and an unforgettable exploration of the American history of passing as White.

(Picture: Brit Bennett. Photo credit: Emma Trim.)

Next in the series exploring The Exuberance of Youth World Book Club talks to the award-winning American author Ben Lerner about his beguiling debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station.

Brilliant, unreliable, young American poet Adam Gordon is on a fellowship in Madrid, where he is struggling to establish his identity and dazzle his contemporaries.

Instead of studying, his research becomes a meditation on authenticity - are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain, especially the two clever and beautiful women he falls for, as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? In the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid train bombings has he participated in history or merely watch it pass him by?

Winner of the Believer Book Award and a Guardian Book of the Year from 2012 which marked the launch a major new literary talent.

(Picture: Ben Lerner. Photo credit: Catherine Barnett.)

In this year-long celebration of The Exuberance of Youth, World Book Club revisits the multi-prize-winning debut novel Homegoing by the acclaimed Ghanaian author Yaa Gyasi.

The story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a white slave-trader, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history. A novel of remarkable sweep and power, with each character’s life indelibly drawn, Homegoing reveals the devastating legacy of slavery and the resilience of the human spirit.

(Picture: Yaa Gyasi. Photo credit: Peter Hurley/Vilcek Foundation.)

In the season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, World Book Club talks to Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid about his compelling novel, Exit West.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Exit West features Nadia and Saeed, two ordinary young people, attempting to fall in love in a world turned upside down. Civil war is driving them from their homeland and they join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, to find their place in the world. Then something extraordinary happens: doors start appearing, all over the world. They lead to other cities, other countries, other lives. But once you leave there’s no coming back. Readers from around the world put their questions to Mohsin Hamid about this dazzling book.

(Picture: Mohsin Hamid. Photo credit: Jillian Edelstein.)

World Book Café, the programme where writers reveal the secrets of their home cities, goes to Brooklyn.

In a lively and engaging conversation from the heart of the neighbourhood, Asian American authors will share insights into their creative lives, the obstacles they face and the joy they find in words and writing.

Presenter Michelle Fleury will be joined on stage by Brooklyn-based writers Elaine Hsieh Chou, Crystal Hana Kim, Matthew Ortile, Pitchaya Sudbanthad and Jen Lue.

Jennifer Egan answers audience questions about her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. It is a dazzling, exciting book, which plays with form and storytelling traditions. Goon Squad is made up of connected short stories circling around musician and record executive Bennie Salazar, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. It explores their pasts and catapults them into the future using a rich variety of voices and narrative styles. This special edition of World Book Club, presented by Katherine Lanpher, was recorded at Brooklyn Central Library.

(Photo: Jennifer Egan. Credit: Pieter M. Van Hattem)

This month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to award-winning American writer Bryan Washington about his moving novel Memorial.

Benson, a Black day-care teacher and Mike, a Japanese-American chef, live together in Houston, but are beginning to wonder why they're a couple. When Mike flies off to visit his seriously ill, estranged father in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother arrives for a visit, Benson is stuck looking after his boyfriend’s mother, in a very unconventional domestic set-up. As both men cope with their difficult circumstances they undergo life-changing transformations, learning more about love, anger, and grief than they had bargained for along the way.

Poignant and profound, Memorial is about family in all its strange forms, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the outer limits of love.

(Picture: Bryan Washington. Photo credit: Louis Do.)

In the latest in World Book Club's season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, Harriett Gilbert talks to Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo about her extraordinary novel, We Need New Names.

A remarkable literary debut shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize We Need New Names is the unflinching, compelling story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe and into America. A coming-of-age story, we follow a young girl named Darling, first as a 10-year-old in Zimbabwe with her friends, navigating a vibrant world of colour, political chaos and ultimately lethal danger. Later as a teenager emigrating to the Midwest United States, she hopes to find a better future living with her Aunt Fostalina in Michigan, only to discover that her options as a young immigrant are perilously few.

(Picture: NoViolet Bulawayo. Photo credit: Nye Lyn Tho.)

A remarkable debut from an exhilarating young new voice, Such a Fun Age is a big-hearted page-turner of a story about race and privilege, centring on a young black babysitter, her well-meaning employer, and a chance encounter that threatens to undo them both.

(Picture: Kiley Reid. Photo credit: David Goddard.)

In the second in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this centenary year of the BBC, Harriett Gilbert talks to world-famous Chilean writer Isabel Allende about her extraordinary novel, Eva Luna.

Eva Luna is the story of an orphan who beguiles the world with her remarkable visions, triumphing over the worst of adversities and bringing light, as her name would suggest, to a dark place.

As Eva comes of age and tells her tale, Isabel Allende conjures up a whole complex, unidentified, South American nation— filled with a cast of unforgettable characters, rich, poor, simple, sophisticated, oppressors and oppressed. Against this turbulent background, love, politics and tragedy all play their part in Eva’s life and help shape her into the unforgettable revolutionary and storyteller she becomes.

A novel that celebrates the power of imagination to create a better world.

(Picture: Isabel Allende. Photo credit: Lori Barra.)

