Artists at Work

Acclaimed British writer Val McDermid discusses her page-turning crime novel A Place of Execution.

A taut psychological suspense thriller told through two overlapping and interlocking narratives, A Place of Execution takes place both in the present day as well as 1963 rural England with two different investigators exploring the disappearance of a 13 year old girl who vanished without a trace on a bitterly cold winter's afternoon.

This is not a cosy novel but one that confronts us with brutal realities and stirs up uncomfortable reactions, gripping the reader up to the very last page and its stunning conclusion.

Detective Erast Fandorin investigates a student's apparent suicide in 19th-century Moscow. Russian writer Boris Akunin talks to Harriett Gilbert and listeners in the studio and around the world about his page-turning, best-selling crime novel The Winter Queen.

After setting out to solve the apparent suicide of a university student in 19th Century Moscow, eager young investigator Erast Fandorin soon finds himself embroiled in a far-reaching international conspiracy.

Boris Akunin tells us where he found the inspiration for his winning young detective who bounces from one cliff-hanger to the next. He also describes why short Russian literature - rather than the heavy tomes of earlier generarions - provides a better "role model" for today's youngsters.

Photo: Boris Akunin Credit: Getty Images

Dysfunctional Norwegian detective Harry Hole navigates a World War Two ghost story. Voted the best Norwegian crime novel ever, Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast delves into neo-Nazi activity in Norway and ends up re-examining a crime that had its roots in the battlefields of the Eastern Front in World War II.

Hear how Jo admits that there’s more than a little of him in his dysfunctional detective Harry Hole and how his own parents ended up on opposing sides during the war, father fighting for the Nazis and his mother in the Norwegian resistance.

Jo Nesbo photo: Hakon-Eikesdal

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Spanish writer and historian Javier Cercas about his haunting novel Soldiers of Salamis.

Internationally feted and winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2004, Soldiers of Salamis delves into the painful history of Spain's Civil War through the gripping, death-defying story of fascist soldier Sanchez Mazas.

In his meditation on the nature of heroism and humanity in war, of remembrance and forgetting after war, the narrator moves from cynical indifference through fascination to wholehearted empathy as the true hero of the story eventually emerges centre stage.

In Eat the Rich the inimitable American satirist P.J. O'Rourke tours the world trying to understand why some countries 'have' and some countries 'have not'.

He talks to Harriett Gilbert and answers questions about his book from a live studio audience and listeners around the world.

Harriett Gilbert talks to the acclaimed German writer Bernhard Schlink about his explosively controversial novel, The Reader, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Made into an Oscar-winning Hollywood film with Kate Winslet The Reader tells of law student Michael Berg who, nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, re-encounters his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial.

Damon Galgut's internationally acclaimed novel is the story of an idealistic medical graduate who arrives at an isolated South African hospital to take up a year's community service.

Damon discusses his novel The Good Doctor, and answers questions from BBC World Service listeners around the world.

Harriett Gilbert and an audience at the Drill Hall Theatre in Central London talk to bestselling Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie about her internationally acclaimed novel Burnt Shadows.

Spanning much of the 20th Century and into the 21st, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties honoured and betrayed, and loves lost and found.

In the devastating aftermath of the second atomic bomb, Hiroko Tanaka leaves Japan in search of new beginnings.

From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the uncertain wake of 9/11, to the novel's nail-biting climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow over the entire world over.

(Photo: Kamila Shamsie. Credit: Reuters)

This month's World Book Club comes from the Jesus Centre in London.

Harriett Gilbert and readers talk to bestselling writer Barbara Kingsolver about her internationally acclaimed novel The Poisonwood Bible.

Having sold four million copies around the world, Kingsolver's most ambitious novel paints an intimate portrait of a crisis-ridden family amid the larger backdrop of an African nation in chaos.

In 1959 an overzealous Baptist minister Nathan Price drags his wife and four daughters deep into the heart of the Congo on a mission to save the unenlightened souls of Africa.

As his plans unravel in tandem with the country's dreams of becoming an independent democracy, the five women narrate the novel, each in their own inimitable voice.

Part stunning literary thriller, part gothic novel, the book The Shadow of the Wind is a page-turning exploration of obsession in literature and love, and the places that obsession can lead.

It is a potent mix of a coming-of-age novel and a tragic love story set in Barcelona's post-war years. Harriet Gilbert puts questions from the audience to the author Carlos Ruiz Zafon.