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
10 February 2008
Joanna Trollope on friendship and clubbing; why psychoanalysis and fiction make good bedfellows; and a great German novelist rediscovered.
Joanna Trollope
Mariella meets the novelist Joanna Trollope. Best known for a series of gently humorous romantic novels set in the outwardly idyllic surroundings of cathedral cities, Trollope’s recent books reflect her own move to city life. She talks about how her new novel reflects her interest in the nature of female friendship, and explains why at sixty-something she felt the need to learn about clubbing and house music.
Joanna Trollope: Friday Nights is published in hardback by Bloomsbury
Psychoanalysis and Fiction
Mariella talks to two novelists who share a professional interest in the unconscious mind. The clinical psychologist Frank Tallis, the creator of the psychoanalytic detective Max Liebermann, explains why Freud and forensics go so well together, and Carol Topolski talks about how her fiction debut Monster Love was influenced by her own work as a psychotherapist.
Frank Tallis: Fatal Lies is published in hardback by Century.
Carol Topolski: Monster Love is published by Penguin
Irmgard Keun
The novelist Irmgard Keun was an overnight sensation in 1930s Germany, and her tales of assertive young women have been described as early forerunners of Bridget Jones. But she fell into obscurity after the 1940s and is barely known in the English-speaking world. As her novel Child of All Nations, a touching fable about a penniless writer and his family, appears in English for the first time, Mariella talks to the German literature expert Karen Leeder about Keun's life and work.
Irmgard Keun: Child of All Nations is published in hardback by Penguin Classics
