This month a special edition of BBC World Book Club coming from Nairobi in Kenya. Lawrence Pollard talks to celebrated Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in the company of an enthusiastic audience of readers and students who have gathered in the bustling bookshop of Nairobi University where Ngugi was once a director. We’re discussing Ngũgĩ's landmark novel A Grain of Wheat, set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain. In it the tangled narratives of a group of Kenyan villagers interweave to tell an epic story of love tested, friendships betrayed and myths forged, confirming Ngũgĩ's status as a giant of African writing.

This month we’re talking to bestselling British writer JoJo Moyes about her wildly popular novel Me Before You.

And then Lou is hired for six months to be his new caretaker. Worlds apart and trapped together by circumstance, the two get off to a rocky start. But Lou is determined to prove that life is worth living and as they embark on a series of adventures together, each finds their world changing in ways neither of them could have imagined.

(Image: Jojo Moyes. Photo credit: Stine Heilmann.)

World Book Club talks to one of the world’s leading thriller writers, British-born Lee Child.

Early one morning Reacher jumps off a bus in the middle of nowhere and walks 14 miles down an empty country road. The minute he reaches the town of Margrave he is thrown into jail. As the only stranger in town a local murder is blamed on him, but as nasty secrets leak out, and the body count mounts, one thing is for sure: They picked the wrong guy to take the fall.

This month's World Book Club once again comes from China's capital Beijing. Lawrence Pollard interviews acclaimed and controversial writer Chan Koonchung about his much debated dystopian novel The Fat Years from a buzzy local bookstore in the city centre, filled with an audience of excited readers ready with their questions for the author.

Chan’s speculative fiction, The Fat Years, has been described as giddily daring. It imagines a time in the near future where China is the world’s dominant power and all Chinese are beamingly happy, all but our heroes who come to realise that a month has gone missing from history. No-one remembers it, no-one cares, so they set out to find it. The Fat Years has never been officially published in mainland China but has quite a reputation. Listen in and find out why.

(Photo credit: Colin McPherson/Corbis/Getty Images.)

This month BBC World Book Club comes from Beijing with Lawrence Pollard.

Bestselling Chinese writer Lijia Zhang answers questions about her novel Lotus. Lijia taught herself English while working in a missile factory in a bid to become a writer and a journalist, and she’s written Lotus in English. It’s the story of a young migrant worker from the country who ends up as a prostitute in Shenzen, the economic powerhouse of Southern China. It’s also a deeply researched picture of the people who look up at the economic miracle from beneath and their struggles for dignity, love and a future they can believe in.

(Image: Lijia Zhang. Credit: Will Baker.)

This month on World Book Club award-winning British writer Kate Atkinson discusses her celebrated novel Life After Life. In it Atkinson poses the question: What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born and then dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can - will she?

Presented by Harriett Gilbert.

On this month’s World Book Club, as he turns seventy, another chance to hear acclaimed American writer James Ellroy, who over a span of fifteen years worked on a massive fictional chronicle of 1960s America.

Image: James Ellroy (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

This month’s World Book Club broadcasts from the Man Booker 50 Festival at the Southbank Centre, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the renowned prize.

This month World Book Club talks to internationally celebrated Indian writer Anuradha Roy about her much-loved novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

Spanning three generations of an Indian family from the turn of the 20th century to India's partition An Atlas of Impossible Longing traces the intertwining lives of the inhabitants of a vast and isolated house on the outskirts of a small town in Bengal.

(Picture: Anuradha Roy. Photo credit: fmantovani.)

Epic in scope, Away is the captivating story of young Lillian Leyb, whose family is destroyed in a horrific Russian pogrom and who comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When she hears that her daughter might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, toward Siberia.

A novel encompassing the searing experiences of migration and exile, motherhood and mourning, Away is at once heart-rending, nail-biting and completely unforgettable.

(Photo: Amy Bloom. Photo credit: Elena Seibert)