Artists at Work

This month in a very special edition, we’re celebrating that most English of novelists Jane Austen.

It’s two hundred years this month since the publication of Pride and Prejudice and we’ve invited bestselling British novelist and Jane Austen aficionado PD James, along with Anglo-Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin, also a great Austen fan and from Australia Susannah Fullerton, President of the Australian Jane Austen Society, all here to share with us their passion for this much loved classic English novel.

We’ll also be hearing from other writers from around the world – AS Byatt, Colm Toibin, Nii Parkes, Kamila Shamsie, to name a few, why the razor-sharp wit of Elizabeth Bennet and the cool hauteur of the gorgeous Mr Darcy are still drawing in more readers than ever across the globe in the twenty-first century.

Susannah Fullerton is the author of Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Image: Jane Austen, Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert talks to one of New Zealand's greatest living writers, CK Stead, about his prize-winning novel My Name Was Judas.

With this playful re-writing of the life and death of Jesus, CK Stead poses some profound and thought-provoking questions on the nature of belief and divinity itself.

Judas's name has become synonymous with 'betrayer', but in this witty, and controversial retelling, some 40 years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally puts forward his story as he remembers it.

Looking back on his childhood and youth from an old age the gospel writers denied him, Judas recalls his friendship with Jesus; their schooling together; the 12 disciples and their stories; their journeys together and their dealings with the powers of Rome and the Jewish clerics.

(Image: CK Stead)

On this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling American writer Paul Auster about 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 three 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.

This month's World Book Club is brought to you from the Institute of Cervantes in London where Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling Spanish writer Javier Marias about his prize-winning work A Heart So White.

This acclaimed novel explores profoundly disturbing questions about the nature of knowledge, curiosity and truth itself.

When the narrator Juan marries his sweetheart Luisa he is haunted by family secrets that cast their long shadow over his contentment and ponders the nature of secrecy – its convenience, its price – does he even want to know the truth he asks himself.

In the company of a lively group of readers at the Spanish Cultural Centre Marias also playfully dispenses his wisdom on how to keep a marriage together and why pen and paper beats technology.

In September's edition of World Book Club superstar US novelist Jodi Picoult talks about her heart-rending novel My Sister's Keeper.

A searing examination of what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person - My Sister's Keeper confronts the question of whether it is morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child’s life.

In the programme Jodi talks with disarming openness about the near tragedy in her own life that helped to drive her to write the novel and she explains why for her writing feels like a form of schizophrenia.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's searing yet ultimately uplifting coming-out, coming-of-age tale, in which a young girl learns to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing, and set out on her own path in life. To mark thirty years since its publication, here's another chance to hear the memorable World Book Club in which Jeanette Winterson discusses where fact meets fiction - there are distinct parallels to her own life.

Hear how important this ground-breaking novel has been for readers around the globe. British writer Jeanette Winterson is in conversation with Harriett Gilbert

(Photo: Jeanette Winterson)

This is the last edition of the London Calling season of World Book Clubs - which have been going out each Saturday during May.

This week the programme are guests of The Nehru Centre - the cultural wing of the High Commission of India in London - and we're talking to acclaimed Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh about his haunting novel, The Shadow Lines.

A moving and thought-provoking meditation on the very real yet invisible lines, which divide nations, people, and families, The Shadow Lines focuses on a family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London.

From the tales of his colourful cousin the narrator conjures up a picture of London in his imagination that is so vivid that he recognizes it instantly when he visits years later and learns that real places can be invented inside your head.

(Photo: Amitav Ghosh)

This week we've the third edition in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which are going out each Saturday during May.

This week we're talking to Howard Jacobson at the first Soho Literary Festival in the heart of the UK capital about his dazzling Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question.

A moving but often laugh-out-loud fictional foray into what it means to be Jewish Jacobson's award-winning novel features three old school friends who despite their very different lives have never quite lost touch.

Over dinner one balmy London evening they revisit a time before they had all loved and lost, unaware that an event later that night will change their lives for ever.

Andrea Levy discusses her novel Small Island with a studio audience, and the author revisits the West London setting of her multi-prize-winning novel.

A thought-provoking tale of love, friendship and immigration set in Earl's Court in 1948, Small Island focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, 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.

Join Harriett Gilbert, readers in the studio and around the globe and Andrea Levy both in and out of the studio for World Book Club.

(Image: Author Andrea Levy)

Coming up the first in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which will be going out each Saturday over the next four weeks.

In the run up to the London Olympic games we'll be discussing four novels which focus on different aspects of the United Kingdom’s colourful and historic capital city.

This week we talk to acclaimed novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd who will be discussing his haunting Whitbread prize-winning novel, Hawksmoor, with an audience at St George's Church, Bloomsbury.

St George's is the final church designed by lauded architect of the English Baroque, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a central and sinister figure in this compelling murder mystery set amongst the labyrinthine streets of 18th Century London.

(Image: Peter Ackroyd)