The first of our season of celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this the centenary year of the BBC, World Book Club talks to Irish writer Naoise Dolan about her dazzling novel Exciting Times. Psychologically astute and dryly funny, Exciting Times is a modern, intelligent dissection of youth, power and privilege set amongst the international circles of contemporary Hong Kong. Clever, young millennial Ava, an Irish graduate teaching English, is having an affair with rich cynical banker Julian. Then she meets Edith. Earnest, attentive and all the things Julian isn’t. A raw, intimate exploration of love and sexuality amongst millennials, Exciting Times charts the often transactional nature of relationships in our complicated modern world.

(Photo courtesy of Naoise Dolan.)

Harriett Gilbert talks to the multi-award-winning Trinidadian-British author Monique Roffey about her enchanting novel The Mermaid of Black Conch, which won the 2020 Costa Book of the Year. Roffey spins the mesmerising tale of a cursed mermaid and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her.

When American bounty-hunters capture Aycayia from the deep seas off the island of Black Conch, David rescues her and vows to win her trust. With Aycayia in hiding, their love grows as they navigate both the joys and dangers of life on shore. But on an island whose history reaches back to darker times nothing is straightforward as old jealousies and ancient grudges surface amongst the inhabitants.

(Photo: Monique Roffey.. Credit: Marcus Bastel.)

Continuing our month-long season to celebrate the English PEN centenary, World Book Club talks to multi-award-winning Turkish-Kurdish writer and activist Burhan Sönmez about his unforgettable novel Istanbul, Istanbul.

At once powerfully political and intensely personal, Istanbul, Istanbul is the story of four prisoners kept in underground cells beneath the city, who tell one another stories about their city to pass the time. There are two Istanbuls, one below ground and one above, yet in reality both are one and the same.

Sonmez worked as a lawyer in Istanbul and was a member of IHD, the Human Rights Society, and a founder of BirGün, a daily opposition newspaper. He was seriously injured following an assault by police in 1996 in Turkey and received treatment in Britain afterwards.

Here he discusses his novel, censorship and the tense political situation in Turkey, and the invaluable impact of English PEN and other such pressure groups with presenter Ritula Shah and readers from around the globe.

Istanbul, Istanbul was translated by Ümit Hussein.

(Picture: Burhan Sönmez. Photo credit: Roberto Gandola.)

This month, to kick off a mini-season to celebrate a very special centenary World Book Club talks, for a second time, to the Nobel Prize-winning giant of world literature, Professor Wole Soyinka, about one hundred years of the writers’ organisation English PEN. PEN is the influential pressure group which helps support and campaign for the release of writers held unlawfully in jail around the globe and which helped to secure Soyinka’s release in 1969, after 26 months of detention without trial by the military regime in Nigeria.

Guest presenter Ritula Shah also discusses Wole Soyinka’s first new novel in half a century with the author and his readers around the world: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is a bitingly witty whodunit, a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s ruling elite, and a powerful call to arms from one of the country’s most relentless political activists and world-famous writer.

(Picture: Wole Soyinka. Photo credit: Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images.)

World Book Club this month talks to the award-winning French writer Maylis de Kerangal about her remarkable and haunting novel Mend the Living.

After a horrific car accident on the Normandy coast surfer Simon Limbeau is rushed to hospital where his devastated parents are later told that he is on life-support, but is brain-dead. His heart, however, is still beating perfectly and could be donated to save someone’s life. They are faced with an agonising choice.

Mend the Living is the story of Simon Limbeau’s heart – and the story of all the lives that are turned upside down in the 24 hours between the accident that cuts short his life and offers hope of new life to another.

(Picture: Maylis de Kerangal. Photo credit: Philippe Quaisse.)

To mark the bicentenary of the birth of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky World Book Club revisits Crime and Punishment in an edition recorded at the elegant Pushkin House, London’s Russian cultural hub, in 2016.

To help us explore Dostoyevsky’s haunting classic thriller Harriett Gilbert was joined by acclaimed Russian writer Boris Akunin and Russian scholar Dr Sarah Young.

Consumed by the idea of his own special destiny, Rashkolnikov is drawn to commit a terrible crime. In the aftermath, he is dogged by madness, guilt and a calculating detective, and a feverish cat-and-mouse game unfolds.

(Photo credit: Alexander Aksakov/Getty Images.)

World Book Club this month talks to the world-renowned Australian author Jane Harper at her home in Melbourne, Australia, about her internationally garlanded thriller, The Dry.

Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, tensions in a small town community become unbearable when the Hadler family are found brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler’s guilty, committing suicide after slaughtering his wife and son.

But policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the funeral of his best friend and is reluctantly drawn into the investigation. As he probes deeper into the killings, secrets from the past bubble to the surface and he questions the truth of his friend's crime.

A chilling story set under a sweltering sun dealing with issues of climate change, alcoholism and a community on the brink of breaking down.

(Picture: Jane Harper. Photo credit: Katsnapp Photography.)

Serious Men tells the intertwined stories of wily Ayyan Mani - who tries to pass off his son as a mathematical genius - and life at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai, where Ayyan works, and where veteran scientists battle over their pet theories about how life began on Earth.

