World Book Club Folgen

This month World Book Club talks to bestselling Dutch writer Herman Koch whose hugely controversial and entertaining novel The Dinner took the literary world by storm five years ago. Since then, it has not left the bestseller lists in its native Holland. The Dinner explores a contemporary moral dilemma when two couples meet in a fashionable restaurant to discuss their children’s involvement in a horrendous crime. How far will a parent go to protect their son? The answer that gradually emerges seems to be very far indeed. Hear Herman Koch, Harriett Gilbert and readers in the studio in London and around the world discuss The Dinner - and confess what they might have done in similar circumstances!

World Book Club talks to award-winning American writer and forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, about the first in her Temperance Brennan detective series, Deja Dead. A nerve-jangling thriller that took the literary scene by storm when it was published in 1997, Deja Dead was the most successful crime-fiction debut ever. In it Kathy Reichs launches her intrepid heroine, a fearless forensic anthropologist and wannabe detective, Temperance Brennan. When the remains of a dismembered body of a woman, bagged and discarded, are discovered near an ancient burial ground Brennan suspects the work of a serial killer. The police disagree, but Brennan sticks to her guns despite, or perhaps because of, her dark forebodings.Picture: Kathy Reichs, Credit: Ben Mark Holzberg

This week, as part of the continuing global commemorations of the First World War, World Book Club is in sombre mood with another timely chance to hear multi-award-winning British writer Pat Barker. She talks about her internationally renowned novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy of novels which culminated in the Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road. Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and now recognised twenty-two years after its publication as a modern war classic, Regeneration is a part historical, part fictional exploration of how the traumas of the so-called Great War brutalised a generation of young men.Picture: WW1 patients recuperating in hospital in 1918. Credit: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.