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
19 October 2008
Thomas Keneally relives the writing of Schindler's Ark; the novelist Eric Linklater remembered; and the man who read the Oxford English Dictionary for fun.
Searching for Schindler
Thomas Keneally won the 1982 Booker Prize for his novel Schindler's Ark, a fictional retelling of the story of the German industrialist who saved more than a thousand of his Jewish workers from the death camps. Now he's written a memoir which recalls the writing of the book, and in particular his friendship with Leopold Pfefferberg, one of the Schindler Jews. He talks to Mariella about the meeting which led to the book, and reveals the crisis writing it caused him.
Thomas Keneally: Searching for Schindler is published by Hodder.
Mariella meets the man who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary - all twenty volumes and 21,730 pages of it. Ammon Shea explains why he did it, and what he learned; and another dictionary enthusiast, Simon Winchester, explains the beauty of the OED.
Ammon Shea: Reading the Oxford English Dictionary is published by Penguin.
Linklater on Linklater
Alexander Linklater, the deputy editor of Prospect magazine, joins Mariella to discuss the work of his grandfather, the novelist Eric Linklater. On the eve of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, Linklater arrived in America on a travel scholarship. Two years later he published his response to living through the early years of the Depression and the spectre of Prohibition, the novel Juan in America. Alexander Linklater explains the book's appeal.
Eric Linklater: Juan in America is published by Capuchin Classics.
