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Episode details

Radio 4,09 Jun 2013,28 mins

Mark Billingham on his latest book The Dying Hours

Open Book

Available for over a year

Mark Billingham talks to Mariella Frostrup about his latest novel in his hugely successful D.I. Tom Thorne series, The Dying Hours. He explains why Thorne has been transferred from the Murder Squad to uniform and is back on the beat, but still battling against authority. Also why his emphasis on the depiction of crime has changed as both he and Thorne get older. Afghanistan and Gaza are places that have featured more often in news headlines than on our bookshelves for many years. Louisa Waugh and Anna Badkhen are journalists who live rather than travel in foreign countries and they explain why they feel that non-fiction books give a new dimension to reporting on these areas of conflict and are the best way to tell the human stories behind the headlines. And Australian Man Booker winner Thomas Keneally tells us about the book he would never lend to anyone - his copy of The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins Producer: Andrea Kidd.

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