Bookclub Folgen

James Naughtie's first guest on Bookclub for 2015 is Marina Lewycka.Marina was born in Kiel, Germany, after the war, and moved to England with her family when she was about a year old.Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction 2005.Nadezhda and her sister Vera are dismayed when their eighty-four year old father falls in love with a thirty-six year old Ukrainian divorcee. Their campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets going back fifty years into some of Europe's darkest history, and the two sisters must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their father.James Naughtie presents and a group of readers - including some from the Ukrainian community in London - join in the discussion.Presenter : James Naughtie Interviewed guest : Marina Lewycka Producer: Dymphna Flynn February's Bookclub choice : When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr.

With James Naughtie. In a special 200th edition of the programme we celebrate the centenary of author Patrick O'Brian and Allan Mallinson is our guide to the first in his hugely popular series of Napoleonic naval stories, Master and Commander. Known as the Aubrey/Maturin novels, the twenty books are regarded by many as the most engaging historical novels ever written. Master and Commander establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his ship's surgeon and an intelligence agent. O'Brian won fans not just because of the story-telling and his power of characterisation but also his detailed depiction of life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war : the weapons, food, conversation and ambience, the landscape and the sea. Master and Commander was first published in 1969 and the twentieth novel in the series Blue at the Mizzen, in 1999, a year before O'Brian died. Allan Mallinson also writes novels about the Napoleonic wars and knew O'Brian. And as always on Bookclub a group of invited readers join in the discussion. December's programme marks the 200th edition of Bookclub which began in 1998 and has featured the world's leading authors from the late 20th/early 21st century like Toni Morrison, JK Rowling, Hilary Mantel, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Alan Bennett. James Naughtie's impressive list of guests also includes writers who are no longer with us like Muriel Spark, Gore Vidal, Douglas Adams, Carol Shields, and Sue Townsend. All are available online to download and keep forever, via the programme's website bbc.in/r4bookclub . Presenter : James Naughtie Interviewed guest : Allan Mallinson Producer: Dymphna Flynn January's Bookclub choice : A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka.

With James Naughtie. Poet Blake Morrison talks about his memoir of growing up in Yorkshire in the fifties and sixties, the son of two local GPs. It's an honest account of family life, father-son relationships and bereavement.The book also movingly chronicles his father's death in 1991, and attempted to resolve some of the secrets in his father's life.First published in 1993, And When Did You Last See Your Father? became a bestseller, was adapted into a film starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent, and inspired a whole genre of literary confessional memoirs. Recorded at the Ilkley Literature Festival, Yorkshire.December's Bookclub choice : Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian (1969)Presenter : James Naughtie Interviewed Guest : Blake Morrison Producer : Dymphna Flynn.