Serious Men won the Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010 and the 2011 PEN Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. It’s an unsettling comedy about inequalities in Indian society; it’s a portrait of a man doing his best for his family with unorthodox methods and unexpected results, and it’s a look at the romance and frustrations of scientific research.

Manu Joseph is a novelist and columnist.

(Picture: Manu Joseph. Photo credit: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images.)

This month World Book Club talks to acclaimed Canadian writer Louise Penny about the very first in her astonishingly successful series of Inspector Gamache crime novels.

When a much-loved inhabitant of the village of Three Pines in the Eastern Townships of Quebec is found dead in the woods during Thanksgiving, the locals are certain that it was just a tragic hunting accident.

But Chief Inspector Armand Gamache from Montreal suspects foul play and won’t rest until he’s rootled out the darkness at the heart of this seemingly peaceable and bucolic community. His always courteous but also insistent sleuthing gradually brings to light the family secrets and long-held grudges seething under its apparently serene surface.

(Picture: Louise Penny. Photo credit: Jean-Francois Berube.)

Spanning much of the twentieth century and told with an elegant simplicity which belies the harshness of the tale it tells, Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life is the story of one man's relationship with an ancient landscape.

Andreas Egger knows every nook and cranny of the Alpine mountain valley that is his home and from which vantage point he witnesses the arrival of the modern world, in all its many and daunting forms.

A stark yet tender book about love, loss and endurance, and about finding dignity and beauty in solitude A Whole Life has already touched many thousands of readers with its message of solace and truth.

(Picture: Robert Seethaler. Photo credit: UrbanZintel.)

A modern classic in the African literary canon and voted in the Top Ten of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, Nervous Conditions is the coming-of-age story of two Shona girls, Tambudzai and Nyasha, both trying to find their place in contemporary Zimbabwe.

Whilst Nyasha has been to England and questions the effect of that Westernisation on her family, Tambudzai is from a more traditional branch of the family and is awed by her cousin’s seeming sophistication.

Through its exploration of race, class, gender and the nature of friendship, the novel dramatizes the 'nervousness' of the 'postcolonial' condition that vexes us still.

(Picture:Tsitsi Dangarembga. Photo credit: Hannah Mentz.)

This month World Book Club discusses Bill Bryson’s hugely acclaimed travelogue Notes from a Small Island with the author and his readers around the world. After two decades as a resident of the United Kingdom, Bryson took what he thought might be a last affectionate trip around his adoptive country before returning to live in his native America. Notes from a Small Island is the irreverent and hilarious account of this meandering journey through his beloved island nation. From Dover to Downing Street, from Giggleswick to Loch Ness by way of Titsey and Nether Wallop, Bryson rejoices in Britain’s inimitable placenames and much else of more substance besides, his very own State of the Nation address, as it were.

A huge number-one bestseller when it was first published, Notes from a Small Island has become that nation's most loved book about Britain.

(Picture: Bill Bryson. Photo credit: Catherine Williams.)

On this month’s World Book Club, Icelandic literary superstar Sjón will be answering questions from readers around the world about his novel Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was.

Set in Reykjavik in 1918, it’s the story of sixteen year old Mani, whose life is completely changed by the arrival of the Spanish flu in the city.

It’s a fascinating novel about human resilience and connections, a love letter to cinema and a portrait of a place at a very particular moment in its history.

Moonstone won The Icelandic Literary Prize in 2013.

Sjón is one of Iceland’s leading novelists and his work has been translated into 30 languages. He’s also a poet and librettist and was Oscar nominated for his lyrics for the film Dancer In The Dark. Presented by Harriett Gilbert.

(Picture: Sjón. Courtesy of Sjón.)

A novel of breathtaking sweep revealing the devastating impact of slavery through history. This month World Book Club discusses the multi-prize-winning debut novel Homegoing with its acclaimed Ghanaian author Yaa Gyasi and her fans around the world. The story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a white slave-trader, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history. A novel of remarkable sweep and power, with each character’s life indelibly drawn, Homegoing reveals the devastating legacy of slavery and the resilience of the human spirit.

(Picture: Yaa Gyasi. Photo credit: Peter Hurley/Vilcek Foundation.)

Life or death choices in a bid to survive the horrors of 1970s Communist China

This month in the penultimate edition of a year celebrating the globe’s greatest women writers World Book Club talks to acclaimed Chinese author Yiyun Li about her harrowing debut novel The Vagrants. Winner of the Guardian First Book Award The Vagrants is based on real events which took place in China in 1979 during the era that ultimately led to the fateful Tiannanmen Square uprising. In the provincial town of Muddy Waters a young woman, Gu Shan, is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. The citizens stage a protest after her execution and, over the following six weeks, the novel charts the hopes and fears of the leaders of the protest and the pain of Gu Shan’s parents and friends, as everyone in the town is caught up in the remorseless turn of events.

(Picture: Yiyun Li. Photo credit: Roger Turesson.)

