World Book Club Folgen

This month World Book Club are once again part of The Hay Literary Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. Harriett Gilbert and a Festival audience talk to the acclaimed Swiss writer Joël Dicker about his gripping and chart-topping novel The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. A famous American writer suddenly finds himself the main suspect in a 30 year-old cold case in his sleepy home town in New England. His former student, a novelist desperate for material, appears as his only saviour. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair is a fast-paced, tightly plotted, literary thriller, and an ingenious book within a book by a dazzling young writer.(Picture credit: Valery Wallace Studio.)

This month World Book Club are lucky enough to be in the beautiful old city of Cartagena in Colombia as part of the Cartagena Hay Festival of Literature. Harriett Gilbert will be talking to one of Colombia’s most acclaimed writers Laura Restrepo about her haunting novel Delirium and learning something about this stunning country’s troubled recent past.Returning home after a business trip to discover his beloved wife Agustina has gone mad her kindly husband Aguliar delves back into her shadowy past to try to understand what has happened. Eventually he discovers the key to her madness buried deep in a Colombian story of money, power and corruption.(Picture Laura Restrepo with Harriett Gilbert. Credit: BBC.)

We talk to the acclaimed Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard about A Death in the Family, volume one of his remarkable series of memoirs My Struggle.Knausgaard writes with painful honesty about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and dangerously unpredictable father, and then his bewilderment and grief on his father's death. Becoming a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. A Death in the Family is an exploration of the author’s past from which emerges a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives.(Photo: Karl Ove Knausgaard. Credit: Sam Barker)