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 29th April 2007
Sebastian Faulks on his new book, Engleby, and the book of the film of the book: the art of the tie-in book jacket.
Sebastian Faulks Sebastian Faulks is known for setting his novels, which include Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, in the past. For the first time he's written a book about contemporary Britain and narrated in the first person.
He talks to Mariella about Engleby, the story of a highly intelligent but disturbed man whose social ineptitude may have serious consequences for those around him.
Engleby - Sebastian Faulks Publisher: Hutchinson (3 May 2007)
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks Publisher: Vintage
Charlotte Gray - Sebastian Faulks Publisher: Vintage
Political Writing Historian Peter Hennessy, winner of this year's Orwell Prize for political writing, selects four books which he thinks best demonstrate Orwell's aim of making political writing an art.
Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties - Peter Hennessy Publisher: Allen Lane
The English Constitution - Walter Bagehot Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks;
Opium of the Intellectuals - Raymond Aron Publisher: Transaction Publishers
This Blessed Plot - Hugo Young Publisher: Macmillan
Harold Wilson - Ben Pimlott Publisher: HarperCollins
Tie in book covers 'Now a major motion picture' - a familiar phrase on book covers as jackets are redesigned to reflect film versions of novels, but a phrase that can put some readers off.
Open Book talks to publishers Adam Freudenheim and Paul Baggaley, and Neill Denney from the Bookseller about the art of the tie-in covers.
William Somerset Maugham And one of those books currently being repackaged is The Painted Veil by W Somerset Maugham. Edward Norton and Naomi Watts star in a new film version of the story of an unhappy marriage, played out in 1920's China.
Literary agent and novelist Derek Johns - who first read Maugham as a teenager - joins Mariella to discuss this most prolific of authors, said to be the highest paid writer of the 1930s, but who has never been considered a literary great.
The Painted Veil - W Somerset Maugham Publisher: Vintage
Collected Stories - W Somerset Maugham Publisher: Everyman's Library