A fast-moving, passionate, genre-bending work of art that both dazzles and entertains. This month, World Book Club discusses the much garlanded novel How to Be Both with its acclaimed British author Ali Smith and her fans around the world. Still not able to gather together in a studio, presenter Harriett Gilbert and Ali Smith will be talking remotely to international listeners via all manner of means - phonelines, emails, Skype calls, and social media. In this playfully ambitious novel, a 15th-century artist, Francesco del Cossa, travels through time and space to discover a grieving sixteen-year-old girl in contemporary England taking comfort in a painting he (or is it she?) created. Or is it all the other way around? And whose story comes first?

(Picture: Ali Smith. Photo credit: Sarah Wood.)

This month’s World Book Club is the ninth in our series celebrating the greatest women writers at work across the globe. Harriett Gilbert and listeners from around the world talk to the world-renowned American author Elizabeth Strout at her home in New Brunswick, Maine, in the USA. The novel under discussion is her internationally-garlanded Olive Kitteridge: a novel made up of 13 luminous short stories set in small-town Maine and bound together by one larger-than-life character, the flawed and fascinating Olive Kitteridge. Retired school teacher and long-time wife of the long-suffering Henry, Olive struggles to make sense of the changes in her life and the lives of those around her. Her travails, at once parochial but also universal, make readers laugh, nod in recognition, as well as wince in pain.

(Picture: Elizabeth Strout. Photo credit: Leonard Cendamo.)

The Australian writer Helen Garner joins Harriett Gilbert as World Book Club continues its celebration of women writers.

She’ll be talking about her 2008 novel The Spare Room. It’s the story of two women: Nicola, who has cancer, and Helen who looks after her for three challenging weeks. Helen has her doubts about the unconventional clinic where Nicola has sought out treatment, but she nonetheless throws herself into the role of nurse, finding some comfort in the practical demands of the job.

Based on real events, The Spare Room is an unflinching, fierce look at friendship, illness and caring which finds humour in the darkest of places. The book is as spare and as lean as its title, yet manages to encompass big ideas about life and death.

(Image: Helen Garner. Photo credit: Darren James.)

This month, for the seventh World Book Club edition celebrating International Women writers, Harriett Gilbert is joined by the remarkable British writer Bernardine Evaristo from her home in east London to talk about her Booker-Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. Although still unable to gather an audience together in a studio, we take questions from listeners from all around the world via phonelines, tweets and emails to once again create a truly global event. Girl, Woman, Other charts the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, mostly black and British, it tells the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and down the ages. A dazzling mixture of history and contemporary story-telling, Girl, Woman, Other crackles with energy and teems with life, offering an unforgettable insight into life in today’s multi-cultural Britain.

(Picture: Bernardine Evaristo. Photo credit: Jennie Scott.)

This month World Book Club talks to acclaimed British author Deborah Levy about her Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Hot Milk. In this era of coronavirus we are sadly not able to gather together in a studio but we will be talking remotely to international listeners via phonelines, emails, skype calls, social media – you name it! In Levy’s hypnotic tale of female sexuality two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and her doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the celebrated and controversial Dr Gomez.

Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Levy explores the strange and beguiling nature of womanhood and desire. Dreamlike and compelling, Hot Milk is a delirious, timeless fable of feminine potency.

This month World Book Club marks the recent worldwide publication of The Mirror and The Light by treating you to a repeat of our memorable edition of the programme with the double-Booker prize-winning British writer Hilary Mantel.

Recorded two years ago at the Man Booker 50 Festival at the South Bank Centre, which was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the renowned prize, Hilary Mantel discusses the second volume in her acclaimed series of novels about Thomas Cromwell. Bring Up the Bodies delves into the heart of Tudor history and the downfall of Queen Anne Boleyn whom King Henry VIII had battled for seven years to marry.

Join writer Hilary Mantel, presenter Harriett Gilbert and readers at the South Bank Centre and around the globe for a World Book Club for an hour during which the words Corona or Virus are not mentioned even once.

Long-listed for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, Bhutto’s lyrical debut novel unfolds over the course of one morning in Mir Ali, a small town in Pakistan's Tribal Areas close to the Afghan border. Set during the American invasion of Afghanistan, it chronicles the lives of five young people trying to live and love in a world on fire. On a day seemingly like any other, three brothers meet for breakfast before going their separate ways. Three hours later their day will end in devastating circumstances.

(Photo: Fatima Bhutto)

French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani joins Harriett Gilbert in the Radio Theatre at the BBC and readers from around the world to talk about her novel Lullaby, the devastating story of a nanny, Louise, who kills two children in her care.

The book – an international bestseller – opens with this horrific crime then travels back in time to discover why an apparently perfect nanny turned into a cold blooded murderer. Through the lives of Louise and her employers, Slimani explores Paris’s economy and society, depicting a city where poverty and wealth live side by side and people know little about one another. The third programme in World Book Club’s year celebrating international women’s writing, this novel raises urgent questions about women’s lives and maternal instincts, and what is expected of them.

(Photo: Leïla Slimani. Photo credit: Catherine Hélie/Editions Gallimard.)

Highly acclaimed British author Tessa Hadley talks to Harriett Gilbert about her award-winning novel - The Past.

