Bookclub Folgen

World-wide bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith meets readers to discuss the first in his series of humorous novels set in Edinburgh - 44 Scotland Street. The presenter is James Naughtie.The book tells the story of the interlocking lives of the inhabitants of adjoining flats in a house in the Georgian New Town of Edinburgh - their comic adventures, their foibles and accidents, their chance criss-crossings day-to-day.McCall Smith talks about the challenges of writing one thousand words a day, and how readers would advise him on where to take the story next, and what they thought he should do with characters they didn't like. He also explains how a few real people - novelist Ian Rankin, art gallery owner Guy Peploe - turned up in the stories.January's Bookclub choice: Unreliable Memoirs (Vol 1) by Clive James Producer: Dymphna Flynn.

James Naughtie and readers talk to celebrated American author John Irving about his novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. The novel starts with a shock - the eponymous hero hits a foul ball in a baseball match and kills his best friend's mother. It then moves through to spooky premonitions during an amateur performance of A Christmas Carol, to a drunken psychiatrist driving down school steps, to a bloody end during the Vietnam war. Yet there is pattern and meaning in such bizarre antics, and part of the fun for the reader is to work them out. Irving reveals the mysteries of one of fiction's most extraordinary characters, Owen Meany - the little guy with the falsetto voice.

James Naughtie and readers talk to Linda Grant about her novel When I Lived in Modern Times, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000. Linda is known for bringing a strong Jewish identity to most of her writing. 'Scratch a Jew and you've got a story', remarks the main character Evelyn Sert on the story's first page as she looks over her life. The novel follows Evelyn - hairdresser, spy, lover - on her voyage from post-war London to Tel Aviv, where the British are preparing to leave Palestine and the new state of Israel is about to be born.