Bookclub Folgen

Eimear McBride discusses her book, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

James Naughtie and a group of readers talk to the renowned travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron about his account of travelling through Russia in the late 1990s, In Siberia.It's the story of how Thubron made a 15,000-mile journey through an astonishing region - one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth. He journeyed by train, river and truck among the people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union, travelling among Buddhists and animists, radical Christian sects, reactionary Communists and the remnants of a so-called Jewish state; from the site of the last Czar's murder and Rasputin's village, to the ice-bound graves of ancient Scythians, to Baikal, the deepest and oldest of the world's lakes. Presenter : James Naughtie Interviewed guest : Colin Thubron Producer : Dymphna FlynnFebruary's Bookclub choice : A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2013).

James Naughtie and readers talk to Clive James about the first volume of his autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, which has sold over a million copies.Clive James is a poet, essayist, novelist, documentarist, critic, talk show host, travel writer, cultural commentator - and red-hot tango dancer. The audience talk to Clive about Unreliable Memoirs, which covers his boyhood years in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney. Clive was born in 1939; the other event that year (he says) was the outbreak of war, from which his father never returned. Clive tells Bookclub how that event has dominated his whole life.