Recorded at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival in the elegant surroundings of The Mathematical Institute, part of the university. Tessa skilfully evokes a brewing storm of lust and envy, the indelible connections of memory and affection, the fierce, nostalgic beauty of the natural world, and the shifting currents of history running beneath the surface of these seemingly steady lives.

Over three long, hot summer weeks, four siblings and their children assemble at their country house for a family reunion, where simmering tensions and secrets come to a head.

First broadcast on the BBC World Service in April 2019.

Harriett Gilbert is joined by Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah for this month’s edition of World Book Club, continuing 2020’s celebration of women’s writing.

Petina will be answering questions from readers around the world about her novel The Book Of Memory. It’s narrated by Memory, an albino woman convicted of murdering her wealthy white guardian, who took her away from life in the townships when she was a child. In this testimony, written from her prison cell, Memory looks back over her life and confronts the events that led to this conviction.

(Photo: Petina Gappah. Credit: Marina Cavazza)

Naomi Alderman talks about her extraordinary novel The Power which imagines that women suddenly develop an electrifying strength, putting them firmly in control - of everything. The new order spreads around the globe, liberating women from enslavement and subjugation but also freeing their darker ambitions. It’s a pacey read, teeming with characters and plot lines. Alderman focusses on Roxy, the teenage daughter of a London crime lord; Tunde a Nigerian journalist chasing the story around the globe, and in America Ali, a young orphan who becomes a spiritual leader and Margot, an ambitious politician who sees the opportunities the new world order offers her.

In this edition of World Book Club, Naomi Alderman talks about the inequalities which inspired her story and her hopes for the future.

(Photo credit: Justine Stoddard.)

This month World Book Club is in Germany marking the 30th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall with a programme from the St George’s Bookshop in the heart of the capital. We’re speaking with one of the country’s greatest living writers Jenny Erpenbeck about her highly acclaimed novel, Visitation. Visitation’s central character is a beguiling house on the forested banks of a lake in Brandenburg near Berlin, which is inhabited by various occupants, one dislodging the next over the course of a turbulent century of upheaval and calamity. Encompassing the years from the Weimar Republic, through World War II to the subsequent Soviet-led Communist regime, and finally to reunification and its aftermath, Visitation forms a literary mosaic of the horrors of twentieth century German history filtered through the beauty of one house and the landscape it’s rooted in.

(Image: Jenny Erpenbeck. Credit: Katharina Behling.)

David Nicholls talks about his internationally successful novel Us. Almost three decades after their improbable relationship first blossomed in London biochemist Douglas and his attractive artist wife Connie live seemingly happily enough with their moody 17-year-old son, Albie just outside London. Then Connie drops a bombshell: she thinks she wants a divorce. Devastated but determined to fight to save their marriage, Douglas insists that the family stick to a previously planned Grand Tour of Europe where he secretly hopes to win his wife and son back. Narrated from Douglas’s endearingly honest point of view, Us is the bittersweet but often very funny story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves and learn how to get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger.

(Photo: David Nicholls. Credit: Sophia Spring)

The Colombian novelist and journalist Héctor Abad discusses his memoir Oblivion, a heart-breaking tribute to his late father. Héctor Abad Gómez was a medical doctor, professor and human rights campaigner in the city of Medellín, Colombia, whose criticism of the Colombian regime led to his brutal murder by paramilitaries in 1987. One of the most exquisitely written accounts of profound love between a father and son in modern literature, Oblivion paints a picture of a remarkable man who followed his conscience and paid for it with his life during one of the darkest periods in Latin America’s recent history.

Presented by Harriet Gilbert

British writer Ann Cleeves discusses Raven Black, the haunting first novel in her award-winning Shetland crime series, with presenter Harriett Gilbert, a studio audience and readers around the world. On a remote Scottish island in the Shetland Isles, a teenage girl is found dead in a snow-covered field. Some years ago, another young girl disappeared in mysterious circumstances near to his house, but the body was never found. As Inspector Perez and local police pursue their investigation a veil of suspicion is thrown over the entire community. For the first time in years neighbours nervously lock their doors, whilst a killer lives on in their midst.

Acclaimed Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma talks about his novel The Fishermen. Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, The Fishermen tells the story of four young brothers who defy their authoritarian father to go fishing in a forbidden river on the outskirts of the western Nigerian town where they live. After a local madman issues a shocking prophecy that the oldest brother will be killed by one of the others, the strong family bonds begin to break down and a tragic chain of events of almost mythic proportions is set in train. With this bold and powerful debut, Chigozie Obioma has emerged as one of the most original new voices of modern African literature.

Acclaimed British writer Andrea Levy was only 62 when she died earlier this year. This month another chance to hear this hugely popular author talking about her multi-prize-winning novel Small Island.

A thought-provoking tale of love, friendship and immigration set in London in 1948, Small Island focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, through a group of unforgettable characters, who, escaping economic hardship on their own 'small island,' move to England. Once in the Mother Country, however, for which the men had fought and died for during World War II, their reception is not quite the warm embrace that they had hoped for.

(Image: Andrea Levy. Photo credit: Schiffer-Fuchs/ullstein bild/Getty Images)

This month World Book Club talks to award-winning writer Siri Hustvedt about her novel What I Loved, a troubling, often turbulent tale of love, art, friendship and heartbreak set amidst the darkly flamboyant New York art scene of the late twentieth century.

Scholars Leo and his wife Erica admire, then befriend, artist Bill and his first and second wives. Their respective sons Matthew and Mark grow up together until the first in a series of tragedies strikes; a calamity which devastates the whole community and changes everyone’s lives forever.

(Image: Siri Hustvedt. Photo credit: Miquel Llop/NurPhoto/Getty Images.)

This month World Book Club talks to award-winning American writer Donna Leon about her celebrated novel Death at La Fenice. When legendary German conductor Helmut Wellauer is found dead in his dressing room two acts into a performance of La Traviata at Venice’s spectacular opera house, police commissario Guido Brunetti is called in. Despite being used to the corruptions of the city, as labyrinthine as the gorgeously crumbling city itself, Brunetti is shocked at the number of enemies Wellauer has made on his way to the top - but just how many have motive enough for murder? Find out more by tuning in to hear Donna Leon talking to her readers in the studio and around the world about murder and mystery in Venice.

(Image: Donna Leon. Photo credit: Regine Mosimann/Diogenes Verlag/AG Zürich.)

This month a special edition of BBC World Book Club coming from Nairobi in Kenya. Lawrence Pollard talks to celebrated Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in the company of an enthusiastic audience of readers and students who have gathered in the bustling bookshop of Nairobi University where Ngugi was once a director. We’re discussing Ngũgĩ's landmark novel A Grain of Wheat, set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain. In it the tangled narratives of a group of Kenyan villagers interweave to tell an epic story of love tested, friendships betrayed and myths forged, confirming Ngũgĩ's status as a giant of African writing.

This month we’re talking to bestselling British writer JoJo Moyes about her wildly popular novel Me Before You. Lou is a small town girl in need of a job. Will is a successful high-powered city trader who becomes wheelchair bound following an accident and decides he doesn’t want to go on living.

And then Lou is hired for six months to be his new caretaker. Worlds apart and trapped together by circumstance, the two get off to a rocky start. But Lou is determined to prove that life is worth living and as they embark on a series of adventures together, each finds their world changing in ways neither of them could have imagined.

(Image: Jojo Moyes. Photo credit: Stine Heilmann.)

World Book Club talks to one of the world’s leading thriller writers, British-born Lee Child. Killing Floor is the first book in the internationally popular Jack Reacher series and presents the all-action hero for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode: a righter of wrongs, and not a man to mess with.

Early one morning Reacher jumps off a bus in the middle of nowhere and walks 14 miles down an empty country road. The minute he reaches the town of Margrave he is thrown into jail. As the only stranger in town a local murder is blamed on him, but as nasty secrets leak out, and the body count mounts, one thing is for sure: They picked the wrong guy to take the fall.

This month's World Book Club once again comes from China's capital Beijing. Lawrence Pollard interviews acclaimed and controversial writer Chan Koonchung about his much debated dystopian novel The Fat Years from a buzzy local bookstore in the city centre, filled with an audience of excited readers ready with their questions for the author.

Chan’s speculative fiction, The Fat Years, has been described as giddily daring. It imagines a time in the near future where China is the world’s dominant power and all Chinese are beamingly happy, all but our heroes who come to realise that a month has gone missing from history. No-one remembers it, no-one cares, so they set out to find it. The Fat Years has never been officially published in mainland China but has quite a reputation. Listen in and find out why.

(Photo credit: Colin McPherson/Corbis/Getty Images.)

This month BBC World Book Club comes from Beijing with Lawrence Pollard. The programme is a guest of the Bookworm, three rooms and a roof terrace full of books in Chinese and English, a fixture on the literary scene here for over a decade.

Bestselling Chinese writer Lijia Zhang answers questions about her novel Lotus. Lijia taught herself English while working in a missile factory in a bid to become a writer and a journalist, and she’s written Lotus in English. It’s the story of a young migrant worker from the country who ends up as a prostitute in Shenzen, the economic powerhouse of Southern China. It’s also a deeply researched picture of the people who look up at the economic miracle from beneath and their struggles for dignity, love and a future they can believe in.

(Image: Lijia Zhang. Credit: Will Baker.)

This month on World Book Club award-winning British writer Kate Atkinson discusses her celebrated novel Life After Life. In it Atkinson poses the question: What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born and then dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can - will she?

Presented by Harriett Gilbert.

On this month’s World Book Club, as he turns seventy, another chance to hear acclaimed American writer James Ellroy, who over a span of fifteen years worked on a massive fictional chronicle of 1960s America. American Tabloid, the first of the three books, exposes the underbelly of a country on the threshold of Kennedy's golden age, and follows three men close to the tentacles of power in a conspiracy with the Mafia that leads to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the assassination of JFK in Dallas. Brutally brilliant and profane, the book bursts at the seams with crooked policemen, corrupt politicians, mobsters and hitmen, all driven by a desire for power, money and the settling of old scores.

