QUARTET IN AUTUMN by Barbara Pym, chosen by Samantha Harvey

Two award-winning writers share books they love with Harriett Gilbert.

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief ,The Western Wind and, most recently, Orbital. She is also the author of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. Her choice of a good read is a slim novel by Barbara Pym set in 1970s London about the lives of four single people in their sixties who work in an office together. Quartet in Autumn is sharply perceptive about the ways in which we hide from one other and from ourselves.

Darran Anderson is an Irish writer who lives in London. He is the author of Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between; a memoir, Inventory, about growing up during the Troubles; and the forthcoming In the Land of My Enemy. His choice, Pharmacopoeia, brings together fragments of the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman's writing on nature, gardening and Prospect Cottage, his Victorian fisherman's hut on the shingle at Dungeness.

Harriett's choice is a fantastically strange novel by Rachel Ingalls, published in 1982. In Mrs Caliban, a grieving housewife in a loveless marriage embarks on a heady affair with a green-skinned frogman.

Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio