Artists at Work

World Book Club talks life, sex, drugs, if not rock ‘n’ roll to chart-topping Irish writer Marian Keyes about her best-selling novel Rachel’s Holiday. She answers BBC listeners' questions from around the world, and also reads several passages from her novel, about feisty 27-year-old Rachel, who is sent to a rehab clinic because of her addiction to drugs. Both funny and moving, Rachel’s Holiday examines the pain of addiction and depression, revealing a darker than usual side to Marian’s writing. The programme is presented by Harriett Gilbert.

(Photo: Marian Keyes. Credit: Barry McCall)

On Monday, Guenter Grass, German Nobel literature prize-winner and author of The Tin Drum, died aged 87. Before his death he had been described as "the world’s most important living writer".

We look back to 2009 when Guenter invited World Book Club into his home in Germany to put listeners' questions to him about his internationally-celebrated novel The Tin Drum.

Bitter and impassioned, the book charts the rise and fall of Nazism through the mischievous eyes of Oskar Matzerath, a dwarf who decided to stop growing at the age of three. First published half a century ago, The Tin Drum was re-published in new translations all over the world to mark its 50th birthday in 2009.

Image: Guenter Grass. Credit: Reuters

Harriet Gilbert discusses JD Salinger's classic novel The Catcher in the Rye with a studio audience, including questions from BBC World Service listeners as far afield as Nepal and the Czech Republic. She's in New York's Algonquin Hotel, long-time hangout of our reclusive writer, and answers your questions with the help of authors David Gilbert and Joanna Rakoff. JD Salinger wrote the book in 1951, and died in 2010.

(Photo: JD Salinger)

World Book Club visits the home of the Pulitzer-Prize winning author Anne Tyler, in the city of Baltimore. From her spare, elegant writing room Anne talks to Harriett Gilbert about her own personal favourite novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Abandoned by her salesman husband, fierce, sometimes cruel matriarch, Pearl is left to bring up her three children alone - Cody, a flawed charmer, Ezra, a flawed saint, and Jenny, errant and intense. Now as Pearl lies dying with her children around her, the past is unlocked, each character with their own searing take on it.

This month World Book Club talks to cult American-Canadian writer William Gibson about his much garlanded novel that launched the cyberpunk generation with one of the last century’s most potent visions of the cyberspace future.

The first winner of the science fiction ‘triple crown’ of awards for the genre, Neuromancer conjures a nightmare world of concrete megacities trapped under geodesic domes and run by shadowy megacorps. Washed-up computer hacker Case longs to escape by jacking into the technicolour but terrifying virtual reality of the Matrix, and is glad to be hired by a mysterious employer and his alluring sidekick Molly to pull off the ultimate hack.

This month World Book Club talks to bestselling German writer Daniel Kehlmann whose entertaining, and internationally acclaimed novel Measuring the World took the literary world by storm nine years ago.

In it he reimagines the lives of German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and German geographer Alexander von Humboldt and their many groundbreaking ways measuring the world.

Vividly bringing both very different geniuses to life Kehlmann captures their balancing acts between loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success.

Photo: Daniel Kehlmann. Credit: Sven Paustian.

Gilead is an epistolary novel that is the fictional autobiography of the Reverend John Ames, an elderly congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa, who knows that he is dying of a heart condition.

An intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the 20th Century, Gilead tells a story of fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. In the luminous voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, the novel takes the form of a letter to his young son and is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-driven existence that the Reverend loves passionately – and from which he will soon part.

(Photo: Marilynne Robinson. Credit: Nancy Crampton)

This month World Book Club talks to bestselling Dutch writer Herman Koch whose hugely controversial and entertaining novel The Dinner took the literary world by storm five years ago. Since then, it has not left the bestseller lists in its native Holland.

The Dinner explores a contemporary moral dilemma when two couples meet in a fashionable restaurant to discuss their children’s involvement in a horrendous crime. How far will a parent go to protect their son? The answer that gradually emerges seems to be very far indeed.

Hear Herman Koch, Harriett Gilbert and readers in the studio in London and around the world discuss The Dinner - and confess what they might have done in similar circumstances!

World Book Club talks to award-winning American writer and forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, about the first in her Temperance Brennan detective series, Deja Dead.

A nerve-jangling thriller that took the literary scene by storm when it was published in 1997, Deja Dead was the most successful crime-fiction debut ever. In it Kathy Reichs launches her intrepid heroine, a fearless forensic anthropologist and wannabe detective, Temperance Brennan. When the remains of a dismembered body of a woman, bagged and discarded, are discovered near an ancient burial ground Brennan suspects the work of a serial killer.

The police disagree, but Brennan sticks to her guns despite, or perhaps because of, her dark forebodings.

Picture: Kathy Reichs, Credit: Ben Mark Holzberg

This week, as part of the continuing global commemorations of the First World War, World Book Club is in sombre mood with another timely chance to hear multi-award-winning British writer Pat Barker.

She talks about her internationally renowned novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy of novels which culminated in the Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road.

Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and now recognised twenty-two years after its publication as a modern war classic, Regeneration is a part historical, part fictional exploration of how the traumas of the so-called Great War brutalised a generation of young men.

Picture: WW1 patients recuperating in hospital in 1918. Credit: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.