Image: James Ellroy (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

This month’s World Book Club broadcasts from the Man Booker 50 Festival at the Southbank Centre, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the renowned prize. In the World Book Club chair is the double-Booker prize-winning British writer Hilary Mantel discussing the second volume in her acclaimed series of novels about Thomas Cromwell. Bring Up the Bodies delves into the heart of Tudor history and the downfall of Queen Anne Boleyn whom King Henry VIII had battled for seven years to marry.

This month World Book Club talks to internationally celebrated Indian writer Anuradha Roy about her much-loved novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

Spanning three generations of an Indian family from the turn of the 20th century to India's partition An Atlas of Impossible Longing traces the intertwining lives of the inhabitants of a vast and isolated house on the outskirts of a small town in Bengal. Centred on sensitive foundling orphan boy Mukunda and the wild and motherless daughter of the house, Bakul, the novel charts the unshakeable but oft-threatened bond that grows between them in a world where they feel abandoned by everyone else. A haunting and compelling story of love, loss, grief and the power of home.

(Picture: Anuradha Roy. Photo credit: fmantovani.)

Epic in scope, Away is the captivating story of young Lillian Leyb, whose family is destroyed in a horrific Russian pogrom and who comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When she hears that her daughter might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, toward Siberia.

A novel encompassing the searing experiences of migration and exile, motherhood and mourning, Away is at once heart-rending, nail-biting and completely unforgettable.

(Photo: Amy Bloom. Photo credit: Elena Seibert)

This month World Book Club talks to British writer Sarah Waters about her chart-topping novel, Tipping the Velvet.

Celebrating twenty years since its first publication Tipping the Velvet is a bawdy, historical, lesbian romance, following the startling career of Nan King, oyster girl from Whitstable turned music-hall star turned rent boy. Star-struck and infatuated with actress Kitty Butler Nan starts up a double act with her idol both on and off the stage. But when Kitty, hankering after a more conventional life, spurns Nan in favour of marriage to her manager, a devastated Nan is propelled into a series of ever more erotic excursions and ultimately a struggle for survival. (Photo credit: Charlie Hopkinson.)

Presenter Lawrence Pollard talks to chart-topping Chinese-American writer Celeste Ng and an audience gathered in the local Boston radio Newsfeed Café in the Boston Public Library about her bestselling novel Everything I Never Told You.

In 1970s small-town Ohio Lydia is the favorite child of parents, determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Chinese-American Lee family together is destroyed. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, racism and longing, Everything I Never Told You uncovers the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

(Photo: Celeste Ng. Credit: Kevin Day Photography)

Award-winning Dominican American writer Junot Diaz talks to World Book Club on location in Boston, US, about his wildly popular novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Moving across generations and continents, from the dark and tragic past in the Dominican Republic to struggles and dreams in suburban America the novel chronicles Oscar and his family’s search for love and belonging.

(Photo: Junot Diaz attends the Norman Mailer Center's Fifth Annual Benefit Gala. Credit: Brad Barket/Getty Images)

This month World Book Club talks to Scottish poet Laureate Jackie Kay about her award winning novel, Trumpet.

When legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody dies an extraordinary secret is revealed, one that he shared in life only with his beloved wife, Millie. On learning the truth about his father, their adopted son Colman is devastated and becomes easy prey for a tabloid journalist. Besieged by the press and overwhelmed with grief, Millie withdraws to their remote seaside home where she seeks solace in treasured memories of her fiercely private marriage. The reminiscences of those who knew Joss Moody render a complex and moving portrait of two people whose shared life was founded on an intricate lie that preserved their family, and their rare, unconditional love.

(Photo credit: Denise Else.)

This month World Book Club comes from the Belgium capital Brussels for an Agatha Christie special.

The programme visits the Bibliotheca Wittockiana to discuss one of the bestselling crime novels of all time: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie in which that shrewdest of detectives Hercule Poirot hunts for a killer aboard one of the world’s most luxurious passenger trains.

To help untangle this fiendish puzzleknot and discuss the enduring popularity of the Queen of Crime are acclaimed crime novelist Sophie Hannah who has brought the renowned sleuth back to life again with her sequels, and James Prichard, great grandson of Agatha herself.

(Picture: Agatha Christie at an event in 1967. Photo credit: BBC.)

Best-selling Australian writer Richard Flanagan talks about his Booker prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

This unforgettable novel about the cruelty of war and the tenuousness of love and life tells the story of captive Australian soldiers forced into hard labour, working on the Burmese railway during and after World War Two. At its heart is one day in a Japanese slave labour camp in August 1943 which builds to a horrific climax as surgeon Dorrigo Evans battles and too often fails in his quest to save the lives of his fellow POWs.

(Photo: Writer Richard Flanagan. Credit: Joel Saget)

Best-selling British writer Alan Hollinghurst talks about his Booker prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty.

