Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five won last year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for its brilliantly researched and pioneering portrayal of the five victims of Jack the Ripper – focusing not on the manner of their death, countless books have done, but on their lives. Join her and Alex to find out why and how she began such a vital historical project.

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Alexandra Shulman was editor in chief of Vogue for 25 years and in that time saw many fashions come and go. Her book, Clothes and Other Things That Matter, is a dazzling argument for us to recognize the importance of how we present ourselves to the world while also keeping it in perspective. Join her and Alex to discuss the ins and outs of dressing up and dressing down.

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Award-winning actor and comedian Robert Webb’s first book, How Not To Be a Boy, enthralled readers with its combination of memoir and manifesto. Now, Webb has turned to fiction with Come Again, a wry, moving and comical portrayal of grief, memory and healing (there are also gangsters and car chases).  

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Meet the Caseys, the sprawling, loving and occasionally dysfunctional family at the heart of Marian Keyes’s chart-topping novel, Grown Ups. And roar with laughter as one of our best-loved novelists explains to Alex how she creates her characters, what they mean to her and how she owes her whole success to Mammy Keyes (according to Mammy Keyes).

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Gill Hornby’s novel Miss Austen centres not on the famous writer but on her sister Cassandra, Jane’s most ferocious and loving protector both in life and death. But what do we really know about this shadowy figure from literary history? Find out as Gill describes her glorious blend of fact and fiction.

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Hadley Freeman’s House of Glass is a profoundly moving exploration of how her grandmother’s family was marked by pogroms, the rise of Nazism and the displacement of war. She explains to Alex why she felt compelled to journey back through time and recreate her relatives’ lives – and why it was an undertaking of decades.

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