VINTAGE BOOKS

Where would we be without Charles Dickens? The biographer and academic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and short story writer Helen Simpson join Alex Clark for a very festive edition of the Vintage Podcast.

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Robert is an award-winning biographer and Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Story of Alice; before that he wrote Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist which won the Duff Cooper Prize. He is currently working on a new book called The Turning Point: Dickens’s World in 1851. The year of the Great Exhibition and the year in which Dickens began writing Bleak House, 1851 has been called the turning point of the century as well as of Dickens’s career. 

You can read more about his books here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/robert-douglas-fairhurst/1074442/

Helen is the author of six short story collections including Four Bare Legs In a Bed, Constitutional and Hey Yeah Right Get A Life. In 2011 Helen wrote a short story for The Times called ‘The Chimes’ about a book club dissecting Dickens’s novel The Chimes, which he wrote as a follow up of sorts to A Christmas Carol. Later published in her collection Cockfosters, it draws uncomfortable parallels between Dickens’s world and our own – and has more than a little of Dickens’s playfulness about it too.

Read more about her work here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/helen-simpson/1006023/

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For lovers of Serial, a special audio extract from the Sunday Times best seller The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère

Find out more about the book here: http://po.st/TheAdversary

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH

Emmanuel Carrère - The Adversary

ON THE SATURDAY MORNING OF JANUARY 9, 1993, WHILE JEAN CLAUDE ROMAND WAS KILLING HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN, I WAS WITH MINE IN A PARENT-TEACHER MEETING...

With these chilling first words, acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Emmanuel Carrère, begins his exploration of the double life of a respectable doctor, eighteen years of lies, five murders, and the extremes to which ordinary people can go.

'As a writer, Carrère is straight berserk; as a storyteller he is so freakishly talented, so unassuming in grace and power that you only realize the hold he's got on you when you attempt to pull away... You say: True crime and literature? I don't believe it. I say: Believe it' Junot Díaz

'Mesmerising' Sunday Telegraph

'Stunning' Evening Standard

'Unputdownable' Washington Post

'A masterpiece' New York Times

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We meet animals experts and authors Stephen Moss and Peter Wohlleben talk about the strange and wonderful inner life of robins, crows and horses we might not be able to see from a glance...

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Keep calm – but do not carry on. A special audio extract from Nick Clegg's new book, How To Stop Brexit.

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Learn more about the book: po.st/HowToStopBrexit

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*

Keep calm – but do not carry on. There is nothing remotely inevitable about Brexit – except that it will be deeply damaging if it happens. Extricating Britain from Europe will be the greatest challenge this country has faced since the Second World War. And as negotiations with the EU expose the promises of the Brexit campaign to have been hollow, even some Brexit-voters now wish to exercise their democratic right to change their mind, seeing that the most pragmatic option is to … stop. It would certainly be the best thing for Britain. But how can it be done? Haven’t the people spoken?

No. In this indispensable handbook, Nick Clegg categorically debunks the various myths that have been used to force Brexit on Britain, not by ‘the people’ but by a small, extremely rich, self-serving elite, and explains precisely how this historic mistake can be reversed – and what you can do to make sure that it is.

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1115718/how-to-stop-brexit-and-make-britain-great-again/#DYu2wvzT2BCKruGx.99

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'I only realised this later, much later, when I came to fear that the beginning of that book was also the end of me.'

Alex Clark talks to Man Booker Winner Richard Flanagan 

Read more about his wonderful book, First Person:

http://po.st/FirstPerson

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Six weeks to write for your life... In this blistering story of a ghostwriter haunted by his demonic subject, the Man Booker Prize winner turns to lies, crime and literature with devastating effect

A young and penniless writer, Kif Kehlmann, is rung in the middle of the night by the notorious con man and corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl proposes a deal: $10,000 for Kehlmann to ghostwrite his memoir in six weeks.

Kehlmann accepts but begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. As the deadline draws closer, he becomes ever more unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Heidl is rewriting him—his life, his future. Everything that was certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder: who is Siegfried Heidl—and who is Kif Kehlmann?

By turns compelling, comic and chilling, First Person is a haunting journey into the heart of our age.

Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and The Narrow Road to the Deep North have received numerous honours and are published in 42 countries. He won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014.

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The Jewish story is a history that is about, and for, all of us. Alex Clark speaks to Simon Schama about his new book Belonging, shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

Read an extract from the book: http://po.st/f9Igdl

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Simon Schama - Belonging

Selected as a Book of the Year 2017 by the Daily Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and Observer 

'A glittering gemstone of a book' The Times

The Jewish story is a history that is about, and for, all of us. And in our own time of anxious arrivals and enforced departures, the Jews’ search for a home is more startlingly resonant than ever.

Belonging is a magnificent cultural history abundantly alive with energy, character and colour. It spans centuries and continents, from the Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1492 it navigates miracles and massacres, wandering, discrimination, harmony and tolerance; to the brink of the twentieth century and, it seems, a point of profound hope.

