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
27 July 2008
John Healy, author of the Grass Arena, which has been republished as a Penguin Modern Classic after 20 years out of print.
Deirdre Madden Mariella is joined by Orange Prize nominee and Somerset Maugham Prize winner Deirdre Madden, to talk about her new novel Molly Fox’s Birthday.
The book centres on a triangular friendship between actress Molly Fox, a nameless narrator and a TV academic, Andrew. What is the reason for the narrator’s anonymity? And what are the challenges of writing about drama?
John Healy Despite being out of print for twenty years, The Grass Arena by John Healy has been reprinted as a Penguin Classic. The autobiography covers the period of John Healy’s life when he was living rough, as an alcoholic, in London.
John talks to Mariella about his life as a vagrant and how learning chess saved his life. They are also joined by Professor John Sutherland, who wrote about his battle with alcoholism in Last Drink to LA.
Art in books It is common for novelists to tackle the world of art, but how easy is it to portray pictures in words? Art critic Richard Cork, and authors Elizabeth Lowry and Patrick Gale explain.
