World Book Club Folgen

Life or death choices in a bid to survive the horrors of 1970s Communist ChinaThis month in the penultimate edition of a year celebrating the globe’s greatest women writers World Book Club talks to acclaimed Chinese author Yiyun Li about her harrowing debut novel The Vagrants. Winner of the Guardian First Book Award The Vagrants is based on real events which took place in China in 1979 during the era that ultimately led to the fateful Tiannanmen Square uprising. In the provincial town of Muddy Waters a young woman, Gu Shan, is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. The citizens stage a protest after her execution and, over the following six weeks, the novel charts the hopes and fears of the leaders of the protest and the pain of Gu Shan’s parents and friends, as everyone in the town is caught up in the remorseless turn of events.(Picture: Yiyun Li. Photo credit: Roger Turesson.)

A fast-moving, passionate, genre-bending work of art that both dazzles and entertains. This month, World Book Club discusses the much garlanded novel How to Be Both with its acclaimed British author Ali Smith and her fans around the world. Still not able to gather together in a studio, presenter Harriett Gilbert and Ali Smith will be talking remotely to international listeners via all manner of means - phonelines, emails, Skype calls, and social media. In this playfully ambitious novel, a 15th-century artist, Francesco del Cossa, travels through time and space to discover a grieving sixteen-year-old girl in contemporary England taking comfort in a painting he (or is it she?) created. Or is it all the other way around? And whose story comes first?(Picture: Ali Smith. Photo credit: Sarah Wood.)

This month’s World Book Club is the ninth in our series celebrating the greatest women writers at work across the globe. Harriett Gilbert and listeners from around the world talk to the world-renowned American author Elizabeth Strout at her home in New Brunswick, Maine, in the USA. The novel under discussion is her internationally-garlanded Olive Kitteridge: a novel made up of 13 luminous short stories set in small-town Maine and bound together by one larger-than-life character, the flawed and fascinating Olive Kitteridge. Retired school teacher and long-time wife of the long-suffering Henry, Olive struggles to make sense of the changes in her life and the lives of those around her. Her travails, at once parochial but also universal, make readers laugh, nod in recognition, as well as wince in pain.(Picture: Elizabeth Strout. Photo credit: Leonard Cendamo.)