Harriett Gilbert talks with Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah about his hauntingly beautiful novel Paradise.

It tells the story of Yusuf, a 12 year-old boy living in East Africa at the beginning of the 20th Century. Sold off to settle his father’s debts, Yusuf embarks on a journey across the African continent. Through his naive and innocent eyes, the journey starts out as an adventure, but every wonderous thing Yusuf sees, every glimpse of paradise, is polluted by violence, the growing influence of colonialism, and the looming spectre of World War One.

Paradise is a stunning novel - a multi-faceted, vivid exploration of the shifting culture of Africa at the turn of the century. It’s layered with mythology, Biblical and Koranic symbolism, and an unflinching insight into the effects of colonialism.

Harriett Gilbert talks with Michelle de Kretser about her eighth novel, Scary Monsters, which won the 2023 Rathbones Folio Fiction Prize.

This diptych novel consists of the tale of two immigrants, one in the past, and one in a dystopian future that seems all too possible. Which story to start with? That’s the reader’s decision.

In the past, Lili. Her family migrated to Australia from Asia when she was a child. Now, in the 1980s, she teaches in Montpellier, in the south of France. Her life revolves around her desires to carve out a space for herself, and become a great woman like Simone de Beauvoir. She tries to make friends, observes the treatment of other immigrants to France who don’t have the shield of an Australian passport, and continually has to dodge her creepy downstairs neighbour, as stories of serial killers dominate news headlines.

In the future, Lyle works for a government department in near-future Australia where Islam has been banned, a pandemic has only recently passed, and the elderly are encouraged to take advantage of The Amendment - a law that allows, if not encourages, assisted suicide. An Asian migrant, Lyle is terrified of repatriation and spends all his energy on embracing "Australian values", which in this future involve rampant consumerism, an obsession with the real estate market, and never mentioning the environmental catastrophe even as wildfires choke the air with a permanent smoke cloud. He's also preoccupied by his callously ambitious wife, his rebellious children and his elderly mother who refuses to capitulate to his desperate desire to invisibly blend in with society.

We love it, not just because of the playful dual structure, but because Michelle’s writing tackles the monsters - racism, misogyny, ageism - with keen observations and biting humour, shining a light not just on how society treats newcomers, but how we relate to our idea of our shared history, and what kind of future will be built from the world we live in now.

Harriett Gilbert is joined by one of the boldest writers of her generation, Ottessa Moshfegh, to delve into her second novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. This twisted Sleeping Beauty story is told from the perspective of an unnamed protagonist, a twentysomething art school graduate who, after the death of her parents, quits her gallery job to heal her pain by drugging herself into a year-long hibernation. Her only ties to the waking world are the bodega which she routinely slouches to for coffee, the most unscrupulous psychiatrist in New York, and her best friend, and object of contempt, Reva. We love this book because it’s a hypnotic, wickedly humorous character study of a woman who is broken, toxic, yet utterly fascinating. Even if you don’t take her to your heart, this character will linger in your mind every time you have a long lie in bed.

Image: Ottessa Moshfegh (Credit: Jake Belcher)

Novelist Meg Rosoff joins Harriett Gilbert to answer listeners' questions about one of her best-loved novels, How I Live Now.

It is the story of Daisy, an American teenager shipped off to live with her aunt and cousins in England. What is at first an idyllic escape into English countryside life is shattered at the onset of War, when England is suddenly occupied by an unknown enemy. Daisy finds herself struggling to survive and keep her new family safe as they face violence, fear and starvation, while at the same time experiencing her first love, with her own cousin - Edmond.

Beautiful, brutal, and laced with Daisy’s razor-sharp, jaded teenage humour, this is a book that brings readers into a world that feels incredibly, terrifyingly real, and will likely stay in your memory for years to come.

(Photo: Meg Rosoff. Credit: Glora Hamlyn/Penguin Books)

World Book Café heads to Oslo to Europe’s largest Literature House to find out if Norway is the best place in the world to be a writer?

Octavia Bright is joined to discuss the highs and lows by the internationally bestselling novelist and climate activist Maja Lunde. Johan Harstad prize winning novelist and the first in-house writer at the National Theatre in Oslo, Gunnhild Oyehaug whose witty and experimental short stories and novels have won her fans around the world and Oliver Lovrenski whose first book was an instant bestseller when it was published in Norway in 2023, when he was just 19.

With generous grants for writers to live and work the Norwegian government also buys 1,000 copies of every book published to give to local libraries across the country. The organisation NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad) is funded by the ministry of culture and, since 2004, it has contributed to the translation of more than 8,000 books into no less than 73 languages. For a country of 5.5 million people Norwegian literature punches above its weight. However with much of the country’s wealth coming from the oil industry do environmental concerns tarnish this utopia for its writers?

Producer: Kirsten Locke

A special programme from the largest public literature house in Europe, Litteraturhuset in Oslo. Harriett Gilbert is joined by one of Scandinavia’s most successful crime writers, Anne Holt. Her novel 1,222 is a tense, twisty story set during a snowstorm in an isolated mountain hotel, a reference to the fact that the hotel is one thousand, two hundred and twenty-two metres above sea level. It features her series detective Hanne Wilhelmsen, no longer in the police force due to being paralysed by a bullet that hit her in the back. Murder, intrigue and a lot of snow pulls her back into what she does best.

Image: Anne Holt (Credit: Lars Eivind Bones)

The Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart talks about his Booker Prize winning Shuggie Bain. The powerful, heartbreaking story of a young boy's love for his addict mother, and a mother's chaotic love for her son.

Photo credit: Martyn Pickersgill

Ahead of its 20th anniversary early next year, the author Kate Mosse talks to Harriett Gilbert and readers from around the world, about her globally bestselling novel, Labyrinth.

It’s a historical thriller set between medieval and contemporary France where the lives of two women, living centuries apart, are linked in a common destiny. In 13th century Carcassonne, seventeen-year-old Alaïs is given a mysterious book by her father which he claims contains the secret of the Grail. While 700 years later, archaeologist Dr Alice Tanner discovers two skeletons in a forgotten cave in the French Pyrenees and sets out to investigate their origin.

In this month’s edition of BBC World Book Club bestselling American writer Elif Batuman discusses her acclaimed debut novel. ‘The Idiot’ follows Selin, a Turkish-American fresher at Harvard in the mid-1990s, delving into her experiences as she navigates the challenges of university life, grappling with identity, language, and the complexities of relationships, romantic and otherwise. Selin becomes infatuated with Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics student, and their relationship unfolds primarily through a series of cryptic emails, highlighting the difficulties of virtual communication across cultures. As Selin travels to Europe for a summer teaching job, she continues to struggle with her sense of self, her obsession with Ivan, and the meaning of her experiences. The novel captures the disorienting, often absurd nature of early adulthood, where intellectual exploration meets the messiness of real life and its chaotic emotions. Infused with dry humour and philosophical musings, The Idiot is at heart a playful meditation on the limitation of language, and the gap between theoretical knowledge and lived experience.

German author Ewald Arenz answers readers' questions about his bestselling novel Tasting Sunlight. It’s the moving story of Liss, a reclusive woman who single-handedly runs her family farm, and teenage runaway Sally who takes refuge there. As they work together, Liss and Sally form an unlikely – and nurturing – friendship.

Image: Ewald Arenz (Credit: Tristar Media/Getty Images)