This month, we’re tackling one of the most urgent issues of our time, the question of migration across borders. Small Boat is a stunning and provocative novel that is inspired by the real-life tragedy of 27 asylum seekers who drowned in the English Channel in 2021. Rather than tell the story through the perspective of the victims, Small Boat is narrated by the French radio operator who failed to send help. It’s an audacious and uncomfortable choice – and that’s exactly the point. 

In this episode, Dua speaks with Vincent about moral responsibility, the challenge of maintaining empathy at a time of great political polarisation, and the dangers of becoming desensitised to human suffering. They talk about his choice to centre the story around an ambivalent protagonist, and how fiction can make us face uncomfortable truths. 

The novel doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it holds a mirror up to us, asking what we would do, what we’ve done, and what it means to look away. As Dua says, this book doesn’t let you off the hook – and it’s one everyone should read. 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Barnes & Noble  

 
Get in touch: 

📩 Email us - [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter - introduced each month by Dua - at www.service95.com 

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Welcome to the Service95 Book Club with Dua Lipa, a new podcast dedicated to the books that stay with us – and the brilliant minds behind them. 

 
As well as bringing you a brand-new episode every month, we’ll also be dipping into the archive of fascinating conversations Dua has had with authors over the past two years. First up from the archive, Dua joined by the extraordinary Ocean Vuong, whose novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous left a huge mark on so many readers around the world. 

 
In this episode, Ocean and Dua talk about how care can be radical, how language both connects and distances us, and why sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is just sit with the beauty of a single moment – or, as Ocean so perfectly puts it, live in the whipped cream. 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble 
Get in touch: 

📩 Email us - [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter - introduced each month by Dua - at www.service95.com 

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the very first episode of the Service95 Book Club with Dua Lipa, a new podcast dedicated to the books that stay with us – and the brilliant minds behind them. 

 
To launch the series, Dua is joined by Jennifer Clement, whose unique book Widow Basquiat lifts the curtain on the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his complex relationship with his muse, lover and bohemian spirit Suzanne Malouk. It’s a chaotic love story like no other, as well as a love letter to an almost mythical New York City that no longer exists. 

 
In this episode, Jennifer and Dua talk about how our childhoods shape us, the patterns of behaviour we repeat, and the bars, clubs, galleries and artists that made up the New York creative scene in the 1980s. As Jennifer says, it was a time of explosive freedom and excess, where anything felt possible… until the arrival of AIDS, when everything changed. 

Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble 
 
Get in touch: 

📩 Email us - [email protected] 

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates 

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter - introduced each month by Dua - at www.service95.com 

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this new podcast series, we’ll bring you both new interviews with authors of Dua’s Monthly Reads - books that make you laugh, cry, or rethink something you thought you knew - and dive back into the Service95 archives to hear conversations that are too good to miss.

A place that Dua will share her favourite reads from her bookshelf with you, let’s open the front cover and get started.

Get in touch:

📩 Email us - [email protected]

📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates

📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter - introduced each month by Dua - at www.service95.com

And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices