Ryan Salter knows first-hand what it looks like when a health system is under extreme pressure because of Covid-19. Dr Salter has recently returned from the UK, where he was a consulting anaesthetist at Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge during the first and second Covid waves.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is the new book from Idaho-based author Anthony Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See. Like his last offering, Doerr's new book is a complex interweaving of several storylines - some centuries apart - with the protagonists almost all children.

As former director of the Whanganui Regional Museum, Frank Stark is familiar with the eclectic architectural heritage of the river city. And when he and partner Emma Bugden bought the historic swimming baths in the suburb of Gonville, part of the package turned out to be a former fire station and out-of-use town hall, remnants of Gonville's brief time as a separate borough.

English actor Joanna Scanlan stars alongside Peter Mullan (My Name is Joe, Top of the Lake) in new short film Don vs Lightning, in which an elderly Scottish grump finds himself the victim of multiple lightning strikes. Scanlan will also be popping up on our screens in the near future in The Larkins.

Author, plant lover and former BBC documentary maker Jonathan Drori joins the show for a chat about some of the latest botanical news. This week, Drori will be discussing the discovery of six new coffee species and the fight is on to save giant sequoia trees from California wildfires.

Heavily indebted Chinese property developer Evergrande hit headlines last week as the world waited to see if the company would cause China's 'Lehman moment'. And while that now looks unlikely, observers say the situation marks a turning point in China's rapid growth model.

When a bunch of unruly British tourists caused havoc around the country back in 2019, the general director of the New Zealand Opera Thomas de Mallet Burgess was struck by a bolt of inspiration. It was a Shakespearean story that seemed ripe for the stage. But when NZ Opera announced the Unruly Tourists production earlier this year, it was met with controversy and a third of the board resigned in apparent protest against the company's new artistic direction.

Feedback from listeners to the Saturday Morning Programme 25 September 2021.

Doug Wilson is a medical academic author and our regular correspondent from the other side of 80. Wilson graduated from Otago University 60 years ago, and since then there have been significant changes in life expectancy thanks to medical marvels - yet only some people benefit. The figures remain quite different for Māori and Pacific Islanders.

Annette Lees has long had a love affair with the night time. As a child she found it both scary and enchanting, and as an adult she revels in the sense of wonderment found in swimming under the stars or walking in moonlight. But it was a newfound love of bats that was the genesis for her new book After Dark: Walking into the nights of Aotearoa.