World Book Club

On this episode of ‘World Book Club’ Harriett Gilbert speaker with with Graeme Macrae Burnet about his riveting historical crime novel ‘His Bloody Project’ Set in a remote Scottish community in the 1800s, the story centres on a brutal triple murder and the person who admits guilt for the bloody deed - a 17 year old boy. This boy, Roderick Macrae, is shy, intelligent, and remarkably articulate. Could he really be responsible for suc...

In this episode of World Book Club, Harriet talks with one of the world’s best-loved sci-fi and fantasy authors, the four time Hugo award winner N.K Jemisin. Which of her plethora of books did we choose? Her 10th novel, and love letter to New York, ‘The City We Became’.

The story takes place in a world in which major cities become sentient, living beings. After New York is attacked by an otherworldly enemy, five people, champions re...

Harriett Gilbert talks with Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah about his hauntingly beautiful novel Paradise.

It tells the story of Yusuf, a 12 year-old boy living in East Africa at the beginning of the 20th Century. Sold off to settle his father’s debts, Yusuf embarks on a journey across the African continent. Through his naive and innocent eyes, the journey starts out as an adventure, but every wonderous thing Yusuf sees, every glim...

Harriett Gilbert talks with Michelle de Kretser about her eighth novel, Scary Monsters, which won the 2023 Rathbones Folio Fiction Prize.

This diptych novel consists of the tale of two immigrants, one in the past, and one in a dystopian future that seems all too possible. Which story to start with? That’s the reader’s decision.

In the past, Lili. Her family migrated to Australia from Asia when she was a child. Now, in the 1980s, she...

Harriett Gilbert is joined by one of the boldest writers of her generation, Ottessa Moshfegh, to delve into her second novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. This twisted Sleeping Beauty story is told from the perspective of an unnamed protagonist, a twentysomething art school graduate who, after the death of her parents, quits her gallery job to heal her pain by drugging herself into a year-long hibernation. Her only ties to the wa...

Novelist Meg Rosoff joins Harriett Gilbert to answer listeners' questions about one of her best-loved novels, How I Live Now.

It is the story of Daisy, an American teenager shipped off to live with her aunt and cousins in England. What is at first an idyllic escape into English countryside life is shattered at the onset of War, when England is suddenly occupied by an unknown enemy. Daisy finds herself struggling to survive and keep ...

World Book Café heads to Oslo to Europe’s largest Literature House to find out if Norway is the best place in the world to be a writer?

Octavia Bright is joined to discuss the highs and lows by the internationally bestselling novelist and climate activist Maja Lunde. Johan Harstad prize winning novelist and the first in-house writer at the National Theatre in Oslo, Gunnhild Oyehaug whose witty and experimental short stories and nov...

A special programme from the largest public literature house in Europe, Litteraturhuset in Oslo. Harriett Gilbert is joined by one of Scandinavia’s most successful crime writers, Anne Holt. Her novel 1,222 is a tense, twisty story set during a snowstorm in an isolated mountain hotel, a reference to the fact that the hotel is one thousand, two hundred and twenty-two metres above sea level. It features her series detective Hanne Wilh...

Ahead of its 20th anniversary early next year, the author Kate Mosse talks to Harriett Gilbert and readers from around the world, about her globally bestselling novel, Labyrinth.

It’s a historical thriller set between medieval and contemporary France where the lives of two women, living centuries apart, are linked in a common destiny. In 13th century Carcassonne, seventeen-year-old Alaïs is given a mysterious book by her father wh...

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 Hun...

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 interco...

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 ...

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...

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 iro...

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 ...