It tells the stories not just of rabbis and philosophers but of a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Georgian England; a general in Ming China; an opera composer in nineteenth-century Germany. The story unfolds in Kerala and Mantua, the starlit hills of Galilee, the rivers of Colombia, the kitchens of Istanbul, the taverns of Ukraine and the mining camps of California. It sails in caravels, rides the stage coaches and the railways; trudges the dawn streets of London, hobbles along with the remnant of Napoleon’s ruined army.

Through Schama’s passionate telling of this second chronicle in an epic tale, a history emerges of the Jewish people that feels it is the story of everyone, of humanity.

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1097828/belonging/#XA5dMaukSpq2W4Uk.99

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Our Poetry Special - part two! This time we're talking to Michael Simmonds Roberts about his new poetry collection,

Mancunia...

Read an extract from the book: http://po.st/f9Igdl

Manchester books that will make you want to visit http://po.st/ACfKjx 

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Michael Simmonds Roberts - Mancunia

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize

PBS Autumn Recommendation

Mancunia is both a real and an unreal city. In part, it is rooted in Manchester, but it is an imagined city too, a fallen utopia viewed from formal tracks, as from the train in the background of De Chirico’s paintings. In these poems we encounter a Victorian diorama, a bar where a merchant mariner has a story he must tell, a chimeric creature – Miss Molasses – emerging from the old docks. There are poems in honour of Mancunia’s bureaucrats: the Master of the Lighting of Small Objects, the Superintendent of Public Spectacles, the Co-ordinator of Misreadings. Metaphysical and lyrical, the poems in Michael Symmons Roberts’ seventh collection are concerned with why and how we ascribe value, where it resides and how it survives. Mancunia is – like More’s Utopia – both a no-place and an attempt at the good-place. It is occupied, liberated, abandoned and rebuilt. Capacious, disturbing and shape-shifting, these are poems for our changing times.

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1112493/mancunia/#ZiVegydh6ISYfdki.99

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Gearing up for National Poetry Day, we talk to two of our favourite poets and hear some of their poetry.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

http://po.st/NightSkyWithExitWounds

Kumukanda by Kayo Chingonyi

http://po.st/kumukanda

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An honest conversation with Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments, Two Pints, The Barrytown Trilogy and now, his new book, Smile. 

Take a look at the book itself: po.st/DoyleSmile

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Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humour, the superb evocation of childhood – but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to re-evaluate everything you think you remember so clearly.

Just moved in to a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s pub for a pint, a slow one.

One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick.

Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers.

He prompts other memories too – of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who says the unsayable on the radio.

But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular Brother, that he cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.

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Vintage Podcast goes on the road with graphic novelist Joff Winterhart to talk about illustration, storytelling and see the sights of London!

Take a look at the book itself: http://po.st/DrivingShortDistances

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More about Driving Short Distances by Joff Winterhart

Sam is 27 and needs to get a job. Keith, who claims to be a second cousin of his (absent) father, offers him one. On Keith’s card it says he does ‘distribution and delivery’, which seems to consist of ‘a lot of driving around, getting out of the car for a few minutes and then getting back in’, Sam tells his mother. And so the days go by, Keith driving to a trading estate, ducking into a portakabin, all the while telling Sam stories about his first boss, Geoff Crozier, his mentor in distribution and delivery. As the weeks pass, Sam gets to know Keith’s friends, flirty Hazel-Claire from whom they buy two pasties every day at lunchtime, a variety of receptionists, and a few tantalising secrets from Keith’s past…

As in Days of the Bagnold Summer, Joff Winterhart is a master at depicting ordinary life in all its utterly poignant and funny mundanity.

Driving Short Distances is the new book by Joff Winterhart, whose first graphic novel, Days of the Bagnold Summer, was described by Posy Simmonds as ‘original, funny, touching and beautifully observed’ and was shortlisted for the Costa Award for Best Novel.

"In Driving Short Distances Joff Winterhart has created an unforgettable central player, Keith Nutt, who deserves to join Keith Talent in the short but potent list of great British literary Keiths. He is an unforgettable character, beautifully drawn and exquisitely written, and he confirms Winterhart as one of the most talented graphic novelists in the UK." (Zadie Smith)

"Masterpiece is an overused word in reviews and ordinarily I avoid it… In this case, however, it is the only one that will do. Winterhart has delivered a perfect book, as good as mostly much better than any of the regular novels I’ve read so far this year. Like his first… its characters are superbly drawn. But with its themes of depression and its tender examination of the ways men talk (and fail to talk) to one another, it has a depth that book perhaps lacked. Days of the Bagnold Summer was shortlisted for the 2012 costa Novel award. This time around, Winterhart deserves to win it." (Rachel Cooke Observer)

Read more at http://po.st/DrivingShortDistances

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