Sunday 16:00-16:30, repeated Thursday 16:00-16:30, except first Sunday in the month when it is replaced by Book Club.
Open Book spotlights new fiction and non-fiction, picks out the best of the paperbacks, talks to authors and publishers, and unearths lost masterpieces.
This week
Sunday 18th March 2007
Ali Smith on the work of Katherine Mansfield who she credits with re-inventing the short story.
Katherine Mansfield Katherine Mansfield died young in 1923 aged just 34, but despite her short career she is acclaimed as one of the great short story writers.
Virginia Woolf said hers was 'the only writing I've ever been jealous of'.
As a new collection of her stories is published, novelist Ali Smith joins Mariella to explain why she too is passionate about Mansfield's work.
The Collected Short Stories - Katherine Mansfield Publisher: Penguin
The Accidental – Ali Smith Publisher: Penguin
Hotel World – Ali Smith Publisher: Penguin
The Reader – Ali Smith Publisher: Constable and Robinson
Jim Crace Jim Crace won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1998 for his book Quarantine.
His latest book, The Pesthouse, depicts a dystopian vision of an America without technology, where even metal is treated with suspicion and the population is heading east to flee.
The Pesthouse - Jim Crace Publisher: Picador
Quarantine – Jim Crace Publisher: Penguin
Devil’s Larder – Jim Crace Publisher: Penguin
Vernon God Little Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre has topped a survey of books which we buy, but never finish reading.
Francine Stock, novelist and presenter of Radio 4's The Film Programme, who was a Booker judge the year the novel won the prize, offers some advice on how to get to the last page.
Vernon God Little – D B C Pierre Publisher: Faber and Faber
Time in the novel Jay Rayner's new book The Oyster House Siege is set over the course of a tense four days, while masked gunmen hold chefs and customers hostage in a restaurant kitchen.
He joins Mariella to discuss ratcheting up the tension in a book with such a specific timeframe while Peter Kemp, fiction editor of the Sunday Times discusses other novels where time plays an important role.
The Oyster House Siege - Jay Rayner Publisher: Atlantic Books
Pompeii – Robert Harris Publisher: Arrow
Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark Publisher: Penguin
