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
22 March and 26 March 2009
Maggie Gee talks about modern Uganda.
Maggie Gee
Mariella talks to Maggie Gee, one of Granta's original Best of Young British Novelists. In her latest book My Driver she returns to two of her most memorable characters, a mediocre middle-aged novelist and her former cleaner, a forceful Ugandan woman called Mary Tendo. Maggie Gee talks about modern Uganda and how the comedy and tragedies of the country today influenced her writing.
Maggie Gee: My Driver is published by Telegram.
Writing in Pairs
Two of this month's crime fiction releases are written under pseudonyms. But in both cases, the pen name conceals not one but two writers. Open Book talks to "Nicci French", the husband-and-wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French - and to "Claude Izner", aka the sisters Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefèvre, about writing in pairs but under a single name. And John Sutherland looks back at the history of literary double-acts.
Nicci French: What To Do When Somebody Dies is out now in hardback, published by Penguin. Claude Izner: The Marais Assassin (translated by Lorenza Garcia and Isabel Reid) is published by Gallic.
William Boyd on Raymond Chandler
The great American novelist Raymond Chandler, creator of the unforgettable downbeat sleuth Philip Marlowe, died fifty years ago this week. Mariella is joined by a well-known Chandler fan, Wiliam Boyd, the author of Any Human Heart, to look back at his work.
Six Raymond Chandler novels have been republished with original early edition covers, published by Penguin Classics.
