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Available for over a year
Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo only started writing in his late 30s, following successful careers as a footballer, rock star and then stockbroker, but since his publishing debut in 1997, his books have sold upwards of 14 million copies. Entering Nesboland is not for the fainthearted: the body count rises almost as fast as the author's sales figures and murders are more gruesome, original and downright terrifying than most of us can imagine in even our worst nightmares. With the publication in English of his latest Harry Hole thriller, Police, Jo Nesbo explains his relationship with his ruggedly handsome, cynical, alcoholic detective, how his plotlines still scare him and why Ibsen has become a source of inspiration. From Captain Kidd to Captain Hook, Blackbeard to Long John Silver, Mariella explores the piratical high seas and treasure troves of literature with Neil Rennie and Professor Claire Jowitt, to discover how the literary imagination has influenced our perception of pirates rather more than the history of real life brigands themselves. And in the next in Open Book's series, The Book I'd Never Lend, author and clinical psychologist Frank Tallis tells us about his most treasured of tomes - a book of four psychoanalytic case studies by Sigmund Freud, originally owned by Freud himself. Producer Andrea Kidd.
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