World Book Club

On this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling American writer Paul Auster about his acclaimed work The New York Trilogy. In three brilliant variations on the classic detective story, Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York City his own. Each interconnected tale exploits the elements of standard detective fiction to achieve an entirely new genre that was ground-breaking when it was published three decades ago. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of identity and what it means to be human. Hear what readers made of Paul and his novel and what happened when another Paul Auster stood up to introduce himself to the Paul Auster on the stage.

This month's World Book Club is brought to you from the Institute of Cervantes in London where Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling Spanish writer Javier Marias about his prize-winning work A Heart So White. This acclaimed novel explores profoundly disturbing questions about the nature of knowledge, curiosity and truth itself. When the narrator Juan marries his sweetheart Luisa he is haunted by family secrets that cast their long shadow over his contentment and ponders the nature of secrecy – its convenience, its price – does he even want to know the truth he asks himself. In the company of a lively group of readers at the Spanish Cultural Centre Marias also playfully dispenses his wisdom on how to keep a marriage together and why pen and paper beats technology.

In September's edition of World Book Club superstar US novelist Jodi Picoult talks about her heart-rending novel My Sister's Keeper. A searing examination of what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person - My Sister's Keeper confronts the question of whether it is morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child’s life. In the programme Jodi talks with disarming openness about the near tragedy in her own life that helped to drive her to write the novel and she explains why for her writing feels like a form of schizophrenia.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's searing yet ultimately uplifting coming-out, coming-of-age tale, in which a young girl learns to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing, and set out on her own path in life. To mark thirty years since its publication, here's another chance to hear the memorable World Book Club in which Jeanette Winterson discusses where fact meets fiction - there are distinct parallels to her own life. Hear how important this ground-breaking novel has been for readers around the globe. British writer Jeanette Winterson is in conversation with Harriett Gilbert (First broadcast in 2012.)(Photo: Jeanette Winterson) (Credit: Ysabel Halpin)

This is the last edition of the London Calling season of World Book Clubs - which have been going out each Saturday during May.This week the programme are guests of The Nehru Centre - the cultural wing of the High Commission of India in London - and we're talking to acclaimed Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh about his haunting novel, The Shadow Lines. A moving and thought-provoking meditation on the very real yet invisible lines, which divide nations, people, and families, The Shadow Lines focuses on a family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London. From the tales of his colourful cousin the narrator conjures up a picture of London in his imagination that is so vivid that he recognizes it instantly when he visits years later and learns that real places can be invented inside your head.(Photo: Amitav Ghosh) Credit: Getty Images)

This week we've the third edition in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which are going out each Saturday during May. This week we're talking to Howard Jacobson at the first Soho Literary Festival in the heart of the UK capital about his dazzling Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question. A moving but often laugh-out-loud fictional foray into what it means to be Jewish Jacobson's award-winning novel features three old school friends who despite their very different lives have never quite lost touch. Over dinner one balmy London evening they revisit a time before they had all loved and lost, unaware that an event later that night will change their lives for ever.

Andrea Levy discusses her novel Small Island with a studio audience, and the author revisits the West London setting of her multi-prize-winning novel. A thought-provoking tale of love, friendship and immigration set in Earl's Court in 1948, Small Island focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own 'small island', move to England. Once in the mother country, however, for which the men had fought and died for during World War II, their reception is not quite the warm embrace that they had hoped for.Join Harriett Gilbert, readers in the studio and around the globe and Andrea Levy both in and out of the studio for World Book Club.(Image: Author Andrea Levy)

Coming up the first in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which will be going out each Saturday over the next four weeks.In the run up to the London Olympic games we'll be discussing four novels which focus on different aspects of the United Kingdom’s colourful and historic capital city. This week we talk to acclaimed novelist, biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd who will be discussing his haunting Whitbread prize-winning novel, Hawksmoor, with an audience at St George's Church, Bloomsbury.St George's is the final church designed by lauded architect of the English Baroque, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a central and sinister figure in this compelling murder mystery set amongst the labyrinthine streets of 18th Century London.(Image: Peter Ackroyd)

World Book Club celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of that modern classic novel Beloved with another chance to hear the programme with American writer Toni Morrison.In 2009 Toni Morrison came to the South Bank Arts Centre beside the River Thames in London to talk to a packed audience about her Pulitzer Prize-winning, international bestseller Beloved.Having lost none of its power to shock a quarter of a century on, Beloved stares unflinchingly into the abyss of racism and transforms history into a poetic chronicle of slavery and its terrible, unending aftermath.(Image: Toni Morrison. Credit: Peter Devlin)

Harriett Gilbert talks this month to American writer Jonathan Safran Foer about his novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.Set in the aftermath of 9/11, it is the story of a young boy coming to terms with the tragedy of his father's death in the World Trade Centre. After finding a mysterious key left behind in his Dad's closet, Oskar sets out across New York hoping to find some answers. Both a meditation on pain, loss and the healing power of love - as well as an examination of the psyche of post 9/11 New York - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel that lingers in the mind.(Image: Jonathan S Foer. Credit: Giuseppe Aliprandi)

