World Book Club Folgen

A remarkable debut from an exhilarating young new voice, Such a Fun Age is a big-hearted page-turner of a story about race and privilege, centring on a young black babysitter, her well-meaning employer, and a chance encounter that threatens to undo them both.(Picture: Kiley Reid. Photo credit: David Goddard.)

In the second in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this centenary year of the BBC, Harriett Gilbert talks to world-famous Chilean writer Isabel Allende about her extraordinary novel, Eva Luna.Eva Luna is the story of an orphan who beguiles the world with her remarkable visions, triumphing over the worst of adversities and bringing light, as her name would suggest, to a dark place.As Eva comes of age and tells her tale, Isabel Allende conjures up a whole complex, unidentified, South American nation— filled with a cast of unforgettable characters, rich, poor, simple, sophisticated, oppressors and oppressed. Against this turbulent background, love, politics and tragedy all play their part in Eva’s life and help shape her into the unforgettable revolutionary and storyteller she becomes.A novel that celebrates the power of imagination to create a better world.(Picture: Isabel Allende. Photo credit: Lori Barra.)

The first of our season of celebrating The Exuberance of Youth in this the centenary year of the BBC, World Book Club talks to Irish writer Naoise Dolan about her dazzling novel Exciting Times. Psychologically astute and dryly funny, Exciting Times is a modern, intelligent dissection of youth, power and privilege set amongst the international circles of contemporary Hong Kong. Clever, young millennial Ava, an Irish graduate teaching English, is having an affair with rich cynical banker Julian. Then she meets Edith. Earnest, attentive and all the things Julian isn’t. A raw, intimate exploration of love and sexuality amongst millennials, Exciting Times charts the often transactional nature of relationships in our complicated modern world.(Photo courtesy of Naoise Dolan.)