World Book Club

Boris Akunin talks to Harriett Gilbert, a studio audience and listeners around the world about his bestselling crime novel The Winter Queen

Bestselling Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo talks to Harriett Gilbert, a studio audience and readers around the world about his gripping novel The Redbreast.

Bestselling author Javier Cercas talks to Harriett Gilbert, a studio audience and World Book Club listeners from around the world about his prize-winning novel The Soldiers of Salamis.

American satirist PJ O'Rourke discusses his book Eat the Rich with presenter Harriett Gilbert, a studio audience and listeners from around the world.

Acclaimed German writer Bernhard Schlink talks to Harriett Gilbert and an audience at the Cheltenham Literary Festival about his celebrated novel The Reader

Bestselling South African writer Damon Galgut talks to Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience about his Booker Prize shortlisted novel The Good Doctor.

Celebrated Anglo-Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie talks to Harriett Gilbert and an audience of readers at The Drill Hall Theatre in London about her award-winning novel Burnt Shadows.

Celebrated American writer Barbara Kingsolver talks to Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience about her bestselling novel The Poisonwood Bible.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon talks to Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience about his bestseller The Shadow of the Wind.

David Mitchell talks to Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience about his multiple prize-winning bestseller Cloud Atlas.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Ford talks to Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience about his bestselling novel The Sportswriter

French Nobel Laureate JMG LeClezio talks to Harriett Gilbert and a small studio audience about his novel Desert.

Set during World War II, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which has sold an astonishing 5 million copies worldwide, tells the story of Bruno, the nine-year-old son of the commandant of a concentration camp. Devastated at leaving his old life behind in Berlin, the novel charts Bruno’s forbidden friendship with a Jewish boy on the other side of the camp fence, a friendship which has startling and far-reaching consequences.

Winner of the UK's Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, the Orange Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Small Island is a heart-warming and thought-provoking tale of love, friendship and immigration set in London during and after World War II. It focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own "small island," move to England, the Mother Country, for which the men have fought during World War II. Told through the intertwining stories of three very different characters the reception offered by an exhausted postwar Britain is not quite the warm embrace that they’d hoped for.

Indian writer Kiran Desai discusses her internationally best-selling work, The Inheritance of Loss.