February 2012 marks the bicentenary of Victorian author Charles Dickens. In this special edition of World Book Club, biographer Claire Tomalin talks to Harriett Gilbert about Dickens novel Great Expectations live from the BBC Radio Theatre, with actor Simon Callow.(Image: Charles Dickens. Credit: Getty Images)For further details of the British Council’s Global Celebration of Charles Dickens visit: www.britishcouncil.org/dickens2012

Acclaimed Maori writer Witi Ihimaera talks to Harriett Gilbert and a group of readers at the Cheltenham Literary Festival about his magical, lore-laden novel, The Whale Rider. It tells the haunting story of a spirited Maori girl, her tribe and their mysteriously intertwined destinies. Kahu, a 12-year-old girl struggles to become the chief of her tribe but her grandfather Koro, whose attention she craves, believes that this is a role reserved for males only. Kahu will not be ignored and in her quest she finds a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once this sacred gift is revealed, will Kahu be able to assume her rightful position and lead her tribe to a bold new future?(Image: Witi Ihimaera 2015) (Credit: XAVIER LEOTY/AFP/Getty Images)

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed British writer Penelope Lively about her Booker Prize winning novel Moon Tiger. A haunting tale of loss, loneliness and secret desires Moon Tiger is the kaleidoscopic story of maverick historian Claudia Hampton.Telling nurses on her death bed that she will write a "history of the world and in the process my own," she charts her intensely-lived life from her childhood in England after World War I to the war-torn desert plains of Egypt, 30 years later – and beyond. Egocentric and condescending as well as vulnerable and gutsy, Claudia is a complex heroine for our times who lingers in the mind long after you put the book down.(Image: Penelope Lively. Copyright: Penguin)

Harriett Gilbert talks to acclaimed Israeli writer David Grossman about his award-winning novel, To the End of the Land. Winner of - amongst others - the Wingate Jewish Book Prize for 2012, To the End of the Land is a novel of extraordinary power and lyrical intensity about the power of love and the devastating cost of war. Instead of celebrating her son Ofer’s discharge from the Israeli Army, Ora is appalled when he reenlists and is sent back to the front for a major offensive. Unable to bear the thought of sitting alone waiting for the ‘notifiers’ to bring her bad news, she sets off on a hike across Israel with Ofer’s biological father who has never met his son and has has lived in near-seclusion since being tortured as a prisoner in the Yom Kippur war three decades before.Photo credit: Reuters

With the international release of the much anticipated film of We Need To Talk about Kevin in October, here's another chance to catch the World Book Club in which Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience talk to acclaimed American writer Lionel Shriver about this searing novel. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, We Need To Talk about Kevin is the profoundly disturbing story of a boy who, shortly before his 16th birthday, kills seven classmates in a high school massacre. Grippingly but unreliably narrated through the letters of his mother Eva to his absent father Franklin, the novel raises questions about culpability, the limits of maternal love and the nature of evil itself.

Harriett Gilbert talks to Hisham Matar about his stunning debut novel In The Country Of Men. Set in the bewildering world of Tripoli, it is the emotional tale of a young boy growing up, where fears, secrets and betrayal threaten the ties of family and friendship. The novel was shortlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize.

Hariett Gilbert talks to Irish author Colm Toibin about his book Brooklyn.A haunting tale of love, loss and familial duty, and winner of the 2009 UK Costa Novel Award, Brooklyn follows the fortunes of a young Irish woman who leaves home to make a new life for herself in 1950s New York. Hear how Colm's own painful memories of homesickness in America and Spain inform Eilis' experiences in Brooklyn and how her ambivalent relationship to the small town Ireland she's left behind also echoes Colm Toibin's own.

This month's World Book Club comes from the church of St Mary Magdalene in Woodstock, England. Harriett Gilbert talks to Swedish superstar Henning Mankell about Faceless Killers, the first novel in his globally acclaimed series featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander.In it, an elderly farm couple is brutally murdered and the only clue is the wife's uttering of the word "foreign" before she dies. Wallander must find the killers before anger towards foreigners boils over. Hear about - and from - Wallander's female admirers around the globe all apparently queuing up to marry him, and about how Mankell plants deliberate errors - one in each novel - that no-one has ever spotted.

Acclaimed British writer Val McDermid discusses her page-turning crime novel A Place of Execution. A taut psychological suspense thriller told through two overlapping and interlocking narratives, A Place of Execution takes place both in the present day as well as 1963 rural England with two different investigators exploring the disappearance of a 13 year old girl who vanished without a trace on a bitterly cold winter's afternoon. This is not a cosy novel but one that confronts us with brutal realities and stirs up uncomfortable reactions, gripping the reader up to the very last page and its stunning conclusion.

Detective Erast Fandorin investigates a student's apparent suicide in 19th-century Moscow. Russian writer Boris Akunin talks to Harriett Gilbert and listeners in the studio and around the world about his page-turning, best-selling crime novel The Winter Queen. After setting out to solve the apparent suicide of a university student in 19th Century Moscow, eager young investigator Erast Fandorin soon finds himself embroiled in a far-reaching international conspiracy. Boris Akunin tells us where he found the inspiration for his winning young detective who bounces from one cliff-hanger to the next. He also describes why short Russian literature - rather than the heavy tomes of earlier generarions - provides a better "role model" for today's youngsters.Photo: Boris Akunin Credit: Getty Images