Artists at Work

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.

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.

(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.

(Picture credit: Valery Wallace Studio.)