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
21 September 2008
Gilead author Marilynne Robinson on her new novel Home; Carmen Callil on the work of Irene Nemirovsky; and 500 years of book collecting.
Marilynne Robinson
Mariella Frostrup talks to the American writer Marilynne Robinson, whose Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gilead, about an elderly priest in small-town Iowa, had critics reaching for the superlatives. She explains why she's chosen to return to the same events in her new book, Home - and also reveals the reasons for the twenty-five year silence which followed the publication of her rapturously-received first book Housekeeping.
Marilynne Robinson: Home is published by Virago
David Foster Wallace
The book critic John Freeman joins Mariella to pay tribute to the work and lasting influence of the novelist David Foster Wallace, who died this week, aged 46.
Book Collecting
Margaret Willes, the author of a new history of book culture, and the novelist Iain Sinclair discuss the history and quirks of book collectors, from 16th-century aristocrats to modern-day bibliomanes.
Margaret Willes: Reading Matters is published by Yale University Press.
Irene Nemirovsky
The writer and founder of Virago Carmen Callil joins Mariella to give a reader's guide to the work of Irene Nemirovsky, whose rediscovered 1942 novel Suite Francaise caused a literary sensation when first published a few years ago.
Irene Nemirovsky (trans: Sandra Smit): All Our Worldly Goods is published next month by Chatto and Windus
