Behind locked doors with Claire Keegan; Alan Cumming's book he would never lend

Available for over a year

A seasonal theme of light and darkness, inclusion and exclusion, runs through this edition of Open Book, presented by Chris Power. Chris interviews the Irish author Claire Keegan about her intensely compassionate new novel, Small Things Like These, set in a small rural town in 1985. Her protagonist, Bill Furlong, a timber- and coal-merchant with five daughters, makes a discovery about what goes on behind the locked doors of the convent which looms above the town - a discovery that will challenge the precarious security of his own household. Claire confesses that she never does any research for her novels, and draws entirely on the power of the imagination, but that she writes as many as 40 drafts before publication. And she explains why it is harder to write about cruelty than kindness. The actor and author Alan Cumming answers Open Book's returning question, what is the book you would never lend? And, inspired by a new book by Peter Davidson, Chris chairs a discussion with authors Charlotte Mendelson and Andrew Michael Hurley about the motif of the lighted window in art and literature. Producer: Beaty Rubens Book List – Sunday 12 December and Thursday 16 December Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan Foster by Claire Keegan Antarctica by Claire Keegan Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life by Alan Cumming The Lighted Window by Peter Davidson The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Knights by Andrew Michael Hurley Iliad by Homer The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Number 13 by M. R. James The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Oysters by Anton Chekhov