In the summer of 1983 20-year-old graduate Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the glamorous Notting Hill home of ambitious Tory MP Gerald Fedden. Nick’s glittering party and politics filled life is contrasted with the realities of his sexuality and gay life in London of the mid 1980s. Against a backdrop of Thatcherite politics and the emerging Aids crisis of that decade The Line of Beauty explores themes of hypocrisy, homosexuality, madness and privilege.

(Photo: Alan Hollinghurst. Credit: Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images)

On this month’s World Book Club British writer Jane Gardam discusses her award-winning novel Old Filth with the studio audience at Broadcasting House and listeners from around the world.

Edward Feathers is a child of the Raj. His earliest memories are of his beloved Amah, a teenage Malay girl whom he is soon torn away from when he is sent back to be educated in pre-war England, so-called Home, where he is boarded out with strangers.

A career as a successful lawyer in Southeast Asia later earns him the nickname Old Filth, FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong. Yet through it all Feathers has carried the wounds of his emotionally hollow childhood, wounds he now sets out to confront as an elderly widow.

(Photo: Jane Gardam. Credit: Victoria Salman)

This month World Book Club is celebrating its 15th birthday and has come to where it all began – in September 2002 - The Edinburgh Book Festival, to talk to Irish literary superstar Sebastian Barry about his poignant and much garlanded novel The Secret Scripture. Now in her hundredth year Roseanne McNulty, once the most beautiful girl in County Sligo, has long been locked up in an mental asylum for reasons which gradually become clear as she decides to put down a secret record of her remarkable story.

Set against an Ireland besieged by conflict The Secret Scripture is at once an epic story of love and heart-rending betrayal and a vivid reminder of the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had on individual lives for much of the twentieth century.

(Picture courtesy of The Irish Times.)

With an IQ that’s off-the-scale and a hyper-active mind 13-year-old Lou feels out of place amongst the beautiful, confident teenagers in her class. She finds no comfort at home as her mother is in the throes of a profound depression. Her life changes when she meets No, an older homeless girl, whom she immediately feels an affinity with.

Along with a classmate, Lucas, Lou tries to help No to build a life away from the streets. However, No's emotional scars run deep and she pushes Lou's friendship and trust to the limits.

Both poignant and funny, this haunting novel explores homelessness, friendship, love and loss.

(Photo: Delphine de Vigan. Credit: Delphine Jouandeau)

This month World Book Club is talking to chart-topping Australian writer Tim Winton about his unforgettable novel Cloudstreet.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award and recognised as one of the greatest works of Australian literature, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton's sprawling, comic epic about luck and love, fortitude and forgiveness, and the magic of the everyday.

Precipitated by separate personal tragedies, two poor families flee their rural homes to share a "great continent of a house", Cloudstreet, in a suburb of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united and religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.

Over the next twenty years they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try to make the best of their lives.

(Picture: Tim Winton. Credit: BBC.)

This month World Book Club is in the BBC Radio Theatre and is talking to one of the most popular and widely read British novelists, Jeffrey Archer, about his stunningly successful novel Kane and Abel.

William Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski, one the son of a Boston millionaire, the other a penniless Polish immigrant are two ambitious men born on the same day on opposite sides of the world.

Their paths are destined to cross in the ruthless struggle to build a fortune and an empire. Fuelled by their all-consuming hatred for one another, over 60 years and three generations, through war, marriage, fortune, and disaster, Kane and Abel battle for the success and triumph that only one man can have.

(Photo: Jeffrey Archer and Mary Archer attend the press night of Photograph 51, 2015, London. Credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

This month we mark the recent death of the St Lucian poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott with another chance to hear him talk-on-the-programme about his poetic masterpiece, the book-length Omeros.

Following the wanderings of an extraordinary cast of characters from the island of St Lucia, Omeros echoes Homer’s ancient-Greek epic of war and love and deadly rivalry, the Iliad, in order to dramatise the lives, sufferings, displacements and conflicts of the inhabitants of today’s Caribbean.

It also explores the islands’ violent history of colonial wars and slavery.

(Picture: Derek Walcott. Photo credit: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.)

This month World Book Club visits the Oxford Literary Festival in the elegant surroundings of Worcester College, part of the university and is talking to the hugely popular British author Robert Harris with an audience about the first of his bestselling Roman trilogy, Imperium. The setting is Ancient Rome, a city teeming with ambitious and ruthless men, but none more brilliant than a rising young lawyer Marcus Cicero who decides to gamble all on one of the most dramatic courtroom battles of all time. Scrupulously researched and vividly imagined Imperium brings to life the cutthroat politics and the timeless pursuit of power as one man seeks to attain supreme authority within the state.

(Picture: Robert Harris. Credit: BBC.)

This month World Book Club are once again part of The Hay Literary Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. Harriett Gilbert and a Festival audience talk to the acclaimed Swiss writer Joël Dicker about his gripping and chart-topping novel The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. A famous American writer suddenly finds himself the main suspect in a 30 year-old cold case in his sleepy home town in New England. His former student, a novelist desperate for material, appears as his only saviour. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair is a fast-paced, tightly plotted, literary thriller, and an ingenious book within a book by a dazzling young writer.

(Picture credit: Valery Wallace Studio.)