The same question is at the heart of three very different international novels on The Bookshelf this week, “What really happened”…

To a WWI soldier who has forgotten his name and identity in The Remembered Soldier by Dutch author Anjet Daanje?

To a fortune teller for the elite class in Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted?

When four high achieving American boys entered a cave, and one emerged terribly hurt, In Sameer Pandya’s Our Beautiful Boys?

Keep scrolling for a full list of all books mentioned on this week's program.

BOOKS

• Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier (translated from the Dutch by David McKay), Scribe 
• Ben Okri, Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted, Apollo 
• Sameer Pandya, Our Beautiful Boys,  Bloomsbury  
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GUESTS 

Tom Wright, theatre writer and adapter, and Artistic Associate at Belvoir Street Theatre.

Bronwyn Rivers, researcher and novelist whose debut, The Reunion was released this year. She also has a PhD on the 19th century novel.

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Bronwyn Rivers, The Reunion
• Max Porter, Grief is the Thing With Feathers
• Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Ben Okri, The Famished Road
• William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• William Shakespeare, As You Like It
• T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
• Ben Okri, The Freedom Artist
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
• Curzio Malaparte, The Skin
• Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
• Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Jackson Brodie Novel

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans & Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans & Salome Lines-Morison
• Sound Engineer, Simon Branthwaite & Tegan Nicholls
• Executive Producer, Rhiannon Brown